The weirdest thing you ever cooked

Lately, I’ve been on a food funk, craving this and craving that. And the craving is made all the more worse by the fact that the food item in question is hard to find or totally unavailable in New Zealand. Here is a short-list

Hard-to-find
1. caviar
2. fresh shrimp
3. seafood-boil
4. actual lechon
5. Ube ensaymada

Unavailable
1. fresh bangus
2. Lingayen tamales
3. Laduree macarons
4. camote leaves
5. fresh plantain (saba) bananas

On a whim, I went to the supermarket with no clear idea of what I wanted but was wanting something and I ended up buying a tomahawk steak and some watercress. The weather prediction was stormy and cold so I knew I wanted some comfort by way of broth and voila…tomahawk steak (seared first) cooked in a ‘pinapaitan’ broth with Chinese sausage, watercress and sweet corn. It’s a mash-up between a Filipino traditional bulalo and Maori boil-up.

tomahawk steak with broth, sweet corn and watercress on a white restaurant plate

Postcript to that dinner last Friday

We hosted this dinner last Friday for Mary’s friends - women of a certain age - and I started what was turning out to be a really long treatise on friendship when I realised that these women weren’t really my friends, even if we had been sharing what could be one of the better dinners/get-togethers I’ve had with anyone these last couple of years.

But the affection is there, the honesty and the candidness is there, the ease of self is there for which is only possible around people who know and accept you.

And this is the thing with friends, which I have been fortunate enough to have and have had, that the best ones have come into my life by accident; Leila, Chris, Eric..that’s it. And it has been enough, more than enough. God made me self-sufficient, but these people give me happiness and comfort. Remember that scene towards the end in the Netflic movie ‘Don’t Look Up’ when the world starts actually to fall apart?

That’s how I’d like to go if it ever came to that (which is becoming more likely by the day it seems if you read the news) - around a table full of great food with my family and my dearest friends..

Canned goodness

Growing up, the foods that comforted us the most came from a can- Spam, Ma Ling Pork luncheon meat, Philips Sausage and Ligo Sardines. When we had unexpected guests, fruit cocktail (from a can) served with cubed ice was a treat. I had always believed that canned peaches were the most glorious things in the world, and this was further reinforced when I had them, freshly plucked from a tree.

When we were older, there was more variety- Purefoods corned beef (which Matt adores), Turkey Spam, Low-Sodium Spam, canned sisig and my old college standby, Century Spicy Tuna.

When I find myself at an Asian store, I would treat myself to an occasional can; Philips sausage makes for a good omelette and canned sisig saves you the trouble of having to prepare a whole pigs head (or two) to make the real thing.

On New Zealand’s supermarket shelves, there are only a couple of canned meat products that we gravitate to and one specifically, Hellaby’s corned beef, is the best I think; meaty and densely packed, a can is enough to feed four (!!) for breakfast. But for the last couple of years, the price has continually gone up and lately, you almost always never find it at the supermarket.

And then I see this one on the shelves, Countdown’s own corned beef. But at $3.50, why the hell not?

The proof is in the eating, and yes, it’s good.

What did you eat on your birthday?

For me at least, I would have forgotten the heartaches, the regrets, the joy..but I would always remember what I had eaten…

Easter dinner

Ticked off six of my Holy Week tasks, and the Nespresso machine broke. It’s over 6 years old so I guess it’s time to get a new one (which excites me).

But cooked rack of lamb for the first time and I surprised even myself as to how nearly perfect it turned out to be. My only nitpick was that I could’ve pared away more of the fat, but I didn’t really know I had to until we were eating it.

But for supermarket meat (yeah, FUCK YOU FARRO FRESH FOR FUCKING UP MY ORDER), it was superb. You just need to season it aggressively (I used salt, Moroccan spice rub and za’tar) and of course, cooking and resting times are crucial. I had thrown away the packet which indicated how much it weighed, so I just made an educated guess by eyeing the meat. I was guided by the universal advice, that the rarer the lamb the better. And it’s true- the texture is vastly different from beef.

The method is straightforward: sear; put into oven for 10 minutes at 180; take out, ‘paint’ with mustard before covering the surface with the duke; put back into the oven for 20 minutes; take and rest for 5.

Wednesday's salmon head sinigang

Doesn’t look appetising does it?

But it’s getting colder, slowly but surely, and soupy/brothy things both comfort and make you full really quickly.

Got the salmon heads at the Asian store. I was supposed to only get the (salmon) collars, but someone ahead of me on the queue was ordering literally kilos of it and I thought they would run out. The heads bin was just beside me so I got two just in case the greedy motherfucker in front of the line bought everything out (he didn’t).

I just use sinigang mix (with miso) and throw in several strips of ginger. Seasoning is just salt and pepper. Realised that the spinach in the crisper was too far gone to use but I still had a head of broccoli and it actually works with sinigang.

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.