Burnt Lumpia: Filipino Food | Filipino Recipes | Culinary Hijinks

Pork and Rhubarb Sinigang

The Filipino sour soup known as Sinigang can contain any variety of meats, poultry and seafood, and is typically studded with a variety of local vegetables. Depending on the region of the Philippines, a range of native fruits can be used to give Sinigang its trademark tang. And although vinegar is a vital ingredient in Filipino cooking, it is never used as a souring agent for Sinigang.

The typical souring agents that can be used include unripe tamarind pods and leaves, kamias (a very sour green fruit pod native to the Philippines), guava, starfruit, tomatoes, as well as lemon, calamansi and dayap (another variety of Philippine lime).

But since Rhubarb is so plentiful this time of year in my neck of the woods (and also because tamarind, kamias, guava, starfruit and dayap don't grow in my neck of the woods), I decided to try and use the sour red stalks to bring the tang for a Pork Sinigang.

Rhubarb? In soup? Yes. And it works wonderfully! Although rhubarb is typically used in desserts, a savory Sinigang application isn't as crazy as it sounds. Besides lending the necessary sourness for a proper Sinigang, rhubarb also provides a nice crunchy texture in much the same way that daikon or taro traditionally would in the Filipino sour soup.

And besides, using Rhubarb in Sinigang will trip out even the most palate-progressive of all your Filipino friends. It's a culinary curveball!

Rat Tails in the Garden

On most visits to my grandparents' house, I can usually be found in the kitchen, hovering around my grandmother and her two sisters (AKA "The Aunties", AKA my extra grandmas) as they prepare that day's meal. And while many of the kitchen ingredients come directly from the backyard garden that my grandfather usually tends, I rarely venture out there on account of things like bugs and dirt. I mean, I can't be bothered to have my nice kicks all muddied up now can I?

Truthfully though, my grandfather hasn't been himself for the past few months, so he and his green thumbs have been inside the house and away from his vegetables in the backyard. But despite my grandfather's absence from the garden, I still found my grandmother prepping a particularly interesting looking veggie on my last visit to their home.

On the kitchen counter were a bowlful of strange green pods resembling some sort of love child sprung from the loins of a green bean and a green thai chile. My grandmother told me that they were the pods that eventually grow from a radish root if left to its own devices.

Initially, I was quite dubious of this "radish pod" talk. Stuff grows out of a radish root? That's crazy I thought. Maybe my grandfather had been well enough to go outside and grow these magic beans. Or maybe my grandmother or her sisters had been tending the garden. So I actually went outside to the garden to have a look for myself.

Adobong Sili (Chile Pepper Adobo)

It's been said a few times before in this space, but it bears mentioning again: almost anything can be made into a Filipino Adobo. As long as you have a braising liquid consisting of vinegar, soy and/or salt, garlic, bay leaves, and black peppercorns, a tasty adobo you should have. Of course, we Filipinos veer toward the meaty side of things when throwing something into the adobo braise.

In fact, you might remember adobo from such meaty blog posts as Chicken Adobo (Yes, Again), Unforgettably Fatty, and the Burnt Lumpia classic, Wingin' It, Filipino Style. But even things like squid and water spinach do a good adobo make.

And, as I discovered at my grandmother's most recent Thanksgiving feast, even chile peppers can be adobo'd!

Tinola: Filipino Chicken Soup

As new parents, the wife and I have received some child-rearing tips from, oh, just about everyone we know. I'm not saying we're not appreciative of such tips, but some of these pointers have been downright unusual. Not surprisingly, the strangest pointers have come from my own mother:

• "Make sure you massage his head so it will stay round."
• "You should leave the lights on at night when he sleeps, so he gets used to it."

I know I'm new to this whole parenting thing, but I'm perfectly satisfied with the current roundness of my kid's head, and leaving the lights on at night just makes no sense to me. Ironically enough, I can rest a beer on my own head because it's so flat, and I'm nocturnal. Strange, that.

