Pininyahang Manok (Chicken Pineapple)

Milk and pineapple?! That was my first reaction when I saw the ingredients on the kitchen counter. Why not use water and pineapple? My wife, who was cooking this, said: because milk and pineapple are the essential components of this recipe.

I've only seen milk in soup recipes but this intrigued me. Surprisingly, the dish was yummy. I liked the creamy sauce which I poured on my rice, and the sweet-sour pineapple taste.

Banana pancakes

I woke up this morning thinking about making some pancakes for breakfast as we have a packet of instant pancakes in the cupboard. But then I saw some bananas on the table which have been sitting there for a week now and so I thought about making banana pancakes from scratch instead. Good thing Jo-Lo woke up too and asked to help in its preparation, so we had morning fun in the process.

This is a yummy recipe and it's easy to make too!

Orange Jelly

Jo-Lo actually brought this from school. At first I was ignoring it, thinking it was just another one of those fruit slices that made it to Jo-Lo's baon and made the return trip back home (hindi kinain). But right after dinner they started spooning out... gelatin!

I was amazed. What a delightful way to serve gelatin for dessert!

I already had some thoughts about how it was done but a friend, who is an Early Childhood Education teacher, told me how it was made. Very simple and fun!

Ingredients:
Orange-flavoured gelatin
3 medium oranges (or approximate how many orange halves can be filled by your gelatin mix)
water

Procedure:
All you have to do is slice the orange in half, then use a juicer to extract the juice (do not squeeze). Spoon out the pulp and you're left with two hollow orange halves.

Use the fresh orange juice supplemented by water to satisfy the amount of water needed to make the gelatin. Obviously you will need to use the orange-flavoured variety. Follow the instructions on the packet to make the gelatin.

The gelatin will be very hot so let it stand for a while. Then pour the gelatin on the orange halves. When sufficiently cooled, refrigerate, making sure that it has support and not roll all over the place (egg cartons or ice cub containers will do nicely).

When the gelatin has firmed, slice each orange half into two. Now you have the orange gelatin quarters to enjoy!

Technorati tags: recipe

Pata Tim

My wife usually just strolls through the grocery aisles and dumps onto the cart anything that we will need for the coming week. Last weekend, though, she had a checklist. Something was up.

She was cooking Pata Tim, a braised pork leg recipe of Chinese origin. She followed a recipe which turned out great (thank you Myra!). The meat was tender and scrumptious! There is quite a lot of fat on this dish though. So I suggest reserving this for special occasions or when you have guests.

Shopping list notwithstanding, my wife forgot to buy a head of bok choy but this is mainly for aesthetics (though you can also eat it of course) so she went ahead and cooked Pata Tim for dinner.

Tinapa and monggo on a Friday

We bought tinapa (smoked fish) from the Newlands Asian store. Well, we also have smoked fish (salmon, to be specific) from the supermarket which we also like but the one from the Asian store is galunggong (mackerel scad), imported from the Philippines and so that made it special.

We had tinapa and monggo last Friday, and it was indeed a yummy dinner. Friday is customarily a veggies and fish day for most Filipinos as we - at least in one meal for the day - skip meat to commemorate Good Friday. Ginisang monggo and fish are indeed very popular menu items. Kain na!

Technorati tags: musing

Tapioca the easy way

I once bought a bag of tapioca to use in a drink recipe but was quite ignorant of how the tapioca needs to be cooked. I followed the directions in the recipe which called for cooking it in cream. That lead to disaster. The tapioca wasn't cooked through and was tough. Thinking I did not cook it long enough, I tried the recipe again and was a failure once more. And so we shelved the rest of the tapioca until it went past its expiration date and we had to throw it away.

Maruya (banana fritters)

Maruya, or banana fritters, is native merienda item that's popular in the provinces. Well, that was way back when I was a kid. Come to think of it, I haven't had maruya in those days when we'd go to Batangas or Laguna for mountain climbing.  Well, I just might be able to see some again when we go back for vacation.

For this recipe, my wife asked me to cut the bananas into strips. It might be because some of the bananas still needed a bit of ripening and cutting them this way will make sure it gets cooked all the way through (we've had the cooking bananas in our water heater room waiting for it to ripen up but it was taking its sweet time. I decided to cook it after 3 weeks' waiting) . But really, the best way to have this is to just have it sliced lengthwise. I like cutting out three pieces out of one banana.