Domestic Goddess

Anne, Here's a must of what you absolutely must try: 1. Adobo - whether it is chicken or pork or a combination of both, you have to try my country's national dish. Some make it dry, some make it saucy and some even flake it and cook it until it is crispy. The best way to eat adobo? With garlic fried rice, sunny-side egg, a couple of tomato slices for breakfast or brunch in the morning. 2. Sinigang - a sour-savory soup usually made out of pork. It is usually laden with veggies like water spinach, eggplant, yardlong beans and okra. You eat this with steamed rice and with a dip, fish sauce. You dip the pork in the fish sauce, put on top of your rice and with some veggies and chew. Slurp the hot soup between bites. Best eaten during cold, rainy days. Also can be made from fish, shrimp or beef cubes. 3. Lechon Kawali - Pork belly cubes, boiled until tender and then crispy-fried. Usually served with a liver-based sauce or soy sauce-vinegar-chili dip. Also eaten with rice and with your fingers. 4. Lechon Paksiw - leftover roasted pig or Lechon kawali are cooked with a vinegary-sweet sauce with banana blossoms. A lot of filipinos eat this stew with tuyo (fried dried salty fish) as a salty foil to the sweet taste of the stew. Also eaten with steamed rice. 5. Diniguan - pork blood stew. If you can overcome the black color of the stew and the fact that it is black because the sauce is made from blood, then you'd discover the wonderful savory dish known as diniguan. Cubes of pork and offal hide under the luxurious savory sauce. There are two ways to eat diniguan, again with rice and with puto (steamed rice cakes). 6. Pancit - made either from bihon (rice noodles), miki (thick chinese noodles) or sotanghon (mungbean noodles). This stir-fried noodle dish is made with a lot of veggies julliened and shredded pork/chicken and sometimes chinese sausage. Filipinos usually consider this as a snack or a side dish in a special feast. To eat, squeeze a calamansi lime fruit all over the noodles and eat with toasted bread. 7. Lumpia - there are two kinds of lumpia (spring roll): fried and fresh. Fried lumpia usually has minced meat with veggies (carrots, onions) and served with sweet&sour dipping sauce or soysauce-vinegar dip. Fresh lumpia is simply uncooked springroll (wrapper) with sauteed coconut heart or veggies (bean sprouts) with sweet-savory sauce topped with minced garlic and chopped peanuts. Again like with the pancit, lumpia is either served as a snack or as a side dish. 8. Nilaga - boiled beef soup with cabbage, potatoes, squash and spring onions. This hearty soup is another favorite rainy day dish. It is usually served with an boiled eggplant/squash sauce (mixed with vinegar and garlic). The eggplant-squash sauce.. Hope that gets you interested to try out some of the wonderful dishes my country offers.

mcohen - what the recipe is describing is a technique used by my family for generations. Basically, you cook the tomatoes for a long time until you see the tomatoes give out oil. You can actually see the red oil in the pan as you swish the tomato mixture around. My mother says that this adds a new dimension to the dish and must never be omitted or take short cuts to it. My mother also says it prevents the dish from spoiling too quickly (esp. in a humid atmosphere such as the Philippines). And to answer your question - You would know when the sauce is ready when the tomato mixture has reduced to almost half, and thoroughly wilted and the tomato oil has exuded from the mixture. This would take more than 10 minutes.

Actually puto is a small round rice cake, smaller than your palm and is usually white. It also can come in various pastel colors and in teeny-tiny sizes (think reese's cup size). It is made with ground rice flour and sugar then fermented. My aunt who was widowed at an early age, actually had a thriving puto-making business. Puto sounding dirty? Nah! Not unless you change that last letter to "a".

MDanny - I was going to ask what was Pork Chocolate since I have never heard of it and I am Filipino. Then I read the article and saw it was Diniguan (Pork Blood Stew). My mom makes a great diniguan stew and we sometimes eat it with puto (round steamed rice cakes). Um, both your links show one article - the sun post one.

That is seriously one funny sentence... Thanks for making me laugh so hard.

I made gumbo!!!! It was a grey, cold drizzly day today. I had all the ingredients in my fridge and spent the whole afternoon chopping veggies and making roux. After a while, my pot was happily simmering on my stove. OMG, my kitchen was filled with a wonderful homey smell of the gumbo. Ladled on to my bowl. With rice on top... Thanks eGullet! This one's a keeper and will be a winter favorite for us.