So despite my mother's good intentions (at least I think her intentions are good), I've pretty much ignored her "sage" advice. However, there was one nugget of knowledge that spilled from my mother's mouth that did kinda sorta make sense: "Tinola is good for increasing breast milk production."

"I can produce breast milk?" I asked my mom.

"Not you, your wife!" she corrected me.

I told you, I'm new to this.

Anyways, Tinola is a simple-to-make rustic Filipino chicken soup. Like the chicken soups of most other cultures, Tinola is also known for its healing and restorative powers--helping to recover from cold and flu symptoms--this much I knew. But I had never before heard that Tinola was also good for nursing and feeding newborns.

So I wasn't sure if my mother was just perpetuating some old Filipino wives' tale, or if Tinola indeed possessed any lactic magic (I'm very pleased with myself that I came up with that rhyme). But if cooking a pot of Tinola would make things easier for my wife, and indirectly get some Filipino food into my kid, I was all for it.

Green Mangoes and Bagoong

The mere mention of "Green Mangoes and Bagoong" will likely excite the salivary glands of almost any Filipino. It's true.

Green Mangoes and Bagoong.

Green Mangoes and Bagoong!

Green Mangoes and Bagoong!!!

The pairing of sour unripe mangoes dipped in salty fermented shrimp paste (Bagoong) may not sound too appealing to some, but it's a mouth-watering combination for most Filipinos. In fact, after reading the first few lines of this post, I'm sure that there are some gleek-covered computer screens out there due to the certain downpour of Pavlovian drool.

Up until recently though, my own Pavlovian response to green mangoes and bagoong did indeed entail salivation... except it was the sort of salivation associated with nausea. Yeah, vomit spit (ewww). You see, when I was a wee lad I would recoil in horror as I watched my mother snack on this sour/salty delicacy. Eating unripe fruit was strange enough to me as a child, but to then dip and smother the unripe fruit in stinky rotting shrimp was altogether... well, it was just plain gross.

For those who have never had the pleasure of eating bagoong, it is a very pungent and salty paste comprised of itty-bitty teeny-weeny fermenting shrimp. While Bagoong is salty in flavor, its funky aroma is kinda like if anchovies had feet, and wore dirty socks with an old pair of sneakers, and walked around town in the afternoon sun, in July--but in a good way.

As I've gotten older though, I have learned to enjoy Bagoong in tiny doses. Heck, I even made a salad with it. However, I've always avoided eating bagoong where it is one of the primary in-your-face ingredients--such as the condiment for green mangoes. But I must confess that I've finally discovered the virtues of this classic pairing.

On My Low Horse

With a shopping basket in one hand, and a short grocery list in the other, I was skipping (ok, I was walking, but there was a lilt in my step) up and down the aisles of my local Filipino grocery store. As I stopped to mentally check off each item on my list, something squatting on the store floor caught my attention.

"Psssst. Hoy!" the object of interest seemed to simultaneously shout and whisper to me.

Normally, whenever the words "Psssst. Hoy!" are shouted/whispered (shoutspered?) at me, I usually duck and cover and/or run as I've probably done something wrong. But that's another story for another time. I digress.

This time however, I couldn't help but to kneel down and take a closer look at what appeared to be a mini-skateboard with short wooden stumps in place of wheels. Strange, that. Stranger still was that the nose of the board was fitted with a rather nasty-looking serrated spur.

Whoa.

After picking up the menacing looking device, I immediately recalled some childhood memory of my Great Aunt (my grandmother's sister) using this contraption in the kitchen.

What exactly is this thing, you ask?

It's a Kabayo, AKA a Coconut Horse, AKA a Filipino Coconut Grater.

Still in the dark? I thought you might be. So I made a video of me riding the Coconut Horse (out of context, that sounds awesome terrible!).

Thin-Skinned

I received another windfall of kalamansi limes from my mother recently, whose tree was bursting with bright orange orbs of the Filipino citrus. The longer a kalamansi sits on the tree, or the older it gets, it will change colors from green to orange. I'm guessing that because kalamansi are grown so abundantly and used so frequently in the Philippines, you will rarely find an older, orange-hued one there. Such is not the case for my mother, who is lucky enough to have a tree that produces more fruit than she can use. Hmph.

