Nilaga and Minatamis na Gabi

Ingredients

Nilaga
Beef, Onions, Potatoes, Salt, Peppercorns, Cabbage, Bok Choy


Minatamis na Gabi
Gabi (Taro), Water, Sugar, Pandan Leaves

Happy Memorial’s Day!!! Hope everyone had a great three-day weekend with family and friends – though if you’re like me and aren’t doing anything this summer, three-day weekends don’t really mean anything…summer’s sort of like a 90-day weekend for us!

Anywho, so the dish I made last night was Nilaga (basically a beef stew) and my dessert was Minatamis na Gabi (Sweetened Taro). Nilaga more than anything has shown me just how much time can go into cooking. It took me three hours to wait for the beef to become tender…and even then, it didn’t really get that tender. It was actually really frustrating!!!

But this experience, as well as the other cooking days, has taught me to think of and appreciate something I didn’t think about when I started this project – namely how hard it is to maintain a house. I’d much rather work than be the house-spouse (since they aren’t necessarily wives these days…yay 21st century). Currently, I’m just doing groceries, cooking and cleaning-up after the cooking and I’m already exhausted at the end of the day. I can’t imagine having to maintain the whole house, do all the laundry, do all the cleaning, maintain the garden, buy things for the house, take care of kids, and do the cooking – a good old-fashioned 9-5 job pales in comparison to the amount of work that must go into taking care of a house. Which brings me to give a little bit of appreciation to my mom (Mother’s Day is in May)! 

As many of you know, my mom is a single-mom and has had to do the job of both parents all my life. I didn’t understand how hard it must have been back then, and I probably still don’t fully understand all the hardships and pressures that must have come along with being a single parent, but she was able to work her jobs (at one point she was having to work three jobs) and take care of me and take care of a home. From like 3rd to 5th grade before my grandmother started living with us, I would go to my grandma’s place after school to wait for my mom to get out of work. I remember my mom having to wake up at 5 am in the morning before dropping me off to make dinner for me and my grandma that I would bring with me. It must have been hard and I don’t know how she did it for so many years. So, take the time to appreciate your parents/parent/anyone who’s given time to take care of you/cook for you/sacrificed for you. At the end of this month to celebrate mothers, I’d like to thank my mom and my grandmother for everything they’ve ever cooked for me and for all their sacrifices!

Tonight’s dish will be Chicken Adobo and the dessert will be Casava cake. That’s it for now! Till next time!

Other Summer Projects
Books Read: 0
Current Book: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Memories of Philippine Kitchens
Progress with Mandarin: Rosetta Stone Ordered
Weekdays Missed Jogging: 0

Pinakbet and Pastillas

Ingredients

Pinakbet

Pork,  Shrimp, Bagoong (Shrimp Paste), Patis (Fish Sauce), Eggplant, String Beans, Okra, Squash

Pastillas

Powdered Milk, Condensed Milk, Butter, Sugar 

The dish for Wednesday night was Pinakbet and the dessert was Pastillas.  I realized cooking and blogging everyday was very tiring and my mom likes going out to dinner sometimes, so I will be cooking on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and will blog sometime before my next cooking session.  

The pinakbet actually turned out really well – a lot better than the picadillo went.  For those that don’t know, pinakbet is vegetable based dish with pork and shrimp cooked in bagoong – shrimp paste.  Apparently, there’s more than one time of bagoong so it’s a good thing my mom got home before the dish was finished.  I was using the cooked bagoong when I was supposed to be using just bagoong alamang (salted shrimp) instead of the ginisang bagoong (sauteed shrimp).  Anywho, it was salvaged – and my mom said it was actually pretty good!  Woohoo!

The dessert I made was a really simple dessert, but it’s always been my favorite growing up.  Basically, it’s milk and sugar.  Traditionally, you’d use fresh milk and spend a lot of time boiling it down into a paste while adding sugar…but not having access to fresh milk and not having too much time I used the short cut and just used powdered milk and condensed milk.   For some reason, one of my earliest memories was making pastillas in the Philippines.  I think I was like three years old or something and we had made pastillas at my day care center.  I just remember being really excited when my parents picked me up and I gave them some of the pastillas I had made…I know – I guess I’ve just always been adorable, right?  Anyways, I’ve loved them ever since.  Even when my mom and I moved to the US, I’d always love getting pastillas from the Philippines.  The ones you can buy here just aren’t the same for whatever reason. 

