Burnt Lumpia: Filipino Food | Filipino Recipes | Culinary Hijinks

Quack Pot

Throughout the ages, many cultures have adapted and created their own forms of food preservation. For instance:

• Filipinos use vinegar and salt (or soy) to preserve various meats in an Adobo.
• The French use fat and salt to preserve various meats in a Confit.
• The Galactic Empire used Carbonite to freeze various smugglers in suspended animation.

Although Darth Vader did not use carbonite in a culinary fashion, per se, I can only imagine how long a side of beef would last if frozen a la Han Solo. And since freezing things in carbonite does quite a number on my energy bill, I decided that it would be a more worthwhile, and tasty, endeavor to research the wonders of confit in conjunction with what I already know about Adobo.

Ah yes, an adobo/confit experiment! A fusion of Filipino and French food to yield a quacktastic pot of Duck Adobo Confit.

Party Fowl

When invited over to someone else's home for a barbecue, proper party etiquette usually dictates that you not point and laugh at the main dish as it is brought to the dinner table. That would be rude.

However, grilling a whole chicken with a beer can stuck betwixt its drumsticks not only yields a moist and flavorful bird, but it also merits a few chuckles when presented to the table. So by all means, do point and laugh if you are ever presented with beer-can chicken. But you should also be ready for a tasty treat once the bird is on your plate. And there are quite a few foods that combine both hilarity and deliciousness like beer-can chicken can. Just look at that picture above. It appears to be a nicely roasted and juicy chicken on a grill (delicious!), but then there's a beer can stuck up its arse (hilarious!). Sorry, but I'm easily amused.

Although vertically roasting a chicken with a half-full (hooray for optimism!) beer-can stuck where the sun don't shine is a common practice in many parts, there may still be some of you out there unaccustomed to such culinary delights. Let me first explain that the beer-can is more than just a novelty--it actually does help prevent the chicken from drying out by steaming the bird from the inside out, all the while perfuming it with beery goodness.  Grilling in this manner is also not limited to just beer-cans. You could also use fruit punch, colas, energy drinks, whoop-ass, and whatever else comes in a can these days.

Now I make beer-can chicken a few times a year, and I normally take to dispensing a dry rub of herbs and spices to flavor my bird. But this being a Filipino food blog and all, I figured I'd do a Filipino-style barbecue. And if there's one culinary tradition that Filipinos and Americans have in common, it's good barbecue.

Of course, Pinoys can lay claim to piggy goodness in things like Lechon, but we can also grill up a mean and tasty bird in the form of Chicken Inasal--chicken marinated in a heady mixture of vinegar and lemongrass and then thrown on the grill while being basted with red achuete oil.

Mmmmm. Beer-Can Chicken Inasal. It's the best of both worlds.

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!

Arroz By Any Other Name

When spending Christmas at my parents' house, we adhere to quite a few traditions:

• My brothers and I challenge each other's manhood via video games.  This past year it was Guitar Hero.  I'll admit that my brothers are better than me at virtually rocking.  But I rock literally. So there.

• My dad challenges everyone's religioushood (I just made that word up) by not attending Midnight Mass. While my mother, my brothers, my wife and I attend church late Christmas Eve, my father stays home and practices his finger jabs and throat punches on a wooden dummy in the garage.  He then practices his striking with the business end of his belt, jangling the metal buckle like a jingle bell (he's festive like that).

• My mom challenges my wife's stomach-hood (again, another awesome made-up word) by telling her to eat more and more at the dinner table. Any Pinoy who has ever brought a non-Pinoy home knows what I mean:

Mom: "Why don't you eat?"
Wife: "I am eating."

5 minutes later...

Mom: "Are you OK? Why don't you eat some more?"
Wife with mouth full: "Um, yes. Ok, I'll have more pancit."

2 minutes, 39 seconds later...

Mom: "You're not eating! Have some more rice! Rice! Eat! Eat! Eaaaaaaat!"
Wife with gastrointestinal pain and no other choices: "Ummm. Uh. Yes. Please."

And so it goes at my parents' house on Christmas Eve.

As fun as all of that sounds, and it really is, there is one other tradition that I look the most forward to: Arroz Caldo.  And seeing as the theme for the latest Lasang Pinoy event is rice, I see no better entry than my mother's Arroz Caldo.

Chicken Adobo (Yes, Again)

As my thousands of two regular infrequent readers may recall, I have attempted to make Chicken Adobo before.  The results from that previous attempt?  Eh, I wasn't too pleased.  But I wasn't disheartened either.  In fact, after making that not too satisfying dish of Chicken Adobo, I vowed to keep trying different recipes until I found something I liked.

So while partaking in the Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge almost two weeks ago (yes, I'm behind on my blogging, I know) I purchased a couple of pounds of chicken thighs not really knowing what I was going to do with them.  As I was pushing my cart around Henry's that day, I walked past a display of local organic  cider vinegar which triggered a flickering light bulb above my head.  As this light bulb buzzed and pulsated above my noggin, I bit my lip, cocked an eyebrow, and slowly started remembering something about chicken and vinegar.

Duh! Chicken Adobo!

After I had finally flipped the A-HA! switch, I knew I had seen a chicken adobo recipe specifically for chicken thighs in one of the many foodie mags I had back home.  I just had to figure out which magazine it was in.

Lazy Chicken Sotanghon

I have quite a few hand-written recipes that were given to me by my grandmother. Of course, I've only attempted to make a few of them.  Why just a few?  Well, most of my grandmother's recipes are intended to feed a small army.  And my household consists of only me and my wife.  No matter how hungry she and I get, a small army we are not.

Recently though, I was feeling ambitious and rifled through my accordian folder full of recipes (Nerd!) to find the instructions for my Grandma's Chicken Sotanghon.  After going over my Grandma's list of ingredients for this noodle dish, I was ready to give up and file the recipe away like I had many times before.  The recipe called for boiling one whole chicken and then picking the cooked chicken meat from the bones.  That's a lot of work. And I'm lazy.

But I realized something as I was stuffing my Grandma's hand-written, college-lined notebook paper back into my nerd-folder of food: I can't go on living my life like this can I?  I can't deprive myself of good Filipino food just because I am lazy.  I had to do something.  So I created a couple of shortcuts and reduced my Grandma's ingredient list to produce just enough food for me and my wife.

Spatchcocked Poultry

As I mentioned in my last post, spatchcocking refers to the removing of the backbone from poultry (in this case, Cornish Game Hens) so that it can be split for roasting or grilling.

I've only spatchcocked a couple of times, and it is a bit intimidating at first.  But to help me relax, I like to imagine Nigella Lawson whispering in my ear with her sweet British accent: "Would you like to spatchcock some birds with me, Darling?"  Ahem. Uh, on to the spatchcocking demo:

A Man Crush(ing a Brick)

I’ve got a huge Man-Crush on Alton Brown.

There.  I said it.  And I’m not ashamed of it either.

There are some people out there that say Brown is a blow-hard, a know-it-all, a sell-out, and whatever hyphenated put-down you can think of.  And he probably is, to a certain extent, some of these things.  Yet in spite of this, I still get giddy whenever there is a new episode of Good Eats on the Food Network (and The Wife rolls her eyes accordingly).

Why my fascination with Brown?  He makes learning about food interesting; he looks into the “how” and “why” instead of just the “what” of food.  Well, and he also does some unusual (yet completely awesome and kick-ass) techniques to get some of his cookery done.

He’s smoked salmon in a cardboard box, he’s fermented yogurt with a heat pad, he’s dried beef jerky with a box fan, and he’s barbecued pork butt in a flower pot!  Come on now, those are some man-crush-inducing moves don’t you think?

Now while I’ve attempted many of his more tame recipes, I’ve never actually tried any of Brown’s MacGyver-esque techniques.  I guess I’ve always been too in awe of them.  That is, until recently when I saw an episode of Good Eats where Brown grilled some Cornish game hens with the help of a hot brick.

A hot brick?

Yes, an extraordinarily, obscenely, Scarlett Johanssonly-hot brick.

Not Your Mother's Chicken Adobo

I first heard of Romy Dorotan, a Filipino chef and restaurant owner in New York City, a couple of years ago when he appeared on the Martha Stewart show. This episode of Martha caused me to go through three stages of increasing shock:

Holy shit! There's a Filipino on TV!
Holy shit! There's a Filipino on TV, and he's on the Martha Stewart Show!
Holy shit! There's a Filipino on TV, and he's on the Martha Stewart Show, and he's cooking Chicken Adobo!

Strange, that.

After getting over my initial disbelief that Chicken Adobo was being prepared on national television by an actual Filipino, I remember thinking "I am definitely going to try and make that recipe." Hmmm, so much for watershed moments -- quite a bit of time passed before I was even reminded about that Chicken Adobo recipe.

In fact, it was this post by the Amateur Gourmet that did the reminding.  The AG gave a glowing review of Dorotan's restaurant, Cendrillon, and proclaimed the Chicken Adobo at Cendrillon his "#1 favorite chicken dish for 2005."  After reading that post, I remember thinking "I am definitely taking The Wife to Cendrillon on our upcoming trip to New York."  So much for to-do lists -- we did go to New York, and Cendrillon was on our itinerary, it just never got crossed off.

So when Dorotan, and his wife Amy Besa, released their first cookbook on Filipino cuisine entitled "Memories of Philippine Kitchens," I had to buy it. And buy it I did a couple of months ago.  But would I ever cook from it?