Let the challenge begin!
It was last weekend when we had the “light-bulb” moment! We like cooking why don’t we cook a typical food from a different country every week??
And so it began! With this new collection Eat the World! me and Valeria will write and discuss our adventure through the food and traditions of several countries on Earth!
This week protagonist: the Philippines!
And so it started, we took a random country generator and we got the Philippines. While searching what types of food and recipes we could cook for this country we found this article that conveniently summarized 17 amazing recipes from this beautiful country.
We should mention that, although we are not dogmatically strict, our diets tend to be mostly vegetarian and sustainable as much as we can for the dishes that we cook on a daily basis. As a consequence, it became natural to avoid meat-heavy dishes, even if they looked amazing, and honestly I’m sure they’d taste great. Amongst the Filipino recipes we found very popular the heavy use of pork, so we opted to go for white-meat-based dishes like the two you will below!
Philippine noodle stir-fry (Pancit Bihon)
The first Filipino recipe we tried was a noodle stir-fry dish, apparently easy and quick, but unfortunately not so much. I was inspired by this recipe for the general indications and ingredients, but unavoidably I had to adapt and change a couple of things. After seeing that the total time of this recipe was around 2 hours, I decided to speed things up by changing the cooking of the chicken. I decided to simply pan-sear it and cook it on medium fire with the closed lid.
The sauce that we made for “dressing” the noodles was incredibly tasty and tacky: mostly garlic, chili, ginger, soy sauce and a bit of sugar. I couldn’t find anywhere a mushroom powder (I still wonder what type of mushrooms is usually used for this) so I simply added some champignon and instead of the fish sauce I prepared a reduced fish broth. It came out rather salty overall, but by diluting it down it got absolutely great!
I have to say that the combination of all the vegetables suggested in this recipe went great together! I was pleasantly surprised by the combination of cabbage, snow peas and carrots go so well along with garlic and ginger, in the “meat” of the noodles. Incorporating pasta, sauce, with the stir-fried veggies and the chicken gives a great complete dish that is very filling and extremely satisfying!
I did not see much point in the addition of shrimps or prawns that lost a bit of importance in the mix of so many great flavors. It was also my first time cooking with rice noodles: it was very quick and easy once the water is boiling. A quick remark for myself of the future: make sure not to leave them clump together by mixing them with some oil and remember that they will be stickier than standard noodle pasta!
Chicken adobo with tailored rice and kale
While figuring out this recipe to replicate what a philipine chicken adobo would be, it was a bit of a challenge to complement it to make a full philipine-wise dish. This is how the full chicken Philippine experience turned out. Mabuting pagkain!
Adobo is a reduction of vinegar in oil. Adobo often refers to a vinegar, bayleaves and peppercorn-flavoured broth or stew as well. The original recipe suggested to flavor the oil with annatto seeds, but, if you are like us, and you have never heard about them, you cannot really find them anywhere easily. So we decided to change things up and go for a creative approach in which added goji berries at the end to add some extra flavor to the dish. Why? Just because they look similarly red! :)
The chicken thighs were slow cooked in wine vinegar, oil, bay leaves, salt and pepper for about 45 minutes. The original recipe suggested to use white vinegar but in the availability of wine vinegar we decided to go for it and no worries, no sorries, a good adobo came out, although the chicken was a bit too “vinegary”. The timing was definitely a crucial factor for this reduction, so we missed it just a couple of minutes and the reduction went too far, but still manageable, so the timing is quite crucial here, not to get a too liquid or a too burned reduction.
After the reduction, onion and lots of garlic were cooked in the sauce while placing the chicken aside a few minutes. Even if not for chicken, cooking onion in wine vinegar is such a winner, so we missed nothing here.
To complement this dish and taking available ingredients, we prepared an improvised Thai rice flavored with dill leaves and fennel seeds slow cooked with white onion, leek and garlic powder. The mix of dill and fennel seeds with the onion flavors was spot on! To keep the Philippines atmosphere, some kale leaves were baked with a bit of oil to make kale chips. Final results a good complete dish, rich in flavors and with a peculiar touch of acidity, a winner!
In no more words, we crave one day to try adobo in the Philippines!
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