April 29, 2008
I decided to resurrect the Recipe of the Month feature ... so I am back with an inaugural recipe - Inihaw na Pusit - for April 2008.
You have to go to the blog to access it.
December 13, 2006
This recipe page is now archival in nature. No new recipes have been uploaded since December of 2004. I will try to upload recipes once in a while but as
of now, I am in hiatus from the kitchen. The recipes are still ok though.
December 22, 2004
I have tried to organize the Carinderia as a blog but it didn't work!
December 13, 2004
More recipes today to spice up your holiday celebrations. Truly.
November 30, 2004
I'm on a roll. The holidays are coming so I uploaded several recipes today.
November 29, 2004
How to hack a chicken into pieces.
November 27, 2004
Because the recipes are burgeoning, I have now categorized them. Have a look!
November 27, 2004
A glorious soup to warm you this cold season.
October 3, 2004
Sa wakas, after more than a year, a recipe!
September 22, 2003
A recipe worked out when I was bored at work.
September 11, 2003
In these uncertain times, here is a suman (ibos) recipe for you to remind you of those special days of home.
August 17, 2003
An okay snack just for you to make those hot August day blues go away!
I also found this old article (May/June 1997), basically a review of this site in probably now defunct
Link Magazine. So even then, 6 years ago (I can't believe this site has existed for that long! even if I am a year
late in the updates), people have been raving about this! Shucks :-).
August 6, 2003
I found some alogbati in a Vietnamese store yesterday. So what to do, what to do? Ginisang alogbati. You can use regular spinach for this
recipe.
August 3, 2003
I had an unexpected guest for lunch today. I didn't have anything in the fridge except for burger meat and
some withering green and red peppers left over from a Mexican-themed party I did yesterday. So I made giniling
which is a variant of the giniling that is usually served in many carinderias. Try it, you'll love it.
July 13, 2003
Three recipes uploaded today! Imagine that. Since it's grilling season, I hope you like
my inihaw na baboy recipe. Well, it's actually my cousins' (Ng Jena and Glenn Molo of Chicago) but
it's an old family recipe from Tay Olong Bien, ng Jena's father :-) who was the cook in my mother's
large extended family.
March 23, 2003
Finally, after 6 months, some new recipes!
September 1, 2002
Ukoy reprised.
August 18, 2002
I just got back from vacation and felt crappy about going back to work. But a stint in the kitchen
making pancit worked wonders for my moods.
August 1, 2002
I am about to go to vacation starting this weekend and was cleaning out my pantry for perishables
when I had another inspiration. I had some left over sotanghon from a previous party - so I thought -
maybe I'll have some pancit tonight. It's easy, it's fast to do, and it's certainly delicious. Have
a look!
July 31, 2002
Another recipe added today! On the train going home, I thought I would cook fish for dinner.
I remembered I had a snap frozen red snapper I found at a Chinese store a year ago (!), tightly
packed in plastic in my deep freezer - and I thought tonight was the
perfect time for the fish to be resurrected. Especially that I need to keep up with the
updates here. Lovely fish really, the red snapper. So I decided to make escabeche.
July 30, 2002
Another recipe added today! Now you have an idea what I have been eating lately!
July 29, 2002
One recipe added today!
June 12, 2002
Three new recipes added! Whoopee!
May 17, 2002
Again my apologies for not having updates in this site. I can tell you why. I've been banned from
our kitchen. I was cooking something for an update, and while simmering it for 30 mins or so, I sat
down and surfed the Internet. And totally forgot about my cooking. The next thing I knew, the fire
alarm was screaming, and the maintenance people in my building were knocking on my door. Suffice it to
say that my kitchen was a total mess. Soot everywhere and my best casserole pan totally ruined. So it
will take a long time for me to be allowed in the kitchen again. Mea culpa.
July 30, 2001
Two new recipes added ... finally.
April 10, 2001
New recipes coming soon! Sorry for the very late update.
February 20, 2001
I know I have been remiss in updating this ... but I do have some new recipes ...
April 7, 2000
Again, I really love your wonderful comments in my guestbook - especially those who said they don't
really cook but find out that they are able to when they follow the recipes. Well, I will tell you
also that I really didn't cook either until I went abroad. As many of you know, back home, we have
people cooking for us in most of our homes, and it's the same in our house too. Growing up in
Aklan
or even when I was in living in Manila on the campus of the University of the Philippines
where I went
to high
school and college, we always had a
househelper
(or two) who would do the cooking for most of our meals. In the province, only on special occasions
when either my
mother or an uncle would do the cooking. But I always had an interest in cooking and would sometimes
cook the rice by myself - put rice in pot, dip extended palm onto the top of the rice line,
add water up to the second knuckle of the middle finger,
boil covered,
remove cover when boiling, lower heat - and also experiment in cooking. Do you know that they do the same thing
in Papua New Guinea? I mean, when cooking rice?
Starting
when I was in high school in Manila, when our helper would be off or quit on us - we had to fend off
for ourselves. We had a house on campus as my father was a professor at the College of Engineering.
Those
were horrible days when we didn't have a maid - because we had to do everything - from marketing
(usually at the UP Cooperative or
Tops supermarket on Quezon Ave.), to cooking to washing clothes to cleaning etc.
Usually for food, we would just order from the Drive Inn (when they used to have a real restaurant
there owned
by the university cafeteria) but sometimes, we would do our own cooking - simple stuff like fried
whatever.
When I started to live outside the
Philippines, I started to cook in earnest. I had no choice. First when I was living in Australia,
friends of mine would ask me to whip out an "authentic Filipino meal". That was the start. I believe I
cooked pork barbecue the first time I was asked to cook a Filipino meal. They loved it ... but people kept
on calling it satay or something.
