Tag Archives: Filipino Recipes

My personal recipe for munggo (mung bean soup)*

My munggo, or mung bean soup, contains both shrimp and pork, FYI. There was some interest in my recipe on Facebook, so I decided to put my recipe here.

Ingredients

  • 1/2 pound of mung beans
  • 1 Tbsp of vegetable oil
  • 1 lb pork, sliced into thin strips
  • 1/2 lb shrimp
  • 3 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 3 tomatoes, chopped
  • 3 cups chicken stock (if you use more, its fine — I hate wasting half a can of chicken broth)
  • Patis (fermented fish sauce) to taste
  • 1 bunch of spinach

Before you begin cooking, soak the mung beans in water for at least a couple of hours before boiling for faster cooking.

Boil mung beans in water until soft and easily mashed. Set the mung beans aside.

In a pan, heat the oil, add the pork and cook until the meat turns slightly brown. Then add the garlic, onions and tomatoes. Saute until the tomatoes are wilted. Add the shrimp until they’re just pink. Pour in the chicken broth, then add the boiled mung beans. Bring it all to a boil and let it simmer until thick. Season with patis to taste, then fold in the spinach. Cover and remove from heat. Serve hot over white rice.

*I’ve been keeping track of what I eat lately, so I was interested in finding out what the nutrition info on my recipe was. Check it out. (I estimate that this recipe yields 10 servings.) What I’m hearing from my fellow Filipino moms is that this is great dish to eat for milk production.

munggo nutrition info

Champorado flashback

It’s been a long time since I did a Filipino food post. You may think this concoction looks strange, but when I saw a post on Burnt Lumpia about champorado is something I remember so fondly from my childhood. And being seven months pregnant, I’m totally suggestible, so I dragged Trinity to a Filipino market for the ingredients next chance I got.

Champorado

The entire cooking set includes the recipe and the modifications I made. Bottom line: using the tablea and the coconut milk was not entirely to my liking. I believe that my mom used to use unsweetened cocoa, which sounds easier than using tablea, so I will probably go that route next time.

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.