The Sassy Lawyer & Pinoy Cook on food, family and home.
Eggplants. Inexpensive. Filling. Easy to prepare. Versatile. Cooks in a jiffy. Eggplants are moist and succulent and, if you’re lucky to have Asian eggplants, sweet. What’s not to like? The trouble with eggplants is that cooking them can be tricky. Undercook them by one minute and they would be too tough. Overcook them by a ... (more)
If you’re a blogger and you have Google Analytics (or something smilar) installed, you might have occasionally checked what the most popular pages on your blog are. In this blog, there are two consistent topnotchers — bistek and puto. Yep, iconic Filipino dishes with names worth discussing a bit. Let’s start with the puto. I ... (more)
First, you have got to read about why the definition of good food and cooking is largely psychological and a by-product of our childhood. I believe it — there really is no good or bad food (only inedible ones like badly burnt food) because food appreciation is a personal thing. If one grew up with ... (more)
Yes, we’re still carnivorous.
Sitsaron (chicharon or tsitsaron) is the Filipino name for the Spanish chicharrón, a dish of fried pork rinds otherwise known in the English-speaking world as pork cracklings. There are many variations and the cracklings are not always made with pork rinds. Sometimes, it’s pork fat, pork meat, pork rind and fat, pork offal, or even ... (more)
No, I’ve never been to P.F. Chang’s although I read that the U.S. food chain opened its first Asian branch in Alabang two months ago. It’s easily a two-hour drive to Alabang and… I just wouldn’t. The copycat recipe for P.F. Chang’s Mongolian beef, I found via Pinterest. I posted it on my cooking, wining ... (more)
Ten years ago, if you had asked me what my favorite sauce is in the whole world, I’d probably have said, “Sweet and sour sauce.” If you had asked me the same question five years ago, I would have said, “Pesto.” These days, it’s the sweet and tangy Vietnamese nuoc cham. It’s basically a sweet ... (more)
Ground pork and lightly fried firm tofu cubes make the base for this tasty and fast-cooking curried dish. If you aren’t into tofu, you can omit it. I added tofu because I love tofu and I find that an otherwise too-heavy dish becomes so much lighter and easier to digest when tofu replaces part of ... (more)
This is an updated version of a recipe originally published in 2006. The name of the dish sounds Spanish but, surprisingly, it is also a staple in most Chinese restaurants in the Philippines. I’m pretty sure that the Chinese don’t call their version of this pork dish asado. It’s more probable that Filipinized Chinese used ... (more)
If you’ve heard of the Filipino dish called arroz a la Cubana, this is a variation. Instead of rice, the ground meat stew, fried egg and bananas are served with flour tortillas. The meat stew is cooked spicy, chili style, and, in lieu of the traditional saba bananas, I used the lakatan (lacatan) variety — ... (more)
Three of my favorite things in the world — chicken, pork and egg (not necessarily in that order) — in a single dish. Good? It gets better. I sauteed ginger, black peppercorns and shallots, added browned chicken and pork then cooked both in that dreamy Vietnamese sauce called nuoc cham. When most of the liquid ... (more)
Tomatoes and tofu are not ingredients that I’d ordinarily consider to be ideal partners. Because tofu is so neutral, I’d rather combine it with a rich sauce to make it pop. Lately, however, Speedy and I have been experimenting with tofu dishes and it seems that tossing tofu with tomatoes is not a bad idea ... (more)
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 … »»
Conversations