The bag of fruit that my mom unloaded on me contained about a jillion orange kalamansi, and only a few green ones. So I decided to conduct a very unscientific and inconclusive experiment in which I compared the traits of green and orange kalamansi limes. Prepare to be awed.

Kalamansi are smaller than lemons. Mind blowing.

Firstly, I noticed that both the green and orange kalamansi were smaller than a lemon! Mother-effing crazy, right? Wait, hold your applause, there's more!

After cutting open the green ones and a couple of orange kalamansi, I found that both are thin-skinned and orange-fleshed. The juice yielded from both was also orange. I then squeezed some of the juice into separate teaspoons and gave the samples a taste. The juice from both samples tasted sour with a hint of orange fruit--I couldn't find any discernible differences between the green and orange kalamansi. All of this info is earth-shattering, I know. I'm already crafting my speech for the Nobel Prize in Awesome.

So, in conclusion, the skin color of kalamansi doesn't matter. Green or orange, it's still Filipino on the inside (and that, boys and girls, concludes today's After School Special).

Although I was riding a natural high from my ground-breaking findings, I still had a bagful of kalamansi with which I had no idea what to do. Since they were already so "ripe", on the verge of decomposing, I figured I'd at least squeeze 'em and freeze the juice for a later use.

Quiche Me, I'm Filipino

Speaking of magazines, I also wanted to mention that the December issue of Yummy Magazine in the Philippines features a new recipe by yours truly (and for great comedic effect, there's an accompanying picture of me as well--so I'm told).

The recipe I contributed to Yummy is a Bitter Melon and Bacon Quiche, which is pretty much my take on the classic Pinoy dish of Eggs and Ampalaya, combined with the more western Quiche Lorraine (ooh lar lar).

Mmmm. Bitter melon and bacon, together at last.

This all came to be when, a couple months back, one of the kind folks at Yummy emailed and asked me if I had any ideas for a holiday side dish. So I sent them back a long, drawn-out recipe that is now (understandably, and thankfully) a whittled down and more streamlined version of what I sent them. I gather that the editors at Yummy must frown upon unnecessary parenthetical statements and vague references to cartoons and little-known rap lyrics (I kid, I submitted only a very straight-forward recipe).

Autumn Mix

Persimmons and pomegranates are rather persnickety specimens of fall fruit--the former needing nothing but time and patience for its flesh to go from hard and astringent to meltingly sweet and smooth, and the latter requiring a bit of excavation to find the juicy seeds inside.

There are a few different varieties of persimmon available. Some varieties, like the fuyu, are somewhat firm-fleshed and can be eaten like an apple. Other varieties, like the hachiya (gesundheit!), must be completely ripe and very soft before eating. I'd say the hachiya is my favorite type of persimmon.

If you happen to buy a hard unripe hachiya, just shove it in a brown paper bag with a banana, or a tomato, or both, and the persimmon should soften up in a few days. Once it's ripe and very mushy, you can cut a hachiya in half and then eat it out of the skin with a spoon. The flesh of a ripened hachiya is earthy-sweet, and almost jelly-like.

Gloopy, but tasty.

Pomegranates, on the other hand, require a little bit more work. You have to first lop off its crown, score its leathery skin with a sharp knife, and then pull it apart to find its sweet-tart ruby-red seeds.

 

Eureka!

Once the innards of the pomegranate are exposed, I usually place everything in a giant bowl o' water and gently pull the seeds away from the white pith. The seeds sink to the bottom and the pith and skin float to the top.

Clear water.

All of the juice is in the red seeds, so if you're gentle with the seeds, you won't waste any juice. But if you're a wee rough, then the water in your bowl will be bloodied with pomegranate plasma, you scoundrel! After gently separating seeds from pith, you can just skim the skin and pith away, then drain the seeds.

