Burnt Lumpia: Filipino Food | Filipino Recipes | Culinary Hijinks

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!

Kangkong vs. Kale

As I've demonstrated a few times within this space, the Filipino cooking method of Adobo is quite versatile. So far I've made duck adobo, pork ribs adobo, squid adobo, and two kinds of chicken adobo. While all of these adobos have leaned towards the protein side of the meal, all manner of vegetable adobos can be prepared as well.

Yup, you can pretty much adobo-ize anything so long as you braise it in a mixture of vinegar, salt and/or soy, black peppercorns, and bay leaves.

One very common vegetable adobo is Adobong Kangkong. Kangkong, also known as rau muong in Vietnam or ong choy in China, is a leafy green vegetable eaten all over Asia. Kangkong have long hollow stems, and long, narrow, pointy leaves. Both the stems and leaves are edible.

Hill o' Beans

As was probably evident from my last post, I sometimes like to take shortcuts in the kitchen. But mandolines can only get you so far. There are certain culinary tasks that are unavoidably time-consuming and unabashedly boring. And unless you have a small army of prep cooks, monkeys, robots, or children at your disposal, there's no getting around such chores.

Take for instance, the labor-intensive act of shucking fava beans.



Ah, yes, fava beans--the beans so nice, you need to shell 'em twice. Their big green pods are picture-perfect underneath the shade of a farmer's market stall--an emerald harbinger welcoming the start of warm, sunny weather. But as soon as you bring home your pile of favas and dump the green pods out onto your kitchen counter, your once-cheery mood dips a bit when you realize you have to shell all those mother-effing beans.

Although they look like string beans on horse 'roids, there's more to shelling fava beans than just zipping open their giant pods and plucking out each bean. After liberating beans from pod, you then have to go back and rip off each bean's face and mohawk to finally expose the inner core of the legendary legume.

What?

Yeah, faces and mohawks. You didn't know fava beans had faces and mohawks? See for yourself...

Master of the Flying Mandoline

My skill with a kitchen knife is like that of a hobbled Bill Walton with a basketball...

Fundamentally sound, yet incredibly slow.

Yes, I can chop, dice, and slice with the best of them--I'm just chopping, dicing, and slicing at a much slower pace. I'd say it takes me the better part of an afternoon to julienne a couple of carrots.

And when it comes to dishes that require quite a bit of knifework, I'm often at a disadvantage because of the turtle-like pace of my knife-wielding hand and arm (depending on what is being wielded, my hand/arm speed varies. Kitchen knife=slow, typing unfunny jokes=fast).

So thanks to my dawdling and deliberate knife proficiency, I have more than enough reason to use a completely scary and potentially hazardous kitchen gadget: the Mandoline.

Pear-Shaped?

Appearances are often deceiving.

Take the Asian Pear for instance, which, at first glance, can easily be mistaken for an apple. Asian Pears are stout and round like apples, and lack the curvy bottoms of their sisters Bosc, Bartlett, or Anjou pears.

(It's kinda like how Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes are both ninjas. You can immediately tell that Storm Shadow is a ninja because he looks like a ninja. But when you first take a gander at Snake Eyes, he can easily be mistaken for a welder. Or an S&M enthusiast. Or both. But in fact, Snake Eyes is indeed a ninja. A mute ninja armed with hand grenades. And a dog. But a ninja nonetheless.)

And despite being shaped more like Ina Garten than Rachael Ray, Asian Pears are pears nonetheless. Aside from shape, Asian Pears are also different in that they are often more firm, crisp, and juicy than other pear varietals. As such, I thought that Asian Pears would be a great vehicle for poaching since their inherent firmness would make them less likely to disintegrate into a mushy peary pulp after a long simmer in pandan-perfumed liquid.

Yup. Pandan-Poached Asian Pears.

It has a nice ring to it doesn't it?

Filipino Pantry Chicken Caesar Salad

Imagine, if you will, a Chicken Caesar Salad.

Cool. Crisp. Creamy.

Chickeny.

A classic dish, some may say.

Behold!

A Chicken Caesar Salad!

It looks innocent enough doesn't it? But, that is no ordinary Chicken Caesar Salad.

Look closer.

Closer.

Closer still!!!

