Hanging on for dear life

When I saw the Cupmen in a Japanese website, I just had to ask my sister in Tokyo to buy some for me. If there ever was a most useful useless gadget, this has got to be it. A plastic man whose job is to keep the paper-foil cover of instant ramen noodles down. He turns white when the noodles are heating up and goes back to his original color when it cools down. Isn't he just too cute?


The Cupman in my office gets a workout every now and then during emergencies, but the one at home is probably bored out of his skull. Maybe I should just hang him on my computer monitor.

Sweet chili shrimp

How do you explain to someone who doesn't cook, or who can cook only with a recipe, what goes on through your mind when you're deciding on what to whip up?

Take this dish, for example. I had one kilo of shelled, deveined shrimp thawing in the refrigerator. I had moisturizing gunk on my hair and scalp and wanted to keep it on the whole day so I didn't want to have to go out to buy ingredients. So I was running through both the refrigerator and the pantry in my mind (I was reading blogs at the time and didn't want to get up to check). When my mind got to the bottle of sweet chili sauce, it stopped. Ah ha! Okay, shrimp sautéed in sweet chili sauce. But a kilo of shrimp isn't a lot—what can I use to extend it? Ooh, I still have a pack of fish tofu in the freezer. So I get up, take it out of the freezer and put it in the refrigerator to thaw. And as I do that, I see the carton of quail eggs—that'll do. Better boil those now so they'll have plenty of time to cool—I hate peeling hot hard-boiled eggs and scorching my fingertips. Much later, when the eggs have been boiled, cooled and peeled and it was almost dinner—I expected the cooking time to be less than 30 minutes—I bring out the shrimp, tofu and sweet chili sauce from the refrigerator. My eye gets caught by another bottle of sauce, chili garlic this time. Ooh, that'll add a little more kick to the dish—the sweet chili sauce hardly has any. So there, ingredients complete and all I have to do now is cook everything.

I think almost everyone here can follow the thought process, but I don't think I'll ever be able to describe how I know that one ingredient will taste good with another. Will "You have to imagine how they'll taste like together" help?


Anyway, let's cook the dish now.

Since the tofu pieces were pretty big, I cut each piece into quarters. I also cooked it first because it's not pure tofu and is actually a little starchy so I figured it would need to be cooked longer than the shrimp. In a wok, heat a teaspoon of sesame oil, add a teaspoon of chili garlic sauce, stir until mixed well. Add the tofu and sauté until the pale sides are a bit brown, adding a tablespoon of sweet chili sauce sometime during the sautéing. Set aside.

Add more sesame oil and chili garlic sauce to the wok and sauté the shrimp, with one and a half teaspoons of salt. Add sweet chili sauce during the sautéing. When the shrimp's more than halfway done (that is, it's losing its transparency), add the tofu and continue sautéing. When the shrimp's cooked, add the quail eggs. Toss—lightly, so the eggs won't break—to mix the three main ingredients well and to coat the eggs in the chili sauce (add more chili sauce if necessary).

The reason for the pot

Nilagang manok—literally, boiled chicken—is the reason why I got my humongous pot in the first place.


Basically, it's just chicken (I use 8 or 10 pieces) boiled with onions and fish sauce (patis in Filipino, nam pla in Thai). I bring it to boil then simmer for about 40 minutes.

While the chicken's simmering, I cut up all the vegetables. Green beans, ballhead cabbage, pechay (bok choy) and Chinese (Napa) cabbage. I add all these to the pot after 40 minutes and keep it simmering for less than 5 minutes.

It's because of the vegetables that I needed the pot. I always use a lot, but even then, they're usually the first to go. This new one is so huge, you'll notice that the water level is way below the rim—in my old pot, it would have overflowed already.

I really love this pot.

Not quite from scratch

I think I'm a little slow here, but I've just discovered how to make quick, chunky soup using canned condensed soup. My only excuse is that Campbell's soup is imported here and I don't pay it much attention when I do my grocery. There's not much variety either—we only seem to have a few of the cream-based soups plus the chicken noodle soup, and only the regular kind too—none of the chunky or low-sodium varieties. But I wanted to make a shrimp-based chunky soup last weekend—it's rainy season here already and nothing beats hot soup when it's raining—and I didn't have much time to make one from scratch because I woke up late Sunday morning. So I grabbed two cans of Campbell's New England Clam Chowder and a brick of low-fat milk and that's what I based my chunky soup on. I don't think I'll be doing this often though. I checked the nutrition information and the sodium content is high!

2 cans condensed clam chowder cream soup
1 brick (250ml) low-fat milk
1/8 cup butter or margarine
2 small onions, minced
1 kilo peeled shrimp, sliced into bite-size pieces
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon marjoram
2 small carrots, chopped
1 medium zucchini, chopped

Place the condensed soup and milk in a stockpot and use a whisk to mix the two until smooth. Set aside.