Thanks for the warning Sazji! I remember the first time I put a bite of korean chocolate cake into my mouth. It was my husband's birthday cake bought by his office. Everyone was looking at me, waiting for my reaction/comment. For a horrible moment, my smile froze on my face, there was no chocolate taste on the cake. It was like chocolate colored soft sponge. I hurriedly swallowed the small piece of cake. I told them the cake was really... pretty. Thank goodness that went well with them. I discreetly gave my cake slice to hubby, who promptly disposed of it in his desk. I thought it was just a fluke, maybe that one bakery didn't really use good chocolate. Then when I moved here, I found out that was one of the "best" cakes produced here. Sigh, I still keep hoping I'd find a "REAL" chocolate cake here in South Korea. 5 years and still no luck. Hubby refuses to eat any cake except the ones I bake at home.

Pie for me, esp. the savory ones.

Just wanna add my thanks for your wonderful blog. Librarians rank close to my heart, a self-confessed voracious bookworm.

Prawncrackers - I'm drooling at the memory of it. The luscious, succulent morsels of flesh all around the eye and in the cheeks were perfectly grilled and the vinegar-soysauce mix with bird chilis and calamansi was the perfect dip. Lotsa rice were consumed with that meal. Heck, I'm dreaming when I can travel back to Davao (in Mindanao) to order it again.

Looks good but taste blah? Two words: Korean cakes. They are oh so pretty but cardboard taste better. Even the chocolate ones look scrumptious but one taste will tell you that there is no ounce of chocolate flavor in them. Gah! What do they use for chocolate? I baked a REAL chocolate cake once and my korean friends practically went into orgiasmic ecstacy.

Filipinos also go crazy over fish heads, especially the ones living near the coast. Bring a granddaughter of a fisherman, I know how to appreciate the joy of deconstructing a freshly-caught-cleaned-steamed fishhead. We cook our fish+head in sinigang (sour soup), paksiw (fish stewed in vinegar) and pangat (poached with a whole tomato). I would fight with my Dad over the fish head (love sucking the brain out and then dig out the eyejelly-muscle). There is a popular seafood restaurant dish in the Mindanao islands called "Inihaw na Panga" (which is literally Grilled Jawbone). The restaurants would halve a huge tuna head and brush it with oil, salt and pepper and grill it to tenderness. The huge head will be presented to you and sometimes take a third of the table space. I remember one time when some friends and I made a mistake of ordering 3 tuna head orders (thinking they were as big as a plate). Our orders arrived 20 minutes later and we were floored to see hubcap-sized fish heads. We ate one and packed the other two heads for our other colleagues back in our hotel. Each fish head cost lest than 2 dollars.

For those who have trouble getting the nice brown caramel color of a great fried chicken, Ky hubby suggests that you should not cook the chicken too fast, that would result in some burnt spots. His technique is to cook it over medium to high heat and then back down the heat once the color of the skin starts turning light brown. You need to really watch the chicken fry and see if the heat needs to be turned up or down.

The only information I got from the internet is that humans have contracted parasite-induced meningitis from eating raw slugs. Why they ate it in the raw state, I have no idea. Nonblonde - I do so know that "ew" moment when you step on a slug/snail. The gross and gag factor is so eeew!

UnConundrum - I browsed that focaccia recipe and found that the portions are weighed and not in cups. Would you happen to have the measurement in cups/tbsps.? My most requested recipe is my apple pie... and perfectly chocolate cake. Most requested recipe from eGullet that my friend's request is AhLeung's Mapo Tofu.

If one can mail gochujang, I'd send you a jar of a friend's mom's homemade gochujang.

FG, I'll take some pics of different flavored milks in plastic triangular bags here in Korea. I promise to post it tomorrow after my doctor visit (got a nasty spider bite and now I'm having severe allergic reactions).

I echo the fact that you need very fresh fish for cerviche. My mom would only fix cerviche when she found freshly caught/delivered fish at the market or when Dad would jog early in the morning to catch fishermen returning to land with their haul. Taking in consideration the cleaning with vinegar and marinating time, I would say 10-15 minutes. You want the fish to turn white but not get tough in the vinegar. But I would confess indulging in leftover cerviche marinating in the fridge for hours.

Johnny - what a wonderful story! If I was there, I would have tipped her generously. That guy is such a .... cad. (I have other choice words for him but it is unprintable for this forum).

Wash very well, chill in the fridge and then eat it raw, dipped in rock salt.

Well I would say congrats! Congratulations Mitch!

How about DEEP FRIED OREOS (and pepsi and snickers and reeses and...)

Let's not forget Ah Leung's famous Mapo Tofu!

Kathleen, how about a pic of the demon holding an ice cream cone?

Yes, calamansi toddy has always been a staple cure for those afflicted with a bad cold or flu. It goes down so easy when you have a sore throat and always seem to feel like it is really curing it. I miss hot calamansi drinks and also cold ones. Cold calamansi lemonade are always a staple of school parties when I was growing up. And like I said, the cerviche rocks when it is finished with a squeeze of calamansi over the dish.