Since I first tasted my mom’s Chicken with milk, it became an instant favorite. So, for today’s dinner, I cooked a somewhat similar dish called Coconut Chicken, from 4 Ingredients Student Cookbook. The main ingredients were chicken breast, coconut milk, a little bit of ginger and a little bit of curry mix. The asparagus, I just added to the original recipe for the sake of using a vegetable.

My mom said the taste was bland and she even got some fish sauce for herself to improve the flavor. But for some reason, I liked the taste just fine. Or maybe I was just really hungry from working-out today. Oh well…

Okay, frying breakfast stuff should be the easiest thing in the world, right? Wrong… for me, at least.

The tricky thing about bacon… is that it’s so difficult to fry uniformly with medium to high heat because the shape is so weird and there are so many strips to manage. So, forgive the whacked brown, red and pink colors.

It may have been detectable from my last post, but to make it obvious – I am quite the loser in cooking eggs. I have never been able to cook a sunny side up or over-easy despite several tries in my life. The over-easy in the picture was done by my mom as a demo. The scrambled egg was another failed attempt at a sunny side up for me. I almost succeeded with the leftmost egg in the picture but my mom tried to make it an over-easy, thus, messing up the yolk. I have got to nail this some time…

I have never succeeded in making omelet in my life. Somehow, it would always end up becoming scrambled egg. But on my first try (the one on the left), I believe it closely resembled the correct form of an omelet. However, on my second try (the one on the right), I put in too much egg and too much of the tuna-mushroom-onion filling that the omelet lost its integrity while I was taking it out of the pan. Looks gross but it was delicious.

This was served with corned tuna rice. Flavored corned tuna mixed with recycled rice. Flavored corned tuna was not so good so, overall flavor was just… tolerable.

Inspired by my dad’s order during our recent meal at Dulcinea, I cooked pesto linguini. I first made the sauce using olive oil, garlic, water and pesto mix. On my trial run, I fried the garlic in the oil before adding water and pesto. I did not like the browned garlic that much.

So, on my larger batch, I put the garlic last. The resulting taste may not have matched Dulcinea but it was a lot fresher than my first try. Oh and it’s good enough for my dad to wanna baon it for lunch tomorrow. WTG.

I’ve fried pork chop several times in my life… The surface would either be too charred or too light. This time, using corn starch, I believe the color is just right. However, I achieved this using low heat – which compromised cooking time and the meat’s tenderness, made it kinda rubbery. Next time, I’ll turn up the heat just a little bit and just try to keep a close watch.

Here is a combined plate:

One of the things I need to learn as an inexperienced cook is how to be resourceful in the kitchen. My grandma, a very experienced, very resourceful cook who owned and managed a canteen at some point in her life, encouraged me to add a simple twist to recycled rice:  recycled corned beef.

Of course, less corned beef would’ve done the trick but I wanted to empty the fridge of old food as soon as possible, so here is a very meaty corned beef rice:

+++++

I wanted chicken and beef satay to be the my first dinner dish this week but I had to marinate it overnight with the Indonesian satay mix.

I let my mom taste the finished product and she immediately knew something was wrong – a certain sweet taste was missing: I had to add peanutbutter. Of course, if I had looked at a recipe instead of just relying on the instruction at the back of the satay mix, I would have known better. Anyway, I wiped peanutbutter on the chicken meat (oh forget the beef) and what a big difference it made. Nobody made a comment on this dish but the following day, there was no trace of it – which was great because it would have just made the fridge stink.

Oh and no sticks. I cooked using a grill-pan.

Unprepared once again to do the groceries, I did not plan this week’s menu and my mom helped me randomly pick ingredients with no particular dish in mind. One of these random ingredients was sukiyaki-beef. Unfortunately, I did not find a suitable recipe using this meat from any of my present books. So, I looked up a simple recipe online, which I modified according to available resources:

1) In a saucepan, cook the beef with little bit of oil until brown.

2) Throw in some soy sauce and butter.

3) Open can of shitake mushrooms and can of baby corn. Drain some of their liquids into the saucepan (I used this as a substitute to broth). Lower the heat and mix the saucepan’s contents to infuse flavor.

4) Set aside beef in the pan and throw in mushrooms and baby corn.  Cook for two more minutes.

This tasted great… but oil plus butter might be too much, even for an unhealthy eater. Also, I felt like the meat was chewier than I wanted. Learned from my mom that when frying beef, I just let it turn light brown. Wanting it well-done will make the meat lose tenderness. Duh.