That is a salad that has traveled the space-time continuum. A salad, constructed from the unusual. A salad so familiar, yet... so... strange.

What's so strange about it you ask?

This salad was created from the following ingredients...

Behold!!!

Gasp!

Those things can't combine to create a classic chicken caesar salad can they?

Oh, yes they can. Yes they can!

Mwahahahahahaaaaa!

Ladies and Gentlemen. You've just crossed over into...

The Filipino Pantry Zone!

Mango and Pan de Sal Bread Pudding

I’ve wasted a lot of food in my lifetime.

As a kid, I would randomly open our refrigerator door, take out an egg, toss it at my little brother and yell, “Catch!!!”  He sucks at catching.  Good times.

There was that time in college where I was dared to drink a gallon of milk in less than an hour (yes, I was THAT guy).  I was able to drink the milk, but let’s just say it wasn’t in me for very long.

There were also a few half glasses of beer that I’ve had to leave behind at the bar. Mind you, I’ve never left a beer behind that I didn’t want to, or couldn’t, finish.  But there just always seems to be that one person in your group who just can’t let a man finish his beer at his own pace and has to leave the bar right that second.  I must befriend more patient designated drivers, or live within stumbling distance to a decent watering hole.

And from the time I was able to ingest solid foods until right this second, I’ve probably thrown away a metric ton of rice—much to my mother’s chagrin.  Even though my mom now lives a couple of hours away from me, I’m sure that whenever I scrape the uneaten rice off of my plate and into the trashcan she can feel it in her soul.  She then turns to my father and says, “I felt a great disturbance in the Force… as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.”  At least that’s how I picture it.

Anyways, all of this wastefulness was weighing on my mind when I was about to toss some stale Pan de Sal into the trash.  But then I didn’t want my mother to randomly keel over from another Force disturbance (or as she would say, Porce disstuurrrbance).  So I decided to hold onto the Pan de Sal and put it to further use in a bread pudding.  You read that right.  Bread pudding.

Purple Yam Gnocchi

Pablo Picasso had his Blue Period, and I guess for me, the last couple of weeks have been my Purple Period. Luckily however, my monochromatic muse was not inspired by someone's suicide or large quantities of absinthe.

Unlike Ol' Pablo, my inspiration came on much happier terms. Using the purple Ube yam of the Philippines, I have made Purple Ube Pancakes, Ube Ice Cream, and now, Purple Yam Gnocchi.

(On second thought, maybe absinthe did play a role in these seemingly odd creations of mine.)

Anyhoo, whether I was lucid or not is besides the point people! I have come to the conclusion that Ube is a very versatile ingredient--lending its mildly sweet flavors to desserts and savory dishes alike.  That’s right. Savory! (Egads man, he has lost his mind!)

For my latest (I’ve purposefully delayed posting this so as not to oversaturate your eyeballs with violet visions) and probably last (I'm all purpled out) Ube recipe, I used a couple of purple yams that I found at my Asian grocery store.

On Making Pinakbet and Finding My Soul

Pinakbet is my favorite dish. Period.

I'm not speaking in general terms, like it's my favorite Filipino dish, no.  I really mean that Pinakbet--the illest of Ilocano dishes--is my most favorite food in the whole entire world times infinity!  Even by Filipino standards, this is a curious choice (I think) on my part as I know of many Pinoys who can't stand this vegetable medley.  I'm sure it has to do with the ever-present ampalaya, but as you may remember (or not), I loves me some bitter melon.

Despite my fondness for Pinakbet I had never attempted to make it.  I was happy enough getting my once-in-a-while-fix whenever I would visit my grandparents or my parents.  My grandmother and mother can both whip up a batch with a purse of the lips (psssst, hoy!).  Soon enough though, I started hankering for the stuff on a more regular basis.  I started making up excuses to visit my parents just so I could relieve my jonesing for Pinakbet:

Mother: What are you doing home?

Me: Uh, I was in the neighborhood.

Mother: You live an hour and a half away.

Me: Uh, what's for dinner? Pinakbet?

Dad: Goddamn it! Can't you make your own!

My dad's a really good guy (he's just really mean [I'm kidding {not really}]).

Anyhoo, I finally realized that I needed to figure out how to make Pinakbet for myself (otherwise my dad would start charging me for groceries).