I dunno what possessed me to want to make a ginataang dish from scratch. It's easy enough to buy a can of coconut milk or even already grated and pressed coconut milk from the wet market in small plastic bags, but nooooo, I wanted to do this myself.

Frankly, credit it to Balibago's excellent wet market. It's not dirty or filthy, it's big, organized, and it makes you wanna buy things and be experimental. To wit:

I poured in the requisite 1 glass per coconut and start to squeeze.

Fortunately I've a large enough strainer.

Here's the fresh fish killed, deboweled and scraped right before my eyes an hour ago.

Off it goes into a deep dish with the precious milk.

After which I pour on varied and sundry greenery, including 2 pieces labuyo. There's longer green pepper, chives and other greens, and later on I add carrots and onions in there.

Add more milk (I had far too many, but thats ok, it's delicious).

Then boil very slowly.

Oh my God it's delicious.

You gotta wonder how a country so rich with coconuts that you can't turn your head without seeing one would have hungry people. It makes you wonder how idiotic we are to be wasting / neglecting the bounty we so graciously have in abundance.

Anyway, here's a pic of my coffee cup earlier this morning against a backdrop of the view we enjoy from the balcony.

I was trying to go for a smoldering effect but one can only ask so much from Laszlo my overworked (but trusty) cam.

And here's a pic of what Jill and I had for breakfast the other day.

Every weekend we go back to Jill's house in BF to raid and pillage borrow whatever food is available from the pantry. This week it's cans of tuna.

Try not to notice the filthy stove top. Trust me it's clean now.

Anyway, the problem persisted. I ate mostly pork, chicken and fish, I definitely needed to put some greenery in my diet. So I think I found it.

Basically you make a bed of 'hard' veggies, (in this case carrots but sometimes I use potatoes or both):

then you put in your meat or fish, in this case bangus belly, which are surprisingly cheap. One Century Tuna pack costs P99.00 and contains 2 fish which I slice into 8 pieces. I usually eat 1 piece per meal but for above pic I used 2.

Then we put some chopped pechay on top:

and sprinkle juuust a little Olive Oil to keep the leaves from getting burnt.

Then it's off to the oven for 20 mins. Good Lord the smell is so wonderful it'll drive you crazy. I know the wait sounds long but there's always something to do like take a shower or refill water bottles, etc.

Works on chicken too, which I fry on the pan for a little while until golden brown.

The carrots keep the meat from sticking on the sides of the ceramic dish.

Note how well cooked the insides are if you bake it (notice too, the professional method I use to slice it to give you a view of its insides. Expert at work.). Anyway, it's silly how a lot of people settle for eating chicken still with traces of blood in the insides. That's not only gross but surely unhealthy, with possible bacteria inside. Baking thoroughly cooks it without burning it as well as making it oh so buttery soft and just bursting with flavor.

The remaining juices along with the veggies are sublime, and will make you forget your name a few seconds.

And again the nice thing is, you're not all that filled up because most of that is veggies. I kinda learned that the hard way the first weeks I was here and cooked too much, resulting in my gaining weight since I'd eat everything cause I felt guilty throwing it away. But I've learned now and I actually feel great after a meal, I don't feel sleepy or drowsy and after a little rest I'm back to work.

I'm getting to enjoy these meals. Just before I sleep I get all excited about what I'd cook the next day. Yes it's sad.

Current diet however, suggests I need to eat more veggies. And I really really want some. So..

Here's how it went. Ingredients are Eggplant, Squash, Tomatoes, Garlic and Onion, Ampalaya Tops, leftover Adobo and Tinapang Galunggong, which I use to substitute for Bagoong. The Ampalaya leaves were because a single piece of ampalaya is way too many for this one dish.

Re the Binagoong 'substitute' Tinapang Galunggong, let's be honest here. It's probably not so different toxic - wise, from Bagoong. I am sure however, that Bagoong per se would increase purines in my blood resulting in gout within the day for me, so I'm taking my chance with the Tinapa instead. Besides, a single purchase of Bagoong, like the Ampalaya, is too much for just this one dish. At the grocery it comes in bottles, and in the market in a small plastic bag, both still too much for my needs. Galunggong however, I can have for breakfast occasionally.

