We cooked so many dishes it wasn't possible for every person to help with every dish, so I'll have a number of knowledge gaps filled in later. When Annette provides the written recipes I'll try to post them. Being the least skilled cook in the room, I spent much of the day doing the most menial tasks available: cleaning and chopping scallions, peeling and dicing cucumbers, slicing radishes on the mandoline, removing the seeds from hot peppers, browning pieces of chicken in a skillet, etc. I hasten to add that I performed those tasks poorly.
Those are pigs' trotters that had been simmering in a vinegar-laced broth all morning while we were out shopping. These would become "crispy pata" after deep frying.
These are some of the things we got at the market, and some other provisions. That's water spinach in the back. The jars are full of some sweet bean and tapioca-like mixture that get spooned over ice cream. In the red bag are lychees and rambutans.
Here's a look at Annette Tomei, our instructor.
In that second photo, showing some of our group, on the far left is Haley, another instructor at the FCI. She was Annette's primary assistant. I'm going to have to confirm spelling of names, because I only heard the names -- I didn't see them in writing. The cluster of three people you see between Annette and Haley is the Filipino expert contingent: (left to right) Louisa, Benji and Rocky. I think Benji is Annette's brother-in-law. I need to confirm that. Also, obscured in the photo, is one of the students from my class, Ana, who writes a Latin-food blog called
Hungry Sofia, where you'll probably find a more precise report on the day than you'll find here.
The ribs (pork), chicken and fish (trout) were marinating ahead of time:
The fish went on racks to dry:
Annette then deep fried both the fish and the trotters, which were later roasted in the oven as well:
Haley preparing the kilawin, which is also apparently called kinilaw, which is basically a Filipino ceviche. I prepped all those vegetables by the way:
Benji helped throughout, tasting and adjusting to get the Filipino flavors he was after.
For the chicken and pork adobo (adobo is the best-known Filipino dish), Ana and I browned all the meat, which had already been simmered. It then went back into the pot.
We made ice cream from ume plum. Making ice cream is really easy when you have a Vita-Prep, a professional ice-cream machine and two FCI chef-instructors to do it for you.
We also sauteed water spinach with tomatoes, shallots, shrimp paste and some of the cooking liquid from the adobo, and we prepped some mangoes and steamed some rice. This is part of our buffet, which wasn't set up all in one place so it wasn't possible to take just one photo to show it all. The big pot has rice, next to it is the water spinach, the tall metal pot has a lemonade-like beverage made from a lime-like fruit I have to get the name of again, and the pile of white stuff on a plate is a dessert called palitaw where we boiled discs of a glutinous rice dough and then rolled them in coconut:
This is an amazing cake, casava bibinka, the preparation of which I wasn't involved in:
I also was not involved in making the fish soup (singiang), though you may notice those are also the vegetables I prepped. The soup itself was not blurry; that's just the photo.
The menu as planned, though there were some changes driven by market availability, human resources and time:
I'll follow up with more details once the written materials show up in my inbox.