There are a number of things you can do with pomegranate seeds. You can sprinkle 'em on salads, on ice cream, or on your morning bowl o' Wheaties.

Or, together with the flesh of a hachiya persimmon and a few other goodies, you can use the pomegranate seeds in an autumn version of halo-halo.

Why, hello hello!

Halo-Halo is very much a summertime Filipino treat with layers of shaved ice, sweet beans, macapuno strings, ube, jack fruit, and any other number of sweet bits. And although pomegranates and persimmons are largely autumnal fruits, that doesn't mean they can't be used in halo-halo for a tasty dessert.

In a normal Halo-Halo, after the sweets are layered with shaved ice in a tall glass, some evaporated milk is poured in and allowed to seap into the ice. Then the whole shebang is topped with ice cream.

For my fall weather halo-halo, I used some of the Ube jam (it's still good!) that was given to me by Mila, some macapuno (coconut) strings, and some pomegranate and persimmon. Since I didn't have any canned evaporated milk, I just poured in some milk I had in my refrigerator. Lastly, I topped off my halo-halo with some ice cream--homemade Macapuno Ice Cream would be nice, but I opted for homemade Ube Ice Cream.

I do want to stress the importance of shaved ice in a halo-halo. I don't have an ice shaver, so I crushed some ice in my blender--this was not a suitable substitute! I had to crunch through larger pieces of ice as I ate my halo-halo, and crunching ice/breaking teeth is no fun. So if you do make some halo-halo, make sure you have a very powerful blender, or invest in some sort of ice shaving contraption--for the life of me I couldn't find the manual hand-cranked ice shavers I remember my mother using when I was a kid.

Also, I don't think a recipe is necessary here. Just layer sweet things with shaved ice in a tall glass, pour in some milk, then top with your favorite ice cream. For a more traditional halo-halo, Asian markets carry jars of sweet preserved beans, ube jam, macapuno, jack fruit, gelatin, etc. There are also jars labeled as "halo-halo mix" that have a combination of these items all in one jar.

And lastly, halo-halo is literally translated to mix-mix (so I'm told). So after I eat the ice cream, I mix-mix the rest of the contents with a spoon and make haste with the goodness!

The goodness!

I must say that the pomegranate seeds and the persimmon lend a very different twist, but also very welcome fall flavors, to an otherwise sweet and summery treat.

Fruitcake Fiend

I'm not exactly sure how popular Fruitcake is in the Philippines for Noche Buena (Christmas Eve Feast), or at any other time for that matter. But considering that fruitcake is mostly seen as a joke here in the states, I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume that this wintertime loaf rarely appears on any Filipino tables as well.

For the most part, I can understand Fruitcake's bottom position on the culinary totem pole. At its worst, fruitcake can be nothing more than a heavy brick studded with overly sweet, radioactive day-glo candied fruits. But at its best, fruitcake is wonderfully sweet and aromatically spicy--filled with dried fruits and toasted nuts and preserved with a hefty dose of good liquor.

So with the best fruitcake intentions in mind, I bake a couple of loaves at the end of every October every year--aging each cake for a few weeks and enjoying the first at Thanksgiving, and enjoying the second on Christmas Eve. Sure, fruitcake can be eaten straightaway right after baking, but the cakes are exponentially better after being spritzed with brandy every now and again.

My go-to fruitcake recipe is from Alton Brown's "I'm Just Here For More Food". The original recipe calls for golden raisins, dried cranberries, dried blueberries, dried cherries, and dried apricots, but I tend to use different fruits every year depending on what I can find. For this go around, I stuck with the dried blueberries and cranberries, but I also included some tropical fruits like dried mango, dried rambutan, and dried mangosteen that I found at Trader Joe's. Dried fruits are best for fruitcake because they won't spoil, and they're better for you than candied fruits.

This was the first time that I've ever seen dried rambutan and mangosteen before, so I was excited to open up the packs and give them a try.

