Menudo

My wife cooked Menudo for Jo-Lo's birthday party and this was a big hit. The guests loved it so much they took some home with them when they raided the kitchen and discovered that there were still some left in the pot!

Menudo inherently comes from our Spanish heritage (this dish, and the 80s boy band of the same name). We have adapted this dish to our taste and is one of the more popular items in the Filipino menu.

Our version is different from the regular menudo recipe in that we used banana ketchup instead of tomato sauce. Also, pork liver is hard to come by here and so we used chicken liver instead.

Jo-Lo's 5th birthday party

We wanted to make Jo-Lo's 5th birthday party something that we would also traditionally have back in the Philippines. And so aside from kiddie favorites, we also had dishes prepared for the parents: dinuguan, puto, sisig, chopsuey, menudo, and of course, pancit with the noodles cooked whole so that - as superstition goes - Jo-Lo will have long life.

Mini puto

Puto is a popular Filipino steamed cake, whose main ingredient is either all-purpose flour or rice flour. Of course, the rice flour version has a definite edge over texture and taste but if you do not have this, regular flour will do just fine.

Which is how we found ourselves in today when we decided to try out the steamer function of our rice cooker by cooking puto. We do not have puto molds, however, and so we decided to use these ones for macaroons hence the mini puto variation.

Leftover fish fillet in noodles

If you can find dried noodles in your favourite supermarket, better stock up for a rainy day. I have found these noodles to be the perfect snack item, and although it will take a bit longer to prepare (because you have to prep up the rest of the ingredients), it won't really take that long and the result is a dish with significantly reduced salt and preservative content.

(By the way, the fish fillet served here is considerably bigger than those you see in boxes sold in the supermarket, so it's really a waste to just throw it away).

Plus, you can use the noodles with a variety of ingredients! For instance, we have a couple of fish fillets left from Fish n Chips night, and when it goes cold it's no longer that yummy (unless you heat it up in the oven; the microwave does not do a good job of it).

So what we have here is a yummy noodle treat with leftover fish fillet as a main ingredient!