In New
Zealand where I did my master's degree (at Massey University), there were always "bring a plate" teas to
showcase overseas
students' respective cultures and food and since there were only four Filipino students at Massey
at that time I was there (I was the only male),
invariably I was
invited to do whatever - dance, cook, demonstrate, dance, etc. Dancing seems to be the most popular
show in Rotary Clubs - so I learned how to dance the tinikling too. (This bring a plate announcement - it was
told that one of the Filipino students ahead of me went to one and actually brought a plate ...
without any food on it ...)
So it was in New Zealand that I learned that I actually
knew how to cook - from scratch. It was there where I learned how to be creative because it
was only then that the country was opening up as a nation of the world and you can actually find some of the ingredients
necessary for cooking other than lamb and potatoes, while the
others you just have to substitute or make do. I found out (this was early 80s) that
even in a small town where the university was, there was a Chinese store
where you can find whatever you needed, you just have to look for it.
But the incentive for me to cook well was because I was flatting with terrific cooks. The first time I lived
off campus, my flatmates were - one Indonesian guy and two Malaysian women and when the two Malaysian women
graduated, - a Hongkongnite, a
Brunei guy and another
Malaysian (Indian) replaced them. I had to keep up with them - especially that their families used to send them
these wonderful curries that they made themselves. It was from them that I learned how to cook gado gado and rendang and
how to make my own curry. I also learned how to make good stir fry vegetables (especially beef with brocolli) from my
Hong Kong flat mate.
When I moved to the US for my PhD at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, it was re-living my New Zealand experience again - we again had
to do the tinikling and serve Filipino food - I was living in a dorm you see, and every month,
one particular ethnic group had to do some presentations showing their culture. There were 8 of us
from home, including an American who grew up in the Philippines and so right away, I got conscripted
if that is the right term, to do cooking for our presentation. Our presentation was one of the earliest - like the
second week I was there - because one of the dorm student assistants was a Filipino and of course, she
volunteered to do the first one.
After three months of eating junk food in the dorm, I gained more than 40 pounds (truly!) and just could not afford to
buy new wardrobe. I'm a tiny little guy - I weighed 105 pounds when I came to America. After three months living on
dorm food and take outs, I ballooned to 145 pounds. And when I
started to dream about adobo, I needed to do something about it. So I bought some cooking equipment -
and you really have to be creative (again) about this - because cooking is supposed to be prohibited
in the dorms. One anecdote - there were two grad dorms on campus - in the other dorm, there were
many Filipino students living there - and one of them found fresh galunggong (or maybe it was daing)
in one of the Asian markets -
she fried the fish in her room - and oh boy - that stank the whole floor. Usually, dorm officials
just look the other way regarding cooking in rooms - but this time somebody complained about the stink
- so
they had to make a room-to-room inspection and confiscated cooking utensils they found in rooms.
As for me, I bought one of those aluminum electric coffee makers - and cooked everything in it. It's
amazing what you can do in it - really - anything - although my staple food was ramen noodles. Then at the end of
the year, I moved to an apartment so I could cook meals properly - mostly
trying to recreate the taste of food that I grew up with - comfort foods if you will.
Adobo was
easy, but pancit
was a challenge. You have to add the ingredients in a certain succession - this is
the secret to a good pancit.
Then I found Reynaldo Alejandro's
Philippine Cookbook in a bookstore
(surprisingly) - by far it is the best Filipino cookbook for cooking in the diaspora that I have found - the recipes are authentic
and easy. The beauty of his recipes is that they are very friendly and flexible. Not only that,
the book is printed on a type of paper that you don't mind the book being in your kitchen where it should be
while you are working on a recipe - not like other recipe books printed on glossy paper and designed
as coffee table books - well, they are beautiful and all that stuff, but you don't even want to open them
in your kitchen lest you spill
something on it or something. It defeats the purpose.
So. That's my starting adventure in cooking. I always cook Filipino food because there is so much
variety that I haven't even scratched the surface of Filipino cuisine. The recipes featured here are what
I call the so-so
dishes - they are the 'usual' everyday food you can order in better restaurants in the Philippines and
thus easy to do. I realy haven't done the special dishes that for example my mother or my
uncles used to cook for special occasions - like the rice desserts and condiments my mother used to
create - she was very good in making merienda desserts - kumbo, alopihan, ibos, suman,
inumoe, biko, inday-inday, atchara, binayong saging - these are regional dishes that I still have
to recreate and as for the dishes my uncles used to make for fiestas - I don't even know what they were
frankly. Then there are regional dishes - for example, in Aklan - we have inubaran (chicken
cooked with banana pith), inigpit (broiled tuna pressed between bamboo sticks), binakoe
(chicken cooked inside a bamboo),
inasae (barbecued chicken or fish), buroe (jellyfish salad), tinumkan (freshwater shrimp or crab cooked
with young coconut and wrapped in gabi leaves) and a seaweed salad the name of which I can't
think of right now (well, it's eaba-eaba). There are also 'heirloom recipes' that can be
found in other recipe books - a lot of Reynaldo Alejandro's
recipes fall into this category - and I haven't tried those yet too.
At anyrate, I always receive recipe requests from readers ... as much as I want to fulfill all your
requests, timewise, I really can't. It's even painful sometimes for me to upload a new recipe of
the month because most of the time, I don't. So please be patient. Your requested dish may
eventually be featured.
July 19, 1999
Hey, I really appreciate your comments in my guestbook. It is very heartwarming to learn that the
recipes contained here evoke memories of childhood from many and that they work and taste ok. I
really try to make these recipes easy to do - and I do cook myself, so most of the pictures contained
here are the actual products of the recipes. By the way, please help in maintaining this page by
patronizing my sponsors. That's the least you can do :-).
BTW, the privacy statement for this site is located at Privacy Statement site.
