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Champorado

July 2, 2010 By Gay 2 Comments

This is one breakfast favorite that I like anytime of the day. I made one recently for merienda, just a little since I’m cooking for 2-3 servings only.

It’s easy to make. You will need malagkit (glutinous) rice for this one. When buying malagkit rice, I prefer to buy in the grocery where they packed very well. You are also sure that you will be getting pure malagkit. A bit expensive but worth it. There’s a brand I like, called Sung Sung by Jordan Farms. I like it for the fact that they the traditional malagkit variety in the Philippines called Malagkit Sungsung. This was one of the variety I studied for bacterial blight resistance genes and it is one of the varieties which has the gene we call Xa3. That was several years ago for my MS theses! But yes, I’ve studied a lot of rice varieties and I find it amazing to find them in the market being sold.

For chocolate tablea, there is only one choice for me – Kablon Farms.

To make champorado for 2-3 servings, I boiled a cup and a half of malagkit rice. The measuring cup I used is the one that came with the rice cooker. It is smaller than the average measuring cup. Add 2-3 cups water, let it boil and gently simmer. Stir occassionally so the rice won’t stick together. Add more water as necessary until rice is cooked and you get the consitency that you like. It’s really like making na porridge. Add 3 pieces of tablea and gently simmer till these are dissolved.

To serve, laddle the amount you wish in a bowl. Add some muscovado sugar and milk. Shave some dark chocolate on top (optional) and you’re all set to enjoy.

Note: This is traditionally served with fried dried fish, but I never really liked