At first glance, the dried mangosteen and dried rambutan look a lot like styrofoam, and sadly, they tasted a lot like styrofoam too. Luckily though, they were brought back to life after an overnight soak in rum with the rest of the dried fruits and some fresh orange and lemon zest:

Boozy Fruit

After a dip in rum, the fruit is then simmered with some hard apple cider, sugar, and butter, then folded into some flour and eggs to form a batter. After baking, I spray the fruitcake with apple brandy (100 proof!) that I've poured into a spray bottle. The original recipe calls for normal brandy, but I like the aroma of apple brandy too. Really, any brandy will do. Moesha!

Snazzy spritzer, eh?

At this point, you will be very tempted to cut a slice off of your fruitcake loaf because it smells amazing out of the oven! But I do encourage you to resist this temptation and wait. After the fruitcake cools and has been spritzed on all sides with brandy, I wrap it in plastic wrap, and then in foil, and then I even stick them in a giant zip-top bag on which I write the date.

2 kilos of, uh... 2 bricks of fruitcake, that is.

Every two days for the first two weeks I carefully unwrap the fruitcake and spritz every side with more brandy. After the first two weeks, I then spritz the fruitcake only once a week until I decide to eat it. Don't overdo it with the spritzing, you don't want to soak the cake every time. A light spritzing to wet the surface of the cake will do--it's a sipper, not a chugger.

As long as you keep the fruitcake well-wrapped and give it an occasional brandy spritz, don't worry about it going bad or growing mold. And remember, the dried fruits were preserved in rum to boot, so aging a fruitcake for a month or two is no big deal.

Waiting...

Like I said earlier, I'll cut into my first loaf for Thanksgiving after one month of aging, and I'll cut into my second loaf on Christmas Eve after two months of aging. But because I make this fruitcake every year, I can assure you it's worth the wait.

Fruitcake

Adapted from "I'm Just Here for More Food", by Alton Brown.

Note: Alton Brown's original recipe says it makes one 9-inch loaf, but I always seem to get two loaves out of the same recipe. Perhaps my loaf pans aren't as deep as the recipe needs, so do be wary of this if you try this recipe out. If it seems to yield more batter that will fit in your loaf pan, have a second loaf pan ready.

Any combination of dried fruits works well in this recipe. And don't be discouraged by the long list of ingredients--it's still a simple and worthwhile recipe.

3/4 cup dried rambutan
3/4 cup dried mangosteen
3/4 cup dried blueberries
3/4 cup dried cranberries
3/4 cup dried mangoes, chopped
1/4 cup candied ginger, chopped
zest from 1 lemon
zest from 1 orange
5 whole cloves, freshly ground
3 whole allspice berries, freshly ground
1 cup dark rum
3/4 cup apple juice
1/2 cup hard apple cider
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole-wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1 cup toasted pecans, chopped
Brandy for spritzing

In a large bowl, combine the dried fruits, ginger, lemon and orange zests, ground cloves, ground allspice, and rum. Cover and soak overnight.

The next day, pour all of the fruit, zests, spices, and rum into a large saucepan. Add the apple juice, hard cider, butter, and sugar. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring every couple of minutes. Remove from heat and allow mixture to cool to room temperature. Stir in the eggs.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Spray loaf pans with nonstick spray, then line with parchment paper "sling" so that fruitcake can be easily lifted out of pans after baking.

In a large bowl, combine the all-purpose flour, whole-wheat flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and pecans. Add the wet mixture to the flour mixture and stir just until combined. Pour batter into loaf pan and bake for one hour. Check for doneness with a skewer or toothpick poked into the middle of the cake--if it comes out clean its done.

Set pans on cooling rack and spray the top with brandy. Cool completely before removing cakes from pan.

Remove cooled cakes from pans, then spritz top and sides with brandy. Remove parchment paper, then wrap cakes tightly in plastic wrap, and then in foil.

Unwrap cakes and spritz with brandy every other day for two weeks, then once a week for the next two weeks.

I like to serve the fruitcake by toasting slices under the broiler for juuuust a minute, then topping with a dollop of mascarpone cheese. Tasty!