Weekend's Leche Flan

I’ve been craving for leche flan for literally years.

I’ve been mentioning making it for the last three Christmases, for my birthday and for someone else’s birthday. I think my trepidation was my belief that it was challenging to make.

In my mind having grown up with memories of getting other people to make it for any special occasion you can think of, preparing it had taken mythical proportions.

But at the end of the day, it’s basically eggs and milk baked in a bain marie. I separated a dozen yolks, dumped in a can of condensed milk and a cup of normal milk, a tablespoon of vanilla and used a whisk. To make the caramel, simply adjust the temperature of your pan as the sugar melts and its colour changes. Keeping the temperature high all through out will burn it. Keep stirring until there are no visible granules left and you have a silky, golden brown syrup.

I didn't even use those familiar small oval pans because I think they’re not commercially available.

I followed some random recipe online which got one detail wrong- it doesn’t cook in 30 minutes. It takes a little bit over an hour. Other than that, it was one of the easiest sweets I’ve ever made.

And it’s delicious as I’ve always remembered it..

Eating alone is a journey

Sam and Mary have started on the no-eating-anything-except-vegetables-or-air diet so I’ve been on my own as far as meals are concerned.

It was difficult doing my own thing at first which is funny because the whole process of preparing our meals was actually hard work:
1. you had to work with a fortnightly food budget of only $300
2. you need to make sure fresh ingredients are used before they go off
3. you need to use leftovers (which I loathe)
4. you need variety (important to me!)
5. you needed a healthy balance (even if given a choice, I’d have pork 6x a week)

It was easier during lockdown because I worked from home and I could start cooking at 4pm, but if I did go to the office on some days, I had about an hour to cook when I got home at 4:30, not that it mattered really if we ate late. But I wanted to get it done so I could exercise, or read or watch something.

But getting rid of the whole thing altogether (for now at least), was strangely freeing and unfamiliar. It makes you realize how much of meal preparation and meal-times are such rigid set-routines.

It goes all the way back to your childhood when you were called upon to eat and there were no buts around that. And that you couldn’t eat in bed (which I now do), or that if you were eating something expensive such as prawns or lobster, it had to be portioned. Or that you need to eat on time, or have three meals a day.

But ‘eating alone’ has thrown all the rules out the window, and now you can do anything:

1. …but not eat anything you want, like pork belly Tuesdays, fried chicken Wednesdays and Thursday night ribs. You just can’t. And I’m fine with that now.

2. I had pork ribs the other week though (St. Louis brand imported from the US) and the whole rack (about 1.5kgs) lasted me through two meals.

3. There’s such a thing as too many shrimps- especially when they’re frozen. Not as good as fresh.

4. I can’t have just toast for dinner. I tried and it’s stupid because I just get hungry after an hour. I’m working out constantly now that I can feel my energy ebbing when I don’t eat anything substantial.

5. There is something spare but beautiful in a plate of grilled salmon over ramen noodles.

6. Suddenly you have heaps of time to do stuff.

7. You save money

Tuesday's Chicken Pot Pie

Pies are ridiculously easy to make, I mean if you have store-bought pastry you can literally turn anything into a pie. A pie is essentially just two things- the pastry case and the filling.

Don’t bother making your own though the only argument for that is if you’re doing large rounds and the square-shaped sheets just don’t cut it (you can roll them out again though).

And you can have literally any filling though make sure you have a binding sauce like cheese or maybe even a roux. I got one of the last two packets of chicken breast and minced them with onions, seasoning and oregano. Cooked it with a can of Campbell’s mushroom soup and two fistfuls of frozen spinach.

Put in the oven at 180 for about 40 minutes.

24 Wednesday: hungry

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I’m always hungry- craving for flavour.

Restaurants are opening soon and I’m thinking, Filipino- pork sisig, crispy pata and pork barbecue. This photo was taken exactly a year ago when we had dinner at a Filipino restaurant called Kalye Manila.

I’m also craving for something sweet like cheesecake; peanut butter cheesecake.

KFC Saturday & Aneesha finds a weapon that could kill the aliens

We finally gave in.

Too blah to cook. I had to wake up early to recreate the goddamned corrupted 3D file which was easier the 2nd time around because now I knew where all the elements went in. And I used objects in actual scale which didn’t make any difference as I belived it would, but shaved off heaps of time in scaling them down to size.

But the program did become noticeably slower as I added more and more objects into the 3D space and I was thinking, if I only had the new MacBook Pro with the M1 Max chip, mmmmm ($6,054!).