The iPod is so I can check the instructions from time to time, found here.

So I chopped the squash into even pieces, including the skin. I read somewhere the nutrients are with the skin.

Same with the eggplant.

And put it in some water for ten minutes. This is to remove whatever impurities it still had from whichever farm it came from. Or so I'm led to believe. Better safe than sorry.

If you'll notice I made a mistake here, and put in some tomatoes as well. No biggie, I dealt with that later on. I only had 3 tomatoes for this dish btw, leftovers from some other dish I made a week or so ago.

Above are the ingredients with 1 garlic head minced and 2 large to medium onions minced. On the left is some leftover adobo.

After all that chopping we start a-cookin'. I stir fry the garlic, onions and tomatoes in some of the delicious 'juice' from the adobo for a few minutes.

Meanwhile we start the Bagoong substitute. I take out the bones from the Tinapang Galunggong.

And mince them.

Yum. Imagine that in the morning with some fried rice.

Anyway, I boil a pot of approximately 2 to 3 glasses of water, and pour the Galunggong in it.

I chop the leftover adobo as well.

Then pour it all in the boiling water along with the simmering onions and garlic too.

Recipe called for ten minutes boiling, then add the rest (eggplant and squash). At this point the whole house smells wonderful, and your neighbors' stomachs, if they can smell this, will be churning.

The squash starts out tough and hard almost like potatoes. So how long we'll boil this depends on how long the squash turns into a mushy consistency.

Ten minutes later, mushy consistency accomplished.

I then added the Ampalaya Tops, and boil it a little longer.

Result? Yum!

I'm gonna try to add ginger next time, although I'm not sure how that'd change things. As it is I'm pretty happy getting some veggies in me, as all I had been eating was pork and chicken.

You then put it into one of those oven ready deep dishes with some, uhmm, butter 'healthy yellow love grease' ..

Then bake it.

For approximately 20 minutes. I like the wait, there's always something to do anyway like take a shower or wash the dishes or prepare rice and stuff.

I gotta tell you, it's a real winner. No more of that ridiculous stringy over - seasoned, occasionally burnt, still blood in the insides crap we used to be force fed. Nothing but meat falling - off - the - bones, juicy, tasty, wonderful smelling covered with butter 'healthy yellow love grease' you can pour onto your rice and uhmmm uhhmmm YUUUmmm.

After which I end this post with an unrelated pic of one of the street sweepers around here, which I tip every week approximately P30 to sweep all the leaves and occasional trash that finds its way around the house somehow. Ever since I started tipping them (he's just one of them) I started to notice they hang more around here, sweeping in the mornings.

I gotta think of another name for this other than 'Fried / Baked Chicken'. Oh, I know..

Ingredients are the expected: Lots of onions, tomato sauce, ground beef and as they say, "you can never have enough garlic".

Mix together, form balls, heat the tomato sauce with some water and mix..

..mix..

..heat and mix.

Meatball should be nice and firm, not falling apart. If you pack them tight when rolling them up you gotta cook em maybe up to 20 mins to make sure the insides are cooked nice. When you break one apart like below, the insides don't have tomato in them, which makes covering it with tomato sauce yummy.

Cook some rice.

Ok I know above is fried rice, so I cheated a little making this post. This is the same rice I cooked after sitting overnight, fried with egg, soy sauce and salt.

Wish I could post hi res pics because it really looks delish.

Above is le combination fried rice and re - heated Tomato Balls.

You can also do this for merienda. There's a lot of tomato sauce so I heated some up with a few balls.

Then along with some baguette toasted with butter..

Voila! Like I said in my previous post, I make a lot, stuff it in the ref and reheat portions throughout the week. Something like this can last approximately 3 to 4 days, with other types of food in between + eating out of course. Saves me money and most especially saves me time from going to the grocery often which is a real time - sucker.

I'm hungry now.

I finally got to watch My Sassy Girl and it was terrific, or at least the ending was. Quite likely some of the scenes gist' were lost in translation so they came out long and pointless, but it came all together in the end. The Wikipedia page says 'it became a mega blockbluster hit in the entire region from Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, as well as South East Asia, to the point where it was drawing comparisons to Titanic'. That's very impressive and I finally got to see why. It might not necessarily have the best of any given particular detail, but at the end it leaves you happy and that's more than enough for me.

