The Sassy Lawyer & Pinoy Cook on food, family and home.
I got the idea for this dish from a popular ulam (viand) served in Filipino carinderias (roadside eateries). It is basically menudo except that it is made with ground meat. In carinderias, the dish is usually garnished with hard-boiled chicken eggs which serve as an inexpensive extender.
The size of the quail eggs seemed to me to be more appropriate for gound meat…
I was a very young child when my father first brought us to a humble house along a narrow street beside the Concepcion Church in the fishing town of Malabon. It was my first Dolor’s Kakanin experience–an experience that would be repeated over and over and something I would introduce to my husband and children ... (more)
They’re rice cakes, actually. Rice flour is mixed with water, dark brown sugar and lye water then poured into moulds. Kutsinta (or cuchinta) is cooked by steaming. Served with niyog (grated coconut), they make a filling midday snack. I bought these kutsinta on the same day that I bought the puto bibingka. Like I wrote ... (more)
The day I brought the frog legs at Rustan’s Supermarket at Shangri-La Plaza was the day that my husband drooled over Kookie Korner’s cakes. Kookie Korner has a stall right at the supermarket entrance. He asked if we wanted strawberry shortcake but I guess it was more of a rhetorical question. The kids and I ... (more)
As I try to decide whether or not to bake today the rum cake that I had been itching to do for months, let me post some photos of some of the baking utensils I use in my kitchen. Reader Lemon in the mango and jelly dessert comment thread would like to know what a tube pan is. So does Yuga who is now posting recipes in his blog…
We haven’t shopped at the Shangri-La Plaza in years and, my, how it has changed. We were there last Sunday and some of the shops and food stalls I frequented were no longer there. The Vietnamese restaurant at the food gallery has been replaced by something else. The Portuguese Egg Tart Factory stall had disappeared too. Anyhow, the trip wasn’t a total waste. We bought lots of books from Powerbooks and I was able to buy half a kilo of frozen frog legs from Rustan’s Supermarket. I’ve always wanted to try them having been told that the meat is very similar to chicken.
On the last Sunday of May, we hosted a small swimming party for our daughters, their classmates and some friends. We rented St. Moritz at the Vieux Chalet for the day. Vieux Chalet is a Swiss restaurant in Antipolo. St. Moritz is a pool and a guest cottage adjacent to the restaurant but which is ... (more)
These days, my kids spend more time experimenting in the kitchen than I do. I bought some almond-flavored jelly a few weeks ago intending to combine it with fresh ripe mangoes for dessert. My idea was to cut the jelly and the mangoes into cubes then toss them with a mixture of cream and sweetened ... (more)
Before Pizza Hut and Domino’s hit the local scene, pizza was not exactly part of the Filipino’s everyday vocabulary. Probably the only restaurant that offered good pizza was The Italian Village which folded up several years back. There were Magoo’s and DiMark’s but you really have to have a bad craving for pizza to visit ... (more)
A cousin’s husband prepared something similar to this during a weekend party in Tagaytay some time ago and I’ve been meaning to make the dish myself. When I saw an episode of Nigella Lawson’s TV show a couple of weeks ago where she made the same dish, I was reminded of that Tagaytay weekend and I promised myself I would finally do this simple pasta dish. My problem was my younger daughter. Although she loves clam broth, she doesn’t touch the clam meat. She thinks it’s yucky… The problem ended at lunch today…
When does your weekend start? Like most Filipino families, ours used to … »»
It might sound Italian but pastami is not Italian. According to the Free … »»
I was on Twitter last night and there was a post by I-forgot-who with a … »»
In the Philippines, this dish of grilled skewered pork marinated in … »»
For the first time in a long time, I remembered not to cook on a Sunday. … »»
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I've been dreaming of making this for weeks. But since we started making … »»
If I had access to kale, I'd have used a bunch in lieu of white cabbage. If … »»
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There are two earlier version of this recipe for steamed fish with tausi … »»
Casa is Spanish for house. CASA is also an acronym for Connie, Antonio, Sam and Alex. We are all surnamed Veneracion. We all love to take photos -- of anything that catches our fancy. It's a family obsession.
This is a journal of how we live, eat, learn, play and have fun. Work? Work is part of playing and having fun. Seriously.
In 2003, a time when I hadn't heard of the term "blog", I started a recipe website at cooking.houseonahill.net using a now defunct content management system that ran on ASP. Ok, never mind the geek talk, I'm sure you're not interested in that. The contents easily multiplied and, in 2004, I moved the food site to pinoycook.net. Always unhappy with the fact that the dot com versions of houseonahill and pinoycook weren't … (click here to read all »)
Okra has a bad reputation in our house. So bad a reputation that I'm the … (more...)
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This is an updated version of a recipe originally published on September … (more...)
In the Philippines, melon usually refers to the cantaloupe or rockmelon. … (more...)
A one-pot dish that's a breeze to prepare. The sausage meat makes the broth … (more...)
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