Burnt Lumpia: Filipino Food | Filipino Recipes | Culinary Hijinks

Fresh Mango Pudding From Rasa Malaysia's New Cookbook

Aside from the occasional homemade ice cream binge, or the very rare instance where I actually bake something, I don't usually make many desserts. It's not that I don't enjoy sweets, it's just that my sweet tooth usually gets vetoed by my lazy bones.

So whenever I come across a dessert recipe where I don't have to turn my oven on, my sweet tooth can finally exercise its powers over said lazy bones. Such was the case when I was thumbing through Bee Yin Low's new cookbook, Easy Chinese Recipes: Family Favorites From Dim Sum to Kung Pao, and found a beautiful looking recipe for Fresh Mango Pudding.

Bee, if you didn't already know, is the mastermind behind the megablog Rasa Malaysia. Rasa Malaysia has been an inspiration to me since I've started my own little blog here, and now that I'm working on my own cookbook, the recipes and photographs in Bee's new book continue to inspire me as well.

(Full Disclosure: My own Filipino cookbook will be published by Tuttle, the same publisher behind Easy Chinese Recipes.)

Short Rib and Foie Gras Caldereta

Caldereta (or Kaldereta if you're nasty) is an honest to goodness meat stew influenced by both Spain and the United States, but yet remains uniquely Filipino.

Caldereta's roots in Spain can be found in its Spanish name (of course), but also in its preparation wherein Spaniards braised meat (usually mutton) and vegetables in a tomato-based sauce. Filipinos began making their own version of their colonizer's stew by utilizing goat meat and then thickening the tomato sauce with mashed pork livers (take that Spain!).

And with the American occupation of the Philippines came all the trappings of post-war convenience foods and canned goods. Soon, the likes of tomato paste, canned tomato sauce, canned pork liverwurst, and even processed cheese, all made their way into Caldereta (this all tastes a lot better than it sounds).

While I do love a warm and hearty bowl of goat kaldereta thickened with liverwurst (seriously, I do), I have tried to fancify the dish once before by making a wonderful version with beef, red wine, and a homemade chicken liver pate. And although I was quite pleased with that version, I've since found that nothing beats caldereta thickened with canned liverwurst. But there is always room for experimentation.

So when my older brother recently returned from a trip to Europe and gifted me a couple cans of foie gras, the first thing that popped into my head wasn't to eat the foie with toast points and some sort of sweet/sour fruit--it was Caldereta.

Yes, I was going use fancy canned foie gras in place of the usual $2 can of pork liverwurst in my Caldereta. This was either going to be the greatest beef stew ever made, or a complete waste of foie gras.