I cooked a fave of mine, meatballs in tomato sauce, which we had for dinner the other day and lunch today. Jill calls it Tomato Balls. What I like about it is that being tomato based, it lasts for a long time, and you can have it with toasted baguette with butter as well as rice. Living alone really makes me learn to stretch meals as long as I can, and these type of meals, along with Adobo and Menudo, are the answer.

Besides I dislike having to break off work in order to have to cook, so I like cooking things in advance and keeping them in the fridge ready for reheating via my little electric oven.

I need to update BallEx. In fact, by tomorrow the 2nd, I need to really start cracking on the stuff that I've always planned to do with the blogs. So I'll sleep now, it's 11. Goodnight y'all and Happy New Year.

Unlike the other Pauso concoctions, this time it took a real lucky turn. I saw 'mechado cut' beef cubes in the ref and proceeded to defrost them this morning as I went to Tropical Hut along Ortigas Ave. to buy necessities and get some breakfast in me (there isn't much to eat in the house today).

I started to cook it fully intending to make it a tomato - based Pauso invention, but in the middle of d stewing it along with onions and lots of garlic, it 'sweated' out - a fancy term I picked up from the Lifestyle Channel, and produced a sweet smelling beef stewy 'juice'. It smelled and tasted terrific, so I scratched the tomato paste and opted for water + corn starch (a thickening agent) instead.

Above shows it already stewed out, and I know I should be using an oven plus some ceramic or deep type of casserole container dish to cook this, but I have to make do with a kaldero as it's the only thing we have around here (literally). I just cook it at the lowest heat setting possible on our LPG range, which is why it took (brace yourselves) a whole 1.5 hours to fully cook, simmering all the way.

I added up to two cups water and 3 - 4 tablespoons of corn starch, and I'd have added a beef cube to boot if we had one (but we don't). I know its all starchy now, but I really wanted to go for a nice thick soupy liquid. Spices are purely salt and pepper, and that worked out fine. The other people who try to cook in the house try to drown food with too many spices, I think (again, another result of the Lifestyle Channel, particularly the Food Network), but I like to keep things simple, and really, it's hard to beat just the right amount of salt and pepper with good beef.

We have waaay too many spices than we should have. No thanks to Food Network.

Pauso Menudo

Recipe:

• P100.00 worth of Pork Liempo (which translates to approx. 3/4 kilo), sliced into bite size pieces.
• 2 or 3 medium potatoes, diced to thumb sized bits.
• 3 to 4 mid to large onions, sliced.
• 1 clove garlic, chopped.
• 3 to 4 pieces green pepper not as big as BIG PEPPER but not as tiny as siling labuyo, sliced into two pieces each.
• 1 to 2 pieces siling labuyo, chopped into little slivers.
• Tomato Sauce
• 1/10th of a cup soy sauce.
• 3 teaspoons sugar.

1. Heat a pan at low heat, oil it and when hot (but not steaming hot), place in sliced onions and garlic.
2. Once Onions lose their color, put in Potatoes. Stir for approx. ten minutes until potatoes half cooked.
3. Add pork and stir for ten minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste.
4. Mix Tomato Sauce, sugar and soy sauce until smooth (you shouldn't be able to see the sugar or feel it with your spoon anymore). Dump with the pork.
5. Here's where I wish we had an oven. Since we don't, mix it well and cook on low to medium - low heat for another 30 minutes, occasionally giving it a taste and testing the pork if cooked.

Sizzling Onions and Garlic

You'll notice I cooked it for a long time (approx. 1.5 hours). This is because I wanted to heat it enough for a meat - falling - off - the - bone consistency with the pork, but without too much heat to sear / burn it. You can't do that using a pan - fry method. Rather, you'll need either a deep pot or better yet, in a deep pot and into an oven, neither of which we have. We don't even have a cover big enough for the whole pan, which would've kept the juices from evaporating. So I made up for it by cooking at low heat for a long time.

Tasted great though. The big issue is making sure its cooked well and you're set.

* The Pauso Chicken is more or less the same recipe.

Then, Patience

and finally, Revelation

A closer look

Ah, love.