Hmmm so some updates that will help me through the rest of the summer!  My mom found a small notebook with some of my grandmother’s recipes so I’m gonna start taking a look at that.  My grandma , whom we all called ‘nanay’ – the Tagalog for mom - was always known for her amazing cooking so maybe through her recipes I can channel some of her natural talent.  My mom also said she has some note cards with more of nanay’s recipes so she’s going to look for them.  Also, my cousin bought me a graduation gift that will help me this summer!  It’s this cookbook called Memories of Philippine Kitchens written by Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan, two people who actually have a Filipino restaurant in Manhattan – so guess where I’ll be eating once I move to New York in August.   If people are interested, their restaurant is called Cendrillon, so check it out for me and let me know how it is if you’re in the area.   Anyway, it’s not just a cookbook – it’s sort of a historical and cultural analysis of the food, it’s origins, and the influences that the Chinese, the Spanish and the Americans have had on Filipino cuisine – sort of the topic of my last post.  It’ll definitely be a great resource and give me good context while I’m cooking the foods that I’m cooking.  I’m really excited about using this book and nanay’s recipes for the rest of the summer.  

Tonight’s dish will be Nilaga and I’m still deciding on the dessert.  As for my other summer projects…I need to get working on them more.  Haven’t missed a day of jogging yet…but also haven’t opened any books to read!  That’s it for now.  Till next time! 

Other Summer Projects

Books Read: 0

Current Book: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Memories of Philippine Kitchens

Progress with Mandarin: Rosetta Stone Ordered

Weekdays Missed Jogging: 0

Picadillo (Giniling) and Turon

Ingredients
Picadillo
Beef, Garlic, Patis (Fish Sauce), Chayote

Turon
Saba (banana native to the Philippines), Langka (Jackfruit), Brown Sugar, Spring Roll Wrapper

Last night was my first official night cooking for my summer project. Per request of my mom - who probably thought I couldn't handle anything harder - I made some Picadillo (Filipino Style) and some Turon.

Picadillo, as I learned from Wikipedia and as you can probably tell from its name, is a Latin American dish. Like for many things in the Philippines - from the very architecture of the buildings in Intramuros, Manila to some of our traditional dances, to many of the words we use everyday - the impact of 300 years of Spanish colonial rule is obvious. This is something that I've always grappled with in terms of defining my identity as Filipino. Many times I would get defensive when people would emphasize the "Spanish"ness of Filipino culture or ask if Tagalog - the country's national language - was anything like Spanish. I think I would get defensive because I wanted to argue that Filipino culture was unique and original and I thought that in some way, being so heavily influenced by another culture somehow diminished the value of what it was to be Filipino. So, I'd always ask my mom (sometimes to her annoyance because she couldn't think of the words) how to say something in Tagalog that we often uses the Spanish to describe. For instance, we often use the Spanish silia for chair instead of upuan (literally sitting place> or salung-puet (literally butt-catcher).

However, the very fact that the Spanish word for many things is more common and that the influence of the Spanish is so deeply embedded even in our staple foods shows how inseparable Spanish influence is from Filipino culture. Come to think about it, that's what makes Filipino culture so unique and original. It's a melting-pot of so many different cultures, Asian and European, East and West, and often times it's difficult to discern where one influence ends and another begins. Even my dessert dish turon is the product of influences from China. Though the saba is a banana native to the Philippines, the spring roll (lumpia as it is called in the Philippines and Indonesia) aspect of it originated from immigrants that came to the Philippines from the Fujian province of China.

Almost everything in the Philippines has been influenced by two or more other cultures. One could say that the Philippines invented fusion food bringing together in one small place so many elements from around the world. Taking religions such as Islam from the Malaysian nations and Catholicism from the Spanish, systems of laws and governance from the Americans, beliefs such as Feng Shui and astrology from China, and dances and foods from all of these places, the Filipino culture is truly a syncretic culture and I'm a product of all of these different cultures and influences. And I think I've grown to appreciate this multi-faceted identity more and more.

Anyway, tonight's post was sort of a big tangent and definitely turned out longer than I thought it would. If you're still reading this far, thanks for your patience! I'll try to make other posts shorter. Tonight, since we had so much food left over from my graduation party and last night's cooking experiment, my mom asked me to not cook, but just to make sinangag from our left over rice. Basically, it's frying the rice with garlic and salt helping to preserve it and to make old rice still tasty.

Also, listed below are my other summer goals, so to help keep me honest in attaining them, I'm posting updated of how far I get with them so you can all judge me if I seem to be faltering in any one of them.

That's it for tonight. Hope you enjoyed this lengthy post. Till next time.

Other Summer Projects
Books Read: 0
Current Book: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Progress with Mandarin: Rosetta Stone Ordered
Weekdays Missed Jogging: 0

Laman Loob: The Beginning

Yesterday, my mom, with the help of my aunt and uncle, threw me a family graduation party - and if you're Filipino or have been to Filipino functions, you know what they're like. Lots of food (probably enough to feed three times the number of actual guests), little kids running around, the grandparents and aunts sitting in the corner gossiping about everyone else in the family, the uncles out back drinking San Mig(or in yesterday's case, Red Horse and Corona), and everyone that can sing (or think that they can sing) gathered around the television doing some good old fashioned karaoke. And yes, every Filipino family has a karaoke machine of some sort.

What I never realized before was how much work actually went into planning these get-togethers. My mom and I never really threw any of these parties ourselves. This was just a special occasion since I had just graduated from college and I thought it would be fun to invite the whole family over. I mean, we would usually go to at least 8 or 10 of these things a year, from weddings and baptisms, graduations and holidays, to birthdays and funerals, family parties for Filipinos (or at least for my large extended family) are common place. So naively, I thought they were easy to make happen. Little did I know about the six hour grocery store trips, borrowing tables and chairs and grills from family and friends, cleaning (before and after), chopping up all the vegetables and prepping the meat good enough to feed 50-60 people. It literally took most of Thursday, all of Friday, and Saturday morning (starting at 7am) to prepare for the party at 3pm, and all of Sunday to clean everything up. All in all, it was an exhausting week and I don't think I'd ever want to throw another family party ever again - I don't know how the rest of my family does it a few times every year. I admire them a lot more for it now that I've gone through it myself.

Through it all though, I spent a lot of time talking to my aunt and uncle and my mom, learning about their pasts, finding out about our family history, and most relevantly for the summer project that this post is introducing, discovering age-old culinary secrets that have been passed down to my mom and her sisters from my grandmother, who probably got them from her mother before her - and so I probably won't be revealing any of those secrets in this blog this summer.

What I will be talking about is the experience of rediscovering my culture and family history through cooking Filipino food. While growing up in California, I never really took much of an interest in learning about how to cook Filipino food or learning about my culture in general. Though I could speak Tagalog and lived with my grandmother, who has already passed away, I never took advantage of her memories and the knowledge she could give me about myself and my culture. When I entered college at Penn in September of 2006 (ah, how time has flown), I still had no interest in doing anything Filipino, but through some random twist of fate - one of my hall mates thought it would be funny to write my email down on the PPA (Penn Philippine Association) listserve - I found myself deciding to attend one meeting and remained involved ever since participating in our cultural shows and making a large group of close Filipino friends.

Last summer, I finally went back to the Philippines after 15 years. I spent the whole summer there on an internship at the US Embassy in Manila and though I hadn't been back in forever, it felt completely natural. A large part of me felt very at home in this land which in many ways should have been very foreign. Something inside me resonated with everything that was around me, and this something is driving me now to pursue a greater understanding of and appreciation for my culture and history that I can learn from my family. And this summer, I plan on taking advantage of all my opportunities to do so.

Thus, my summer project and the title of this blog. "Laman Loob" refers to the innards of animals (like the liver, the intestines, kidneys and what-not) used in many Filipino dishes. Literally, it simply means "the stuff inside." This summer, I will attempt to learn and (hopefully) master a variety of Filipino dishes, finding out about my culture, family, and, ultimately, about "the stuff inside" of me.