So it’s episode 6 already in Apple TV + Invasion and the slowness - while it’s done really well mostly- is making me ask a lot of questions with no answers in sight. Like what happened to Sam Neil’s retired sheriff character way back in episode one?? Is he dead or not? If you remember, he was digging around the strange crop circle in a farmer’s field when the aliens somehow ‘stabbed’ him with something. The last shot is of him somewhat looking either stunned or dramatically dead with his eyes open. But judging by how a slew of soldier’s bodies were shown mangled and mutilated in episode 6, there’s still hope that Sam was merely temporarily incapacitated. But it’s strange that it’s this far into the series and that story arc has been totally abandoned.

Going back to Aneesha, she manages to go back to the house and arrives to find it barricaded against something. Her family and the couple who took their family in Patrick and Kelly, are hiding in the attic and this is expectedly where the friendly, sympathetic atmosphere evaporates as everyone panics.

Aneesha declares that they were leaving, and this is where everything goes south; the daughter falls through the attic floor and Aneesha follows to rescue her. The noise alerts the alien, and we see for the 1st time what it looks like- a sort of octopus with tentacles and bristling, camouflage-like skin. Kelly falls through the same underlay flooring, but manages to hold on- but the alien gets her as Patrick desperately tries to hoist his wife up.

Aneesha and Ahmed make it downstairs but Ahmed is attacked while trying to move the furniture they used to barricade the door. Aneesha and the kids escape through a window in the basement and try to make a run for it using Patrick and Kelly’s car. But the alien rams itself through the windshield and takes its time to eat/kill/spit at Aneesha with its multi-layered mouth. Aneesha shoots it (no use), then rams a stick-thingy into its mouth (no use), then throws what looks like a phone-book at it (no use), before finding the weird, stone-age like spear flint that Luke had found and stabs the thing with it- success!

My theory is that while conventional weapons can’t kill it, material from their world can- like the way Kryptonite affects Superman. Because why would it be a special kind of weapon?? It doesn’t look like one and was most likely a shard of something that crashed/exploded when the Malik’s neighbourhood was attacked in episode 2.

The philandering Ahmed survives the attack after all and limps out of the house. Aneesha is relieved to see him, but had he not survived, she would have moved on, but I guess when everyone you know is dying around you, it’s probably comforting to have familiar people around. At this point, whatever they’ve done to you pales in comparison to the life and death struggle you all face.

It's not embutido or a meatloaf

You didn't use pork-mince. There’s no eggs, raisins, carrots, Vienna sausage or a boiled egg in it. So it’s not embutido, not really. And the classic meatloaf uses ground beef and bread crumbs.

But it’s using the same principles of some ground protein and seasonings and is either cooked in a bain-marie or baked in the oven. It’s wrapped like an embutido too, and like meatloaf, there’s going to be a gravy sauce for it, probably a butter-based mustard sauce.

Because what do you do with 20 packs of chicken breasts in the deep freeze? We bought them in bulk at Gilmours and much as I want to make Korean fried-chicken every other day, I can’t. On one hand, prepared chicken mince at the supermarket for 500 grams is like $8. The Gilmours bulk buy turned out to be something like 800-1kg per pack at $6. So all you need is a food processor really.

For this- okay let’s call it chicken roll- I used a bunch of frozen spinach, a whole red capsicum, a large white onion and heaps of cheese which I guess acts like a binder.

Pictures of it cooked and served tomorrow.

What's for dinner? Roast pork loin

I wish it was Doyet’s lechon pork belly but..

A roast is so Western and so ubiquitous that you can buy it like you would lechon manok at a roast shop with all the trimmings like roast potatoes the size of tennis balls and pork-crackling on the side, which is the only thing I buy from a roast-shop if I had the chance. A dollar for a long strip of crackling.

I find it dry most of the time which is why I rarely ever buy it or make it. But this was before I’ve overhauled my cooking habits so when I got a small (about 800grams) pork loin by mistake- the people at the supermarket substituted it for pork belly- I thought this was my chance to cook it correctly.

And I sure succeeded. Just two key things really- cooking time and resting time.

Is your tooth sweet?

In 2020 and putting aside the chaos and heartache of Covid aside, I watched with envy how Filipino foodies bloomed; a culinary feast amidst the blight of the pandemic, and all at a tap on your digital screens.

While in New Zealand, there was uhm KFC and your neighbourhood Indian takeaway (ground-breaking).

Not that I would end up binging and spending hundreds of dollars on non-essential, processed food- but it was sad that there wasn’t much choice in a country with so much abundance.

But now, good Lord- it must be the frustrations from last year, boredom, or simply inspiration, but we have a flood of sweet goodies- don’t have a sweet-tooth I must admit, but here’s a couple I’d shell out some good dollars for: