Crispy Pork Belly Roll

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Pianono, Pionono, Pio Nono

Filipino Pionono filled with sweet Star margarine 

Spanish Pionono filled and topped with custard

The internet is a wonderful thing. I found out while searching for a Spanish dessert that the Filipino jelly roll called Pianono came from the Spanish Swiss roll cake Pionono. According to this website the Spanish Pionono was created in honor of Pope Pius IX; Pio Nono is Italian for Pope Pius IX. It's not hard to understand why the cake exists in the Philippines as many of our cakes, desserts, and candies came from the Spanish.

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Dog Biscuits

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Sweet Potato Sourdough Challah

I've had challah before, both store-bought and home baked. It's one of our favorite sweet breads and I always serve it on Christmas morning and Christmas lunch too. I didn't think it will taste any better using sourdough starter and then I saw the beautiful photos of sourdough challah, adapted the recipe adding a large steamed and mashed sweet potato. I love the slightly tangy flavor and the soft tight crumb that reminds me of sponge cake. 

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The Daring Bakers: Sans Rival and Bibingka

cashew sans rival

fluffy soft bibingka baked with slices of salted duck eggs 
and Filipino white cheese

Catherine of Munchie Musings was our November Daring Bakers's host and she challenged us to make traditional Filipino dessert - the delicious Sans Rival cake! And for those of us who wanted to try an additional Filipino dessert, Catherine also gave us a bonus recipe for Bibingka which comes from her friend Jun of Jun-blog.

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Kabocha Mascarpone Pie

For our Thanksgiving pie this year I used kabocha squash instead of pumpkin and mascarpone cheese instead of evaporated milk. The pie is delicious and creamy and I love its flavor specially with a tablespoon of creme fraiche and a sprinkling of superfine sugar. It's the perfect ending to a satisfying dinner of turducken roll, gravy, bread stuffing, candied sweet potatoes, roasted Brussels sprouts and orange cauliflower, baked green beans casserole, and mini brioche rolls.

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Arroz Caldo

arroz caldo topped with crispy flaked chicken, chicken chicharrones,
crispy fried scallions and shaved garlic

Arroz Caldo, a favorite comforting and restorative Filipino rice dish was chosen by our host, the indefatigable super Mom Joy for November 2011 Kulinarya Cooking Club. Arroz Caldo comes from the Spanish arroz for rice and caldo for broth. I have featured Arroz Caldo once before and am reprinting 2 paragraphs from that post.

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Root Beer Float Fudge

On September of this year, I received a cookbook gift from The Daring Bakers; thank you Lis, Lisa, and Mandy for choosing my Chocolate-coated Brown Sugar Meringue and Caramel Candy as one of the top three candies. The book is CHOCOLATES AND CONFECTIONS from the Culinary Institute of America by Peter P. Greweling. 

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Cooking with Tea

lapsang souchong tea-smoked duck ham 

Sarah from Simply Cooked was our November Daring Cooks’ hostess and she challenged us to create something truly unique in both taste and technique! We learned how to cook using tea with recipes from Tea Cookbook by Tonia George and The New Tea Book by Sara Perry.

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Thanksgiving Day-Style Turkey Sandwich

Thanksgiving Day-style turkey sandwich

with a layer of cranberry sauce, slices of roasted turkey breast, 

turkey gravy, crumbled corn bread croutons, 

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Pan de Cadiz

Early this year, while browsing La Tienda's catalogue, a small dessert loaf called Pan de Cadiz caught my eye. It's marzipan baked with a filling of candied sweet potato, normally sold and eaten during the Christmas season. Of course, I had to find a recipe for it, found one online written in Spanish, and this one in English.

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Iced Guinatan Halo Halo with Mochi Pearls

iced guinatan with mochi pearls

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Date Sesame Seed Bars

nice with a cup of hot jasmine tea

This is the easiest no bake dessert to make. They are good to snack on with a cup of hot tea or to eat as candy/dessert.

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Povitica

with walnut filling 

The Daring Bakers October 2011 challenge was Povitica hosted by Jenni of The Gingered Whisk. Povitica is a traditional Eastern European Dessert Bread that is lovely to look at as to eat!

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Toffee Apples and Pears

These crunchy Fall treats are a bit different from their American caramel apple cousins. The coating on these apples is hard caramel instead of the sticky chewy kind. I used mini apples that are a tad sour, they are really tiny at just a third the size of a medium apple...easier to sink my teeth into. I also coated with hard caramel and dipped the bottom in malted crisps one tiny pear called Fragrant Pear; it's almost like the Asian variety in texture and flavor. I love it more than the apples for the triple crunch and the pear is very sweet and juicy. ♥ ♥ ♥

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Dark Rye Bread and Corned Beef Tongue

delicious with slices of warm corned beef tongue topped

with barbecue sauce, Dijon mustard, and creamy horseradish

Rye bread is not one of my favorites specially the sour dense variety but I was willing to give it a chance to wow me. I baked a small batch and surprisingly this time, it did. I used a 3 to 1 ratio of rye/bread flour with a rye sponge in place of sourdough starter. The dense dark bread has no flavorings nor seeds like caraway that in my opinion mask the earthy somewhat smokey flavor of rye flour. I love that it has a bit of chew and is sweetish too. I prefer the bread untoasted with just a little butter or duck liver paté and with corn chowder, but I love it even more with thick slices of corned beef tongue.

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The Daring Cooks: Moo Shu

The October Daring Cooks' Challenge was hosted by Shelley of C Mom Cook and her sister Ruth of  The Crafts of Mommyhood. They challenged us to bring a taste of the East into our home kitchens by making our own Moo Shu, including thin pancakes, stir fry, and sauce.

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Chicken Pork Adobo Quiche

A few weeks ago I read about adobo quiche as one of the dishes in a food taste marketing in Manila. I couldn't recall the website and therefore wasn't able to link it to this post. I love adobo and couldn't wait to try it. I made a crustless quiche with Swiss cheese and leftover chicken pork adobo. It was a huge disappointment. I didn't like it at all. I can't explain why because I love adobo with rice, in pandesal or sliced white bread, or even with fried potatoes. Maybe it's the quiche itself which is supposed to be light and has delicate flavors; maybe meats with strong flavors, Swiss cheese, and eggs don't agree with each other; or maybe it's just me and my quiche recipe.:( 

Duck Embutido or Sausage

I'm making duck ham again and didn't know what to do with the rest of the meat. I still have a few pieces of duck leg confit and didn't want to make more so I ground the meat with 2

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Filipino Food Website Stealing Photos

There is another Filipino food website that has been stealing photos from food blogs and putting its watermark on the photos. The blogger then posts recipes using the stolen photo on the website and on facebook. I saw the website on Foodie Blogroll and reported it as fraudulent. If you have a Filipino food blog and are a member of Foodie Blogroll, please check if you have your photos reused without proper attribution or permission and report to Foodie Blogroll and facebook.This is the only way to stop these blog and photo thieves and crooks. This website comes from the same area of Bacolod where the other Copy/Paste Crook is from. It may be owned by the same thieves.

website  http://www.pinoyrecipe.net/
facebook  http://www.facebook.com/PinoyRecipedotnet

Update 10/10/11: The website owner has already removed all the photos that don't belong to them.

Update 10/13/11:  After reading a few of the posts, I found that most of their write-up and description of, or introduction to a dish are "frankensteinized" from other blogs combined with wiki entries. What annoys me is they usually do not make sense. For example, their translation of Arroz Caldo is Hot Rice, which was lifted from a Filipino blogger who mistakenly used the Italian translation of caldo which means warm, hot, fervent, instead of the Spanish caldo, broth. The description that they wrote taken directly from wiki mentions the Chinese origin [congee] of arroz caldo that THE SPANISH PEOPLE loved to eat at the time. And then they went ahead and used the ITALIAN translation because it's at the top of the entries of a translation page. What do the Italians have to do with a Spanish/Chinese/Filipino dish??? DOES.NOT.MAKE.SENSE. This is the problem with writing a post by copy/paste from other sources laziness instead of thinking and writing for themselves and not understanding the food or dish they are writing about. The sad thing is instead of imparting their knowledge about Filipino food, they are spreading incorrect information to their readers. Definitely not a good thing.

Miso Soup with Wakame and Silken Tofu

For dinner tonight I made miso soup with wakame (dried sea weed) and silken tofu. To complete the meatless meal I had the soup with roasted kabocha sprinkled with sea salt flakes. Sooo delicious and healthy too.

Miso Soup with Wakame and Silken Tofu

¼ ounce dried wakame

4 ounces silken tofu

2 cups dashi stock

4 tablespoons miso paste

2 spring onions, chopped

• Soak wakame in cold water for 15 minutes. Drain and cut into 1-inch pieces. Slice or cut the tofu into strips, squares, or rounds. Bring the dashi stock to a boil. Stir in the miso. Taste the soup and add more miso paste if needed. Add wakame and tofu and turn up the heat. Let it come to a boil, turn off the heat and add spring onions. Serve immediately.

Giant Marshmallow S'mores

giant marshmallow S'more...
crusty gooey roasted giant marshmallow and soft milk chocolate 
between crispy honey Graham crackers...what's not to love?

Food stuff here in the US are getting bigger and bigger to lure consumers like magpies who are attracted to bright shiny new things. Being a magpie myself, I just couldn't resist getting a bag when I saw it at Walmart two weeks ago. These giant roasters are really really big. I roasted one,skewered in a barbecue stick, on the stove top fire and sandwiched it in one halved piece of Graham cracker together with 6 squares of Hershey's milk chocolate bar. That's a lot of marshmallow and chocolate. I was in sugar heaven but could only eat one at a time...it's filling and satisfying. And delicious!

they're huge


what you'll need for a sugar high moment: 
giant marshmallow, Graham crackers, barbecue stick, Hershey's milk chocolate 
*milk chocolate is best for S'mores because it softens faster 
and tastes better than dark chocolate


roast marshmallow over stove top fire, place on top of Graham cracker 
and chocolate, top with another Graham cracker, press lightly, 
let chocolate soften, then take a big bite

Portuguese Sweet Bread

One of my top 10 favorites from The Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge was Portuguese Sweet Bread. The bread has tight soft sweet crumb and fragrant with lemon, orange, and

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Red White Yellow Blue Plate Special

RED WHITE YELLOW BLUE PLATE SPECIAL
longaniza jamonado, tomatoes
sunny side-up egg, fried rice
blue tater tots

The Philippine flag is Kulinarya Cooking Club theme for the combined months of August and September 2011 co-hosted by yours truly, Ray, Boyet, and Day to celebrate Philippines National Heroes Day, plus Ninoy Aquino Day. 

Blue Plate Special means a low-priced meal with meat and three vegetables all in one plate offered by some restaurants here in the US; it doesn't have any blue food although sometimes served in a blue-colored plate. Well, my plate special is quad-colored and the food in it have the actual colors of red, white, yellow, and blue, all in one blue-rimmed plate; it's priceless! My plate is an ensemble of my favorite Filipino breakfast: longaniza, tomatoes, fried egg/s, fried rice, and fried potatoes.

The challenge was to prepare a dish with the four colors of the Philippine flag all in one plate or dish. They may be a garnish or the plate the dish is served in but we were not allowed to use store-bought chemical food dye to color the ingredients if dyeing is necessary. Finding naturally colored blue food was tough but the first thing that came to mind was the blue potato pancake I made a few years ago. These sweetish waxy potatoes have blue/purple color that deepens into almost navy blue when cooked and have completely cooled to room temperature. I added some salt and sauteed chopped onion into the partially cooked grated potatoes, formed the mixture into small lumps, and fried them in light olive oil and butter until dark brown and crusty.