In a wok or large skillet, melt the butter and sauté the onions until translucent. Add the shrimp, salt, black pepper and marjoram and sauté until the shrimp turns pink. Add the carrots and zucchini and sauté for about two more minutes. Set aside.

Heat the soup. Add the sautéed shrimp and vegetables, including the liquid, and mix well. Simmer for three minutes.

Un-recipes

In my almost three months of blogging, I have yet to post any of my recipes. I'm reluctant to do so because they're not really recipes. As my husband can attest to, I have a strange way of cooking. I also have a strange way of deciding what to cook in the first place.

First, I decide what my main ingredient will be: fish/seafood, poultry, pork, beef, in that order of preference. Then I go to the produce section of our well-stocked local grocery and stand there looking at what's available and fresh. And while I'm standing there (looking like a fool, actually), I'm making up the dish in my head. What's the base? Will it be dry or a stew? If dry: Marinated? Grilled? Stir-fried? If a stew: Cream-based? Tomato-based? Clear broth? What flavor? Filipino? Chinese? Italian? Then I start loading the cart with the vegetables (there always has to be vegetables!) that I imagine will taste well with the base. After that, I go on to choosing the herbs, spices and what-have-you. Then, with my cart loaded, I stand there looking at it and ask the final question: Is there anything else I can put in the dish?

After I cook one my concoctions, I try to write everything down. But you can imagine that nothing is precise. Because just as I make things up in the grocery, I also have to wing it during the actual cooking. So if I do start posting my dishes here, I think I'll have to label/tag them as "un-recipes" so you know that some creative cooking will be required.

I have my humongous pot!

Kinox, 18/10 stainless steel, 8.8 liters (about 9.3 quarts), steam release valve

And the sweetest things about it is, one, we got it at a 25% discount (took advantage of the post-Christmas sales going on right now) and, two, we bought it in a store where my husband has gift certificates which he won at a raffle so we spent all of 403 pesos (about US$10) for it.

Now my stews won't be forever spilling over!

(See My cookware wish list here.)

My cookware wish list

And speaking of cooking, on my list of must-buy cookware are these two beauties:

8.5-Quart Stock Pot
I need a humongous pot. My soupy dishes always spill over my 5-quart pot, mainly because they're chock-full of vegetables. This should do the trick.

5-Quart Pre-seasoned Cast Iron Wok
I read somewhere that non-stick cookware should never be pre-heated. That's useless for wok cooking! Woks have to be hot before you start cooking. Besides, aluminum and stainless steel woks are just too light—they're liable to tip over when you're energetically mixing the ingredients.

These babies are by Swiss Diamond. Visit their website and drool.

Broiled, not fried

I'm lousy at frying. Really, really lousy. All my non-cooking friends find that funny because they at least can. Yet if I try cooking tapa or tocino, they're sure to end up charred. I even managed to overcook an omelette once!

The problem is, I get a hankering for fried chicken every now and then. No coating, no gravy, just plain, crispy-skinned fried chicken. (Yes, yes, I know the skin's loaded with bad cholesterol—I don't care! Besides, it's just every now and then.) I tried frying chicken once and I ended up with crispy skin all right, but with raw, pink flesh inside. Another girlfriend suggested I boil the chicken until it's half-cooked before frying, but it came out so dry! We've been avoiding fried foods at home—they aren't exactly healthy, so I don't have a deep-fryer and I have no plans of getting one.

So my solution: use a broiler. That, I have. The chicken comes out all golden brown with crunchy, crispy skin, well-cooked inside but still juicy. I've used whole chicken (like a roast—stuffed and not) and chicken pieces. They're all cooked perfectly.

The broiler I have is old—it was my mom's! It's so sturdy, I'm frustrated it hasn't conked out yet because I'd love to have an excuse to get a new one—the kind that uses tempered glass so I can see inside without lifting the lid. But seeing as how I don't really use it that much, I guess I can wait.

P.S.
Just sharing with you my favorite chicken rub: rosemary, garlic and salt. That's it. Mmm…

Rice cooker cooking

I don't know why I never thought of it before when it's so obvious, and I've made flavored rice in the past (although in an ordinary pot).

I've been trying to use up a sack of jasmine rice and I've been cooking variations of Thai fried rice to do so. Our staple at home is brown rice so no one's going to eat plain white rice, even if it's jasmine. But fried rice requires that you cook the rice first then cook it again in a wok with the other ingredients. Then this morning, I suddenly realized that I can just add the flavor directly into the rice cooker. So I dissolved a pack of curry mix into the water needed for cooking the rice. Halfway through, I dumped a can of drained mushroom pieces into the rice cooker, mixed it and let it continue cooking until it automatically stopped. Tadaah! Curry rice with hardly any effort.

Should have thought of this ages ago. Now I can't wait to try out other flavors.