Today, I cooked Beef Shank with Gravy, another recipe from Around the World in 80 Plates, and which originated in USA.

I love cooking beef because I’ve come to understand that without a pressure cooker, the only way to get the meat tender is time. Of course, I aced the softness of the beef.

However, I was totally a newbie to both beef broth and gravy mix. I had to guesstimate the right quantities to use. My basis for the guesstimate was more of appearance rather than taste and this might have been a problem…

Next time, I might try the following:

1) use less gravy mix or use a totally different gravy mix brand

I never used salt for seasoning so, I truly believe that the resulting saltiness of the sauce was due to the gravy mix.

2) add mushrooms

I wanted to do this but wasn’t able to obtain any.

Today, I decided to try a German dish (still from Around the World in 80 plates) that uses fish. Wow, rhyme?

According to the book, the recipe was based on Sauteed Trout Meuniere, a very popular dish in Germany. The recommended substitute for trout in the Philippines is apahap or local sea bass. But my mom and I couldn’t find this fish so we went with Lapu-lapu.

I had two tries with this recipe because I had two pieces of fish.

First attempt:

I charred the fish head too much on one side… And the fish belly ended up looking really raw. I lowered the heat and tried manipulating the fish position to fully cook its underside but nothing worked. That was when I realized that Lapu-lapu might have been too thick for pan frying. Oh, and I lost the fish tail.

Second attempt:

I did not burn the fish but I still encountered the raw-looking belly problem. And once again, I lost a fish tail.

My mom advised that to not get raw fish portions, I shouldn’t start frying unless the pan is super hot. So, I’ll try that next time. I’m quite happy though that dad and grandma liked the fish flesh. WTG! (Way to go! Hehe.) Oh and the blanched potatoes were great. The zucchini? I have no idea because I never even tried it. Haha.

For my mom’s birthday, we had dinner at Buon Giorno, one of the restaurants in the Cliffhouse Tagaytay compound. This place was particularly memorable because this was where Bryan and I last dated back in 2008, the night before he left for US again.

Anyway, here’s me and my mom:

Here’s what I ordered:

A gamberetti ravioli. The noodles were nice and chewy, and the shrimp filling left me wanting more after my plate was empty.

My mom ordered salmon risotto and my dad ordered gamberri. Too bad I wasn’t able to take pictures before they could start eating.

For dessert, mom ordered:

A chocolate sans rival with pistachios.  Yeah right. This was definitely a rip-off. There wasn’t a pistachio on that cake, just casuy! Those cheating bastards.

For dessert, I ordered:

Tiramisu! The sponge cake, the cream, the chocolate flakes all worked together really well.  But eating this treat made me feel like I need to do cardio again really soon.

I wasn’t prepared to do the groceries last Sunday, so, I didn’t have a grocery list ready. Pressured to instantly come up with ingredients needed for the week, I bought a new cookbook called Around the World in 80 plates, a compilation of yummy international dishes.

This morning, I picked up and modified one of the interesting dishes from this book,  a salad from USA called Buffalo Chicken Tenders with Bleu Cheese Dressing. Salad, because I feared for the freshness of vegetables purchased two days ago. Modified, because as recently mentioned, my father detests cheese. Instead of using the recipe for the bleu cheese dressing, I looked up a simple online recipe for vinaigrette.

After years of tasting different kinds of vinaigrette on different kinds of salad, for the first time, I cared to find out what was in it. What I found out:

1) In its simplest form, vinaigrette is 3 parts salad oil, 1 part vinegar – forced to mix (I used the blender option on my mixer to do this)

2) Herbs, spices, juices and seasoning are added to improve the taste (In my case, the additions were: calamansi juice, worcestershire sauce, salt and white pepper)

As advised by my mom (Happy Birthday to my mother by the way), I used chicken nuggets instead of chicken tenders. This advise was particularly helpful because since college, I’ve been a self-proclaimed expert in frying chicken nuggets. I didn’t follow the recipe religiously on the hot sauce quantity for two reasons – I didn’t want the spiciness to be overwhelming and I didn’t want to finish the entire bottle (only a small bottle was available).

In summary, here are the results:

-I loved the buffalo chicken tenders (although appearance could still be improved by dicing the chicken nuggets before coating with hot sauce-butter mixture)

-I liked the vinaigrette dressing (although this could still be improved by using extra virgin olive oil and apple cider or balsamic vinegar)

-I hated the veggies (the greens were starting to turn brown around the edges)