Tag Archives: Filipino Food

Fried rice with shrimp and BACON!

Has it been a while since my last Filipino food experiment? I suppose its because I really wanted my next attempt to be kare-kare, but I’m not quite ready yet. So Trinity made the choice — we had shrimp in the freezer, so we tried fried rice with shrimp and Chinese sausage. Except, we couldn’t find Chinese sausage at our Agoura Hills supermarkets (which would be more likely to have matzo balls and stuff). The recipe allowed for bacon as a substitution, so there you have it — fried rice with BACON!

Fried rice with shrimp and BACON!

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Mmmmm, caldereta

Trying my hand at Caldereta

A few weeks ago, I attempted the Mount Everest of Filipino cuisine and tried my hand at making caldereta from scratch. It was not easy, let me tell you — I believe it took me an hour of chopping, slicing and preparing, and another two hours of actually cooking the meat so that it would be separate-with-a-fork tender. Plus I had a few obstacles — why do I have to use chorizo? Did my mom use cheddar cheese? I really have to use liver? Really? — but in the end, it was pretty tasty, and Trinity believes it was right on. For the future, I think I will forgo the chorizo, because the taste of the chorizo clashed with the caldereta, in my opinion. I’m also wondering if the minced garlic (we use it out of a jar, its so much easier) should be ground more finely. I’m also not a big fan of olives, but Trinity said he thought the olives really made it seem like caldereta. Oh well.

Check out the Flickr set here. What I really would like to attempt next is kare kare, a peanut soup, but I’m sort of afraid to because of the recent salmonella scare. Although, the recipe in my book calls for roasting peanuts, rather than using peanut butter, which is what my mom used.

Attempting menudo

I say attempt because it didn’t turn out quite how I think it should have.

Attempt at Filipino Menudo

Anyway, I tried the menudo recipe in my little Filipino cookbook, but my problem was that I didn’t follow the directions to the letter. Plus, another knock against this attempt is that its pretty different from my mom’s version, which uses beef and much bigger chunks of potato. The end result was still edible, and not terrible — shoot, I ate it up — but I still have a yearning for my mom’s version of menudo. Ah well. Check out the whole process in the Flickr set.

Adventures in Filipino cooking: Picadillo

Ground Beef & Vegetable Stew (Picadillo)

As I mentioned recently, I got a new cookbook and Trinity has been itching to try it out. We happened to have ground beef on hand, so we decided to try Picadillo, a ground beef and vegetable stew. It was mighty tasty and very fast to make. Check out the Flickr set for the directions. Warning: it does require fish sauce, aka patis. Hahah! PinoyCook, by the way, has a chicken version.

Cooking lumpia and turon

I’ve made lumpia before. So its not like I am experimenting and blogging about it. Not at all. Because I’ve successfully executed lumpia before, I think I felt confident enough to document it for the web.

Cooking Lumpia and Turon

I’m not a prolific chef or cook by any means, but there are a few Filipino dishes I can make, and one of them is lumpia. So as Christmas approached, I figured, hey. Why not make lumpia for work potlucks (it was a hit today, thanks), to give away, and just to have for Trin and myself. So I did. What you see above is the beginning (after chopping and food processing the onions, carrots, water chestnuts and two pounds of shrimp).

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