Longaniza Jamonado

2½ pounds pork, cut into 1-inch cubes 

¼ pound pork fat, cut into ¼-inch cubes

¼ cup fine raw cane sugar
¼ cup white cane sugar

½ teaspoon pink salt

1½ tablespoons kosher or sea salt (not table salt)

1/8 teaspoon ground cloves

hog casing, rinsed and soaked in warm water

• Place the pork and pork fat separately in the freezer for 30 minutes or until icy. Coarsely grind the pork. In a small bowl, whisk together sugars, salt, pink salt, and cloves. In a large bowl, mix by hand the pork and fat until fat is evenly distributed. Mix in by hand the sugar mixture. Fill casing or form into longaniza shapes/patties. Refrigerate for 24 hours before cooking. 

 I also made a layered dessert since this is a 2-month challenge. The bottom layer is plain sweet red agar (sorry but the ready to cook red gulaman bar surely was artificially dyed) with a few drops of vanilla extract. The white and yellow layers are yogurt panna cotta, the white is flavored with vanilla extract and the yellow has calamansi juice and grated zest. For the calamansi layer, I soaked a few strands of Spanish saffron in hot cream. The yellow color is very pale because I didn't want to flavor the dessert too much with saffron. It has a definite calamansi flavor and I love the combined tartness of calamansi juice, yogurt, and blueberries cutting the sweetness of the dessert.

Before we agreed on the flag colors, we initially chose yellow, as in Ninoy Aquino yellow. On the same day we all voted yes on the yellow color, part of the dinner I was preparing was vegetables, salted duck egg, and green mango salad and I noticed the components were mostly yellow including the calamansi dipping sauce. I plated them and took pictures. When we changed the color theme a few hours later to include the flag, I didn't think the salad will do but realized all the 4 colors were also present. The blue is the piece of slate that came with the dish and dipping bowls set. Anyway, this sunshine on a plate is definitely Ninoy Aquino's.

SUNSHINE ON A PLATE
Filipino salad of semi-ripe mangoes, roasted eggplants, tomatoes,
steamed sweet potato tops, salted duck eggs
dipping sauce of sauteed fermented micro shrimps,
calamansi juice with fish sauce, sugar, and sliced hot red chile
calamansi juice and sea salt

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Kulinarya was started by a group of Filipino foodies living in Sydney, who are passionate about the Filipino culture and its colourful cuisine.

Each month we will showcase a new dish along with their family recipes. By sharing these recipes, we hope you find the same passion and love for the Filipino Food as we do.

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See more Red White Yellow Blue creations here.

Baked Caramel Apple Turon

baked caramelized apple turon served with a small scoop of Snickers® ice cream

Have you tried baked turon? I have a few tart apples, cubed one and cooked it in a tablespoon of butter and 2 tablespoons dark brown sugar, filled 2 spring roll wrappers brushed with butter, and baked the rolls until they have browned and looked crispy. The baked caramelized apple turon is so good; tart, sweet, and buttery, and oh so crispy. I love it with a very small scoop of Breyers® Snickers Caramel Swirls ice cream. Sweet!  I'll definitely bake saba and langka turon later today now that I know it will be as crispy as deep fried.

Baked Caramel Apple Turon

2 tablespoons butter

3 - 4 tablespoons dark brown sugar

2 medium size sweet and tart apples, cut into ½-inch cubes

1 tablespoon melted butter

4 - 5 pieces Filipino spring roll wrapper

• Preheat oven to 425°F. 
• In a medium skillet, heat butter and sugar until sugar has melted. Add apples and cook until caramelized and golden brown. 
• Brush  one side of spring roll wrapper with butter. Place in a thin pile 2 tablespoons of apple across one edge of wrapper and roll, folding the edges in as you roll and keeping it tight and thin. Place on a parchment-lined baking pan.
• Brush rolls with butter from the skillet, if any is left, plus melted butter. Bake until brown and crispy. Serve immediately.