I've always wanted to go to the Philippines. Let me tell you where I didn't go in 2020 or in 2021... the Philippines! But I was able to taste some of their delicious foods. There's a Filipino restaurant close to my office that I visit for lunch. My office mates love me bringing back in all the aromas of shrimp paste and garlic rice (sarcasm). I shrug my shoulders. Finally I got up the courage to make a couple of dishes myself.
In this Corona Chronicle, I visited the Philippines. In Filipino cuisine, there's lots of pork, vinegar, and coconut. Most people are familiar with pancit, a traditional noodle dish, and adobo, a dish made with vinegar and soy sauce. I'm not the biggest fan of vinegar in large amounts so adobo wasn't on my menu.
For my Filipino menu I served:
Ginataan Na Hipon (Shrimp with Coconut Milk)
Garlic Fried Rice
Pancit
Tortang Talong (Eggplant Omelet)
Lumpia (Pinoy's version of the eggroll)
Ube Ice Cream (Purple yam ice cream)
The garlic fried rice was right up my alley. I love garlic. When I saw that the recipe said to use 20 gloves of garlic, I was very pleased. It turned out delicious too. If you don't double and triple the garlic amounts in recipes, you may think this amount of garlic is obsessive but trust me, it's not. And the best part is that it's only 4 ingredients. Knowing that this is so easy and simple, I know that I'll be making this again and again. I even had it for breakfast the next day with tocino (a Filipino sweet pork dish) and an over easy egg (See picture below). I sautéed some spinach to balance out breakfast.
What I enjoyed most about the dishes is that they were simple to make but packed in a lot of flavors. That's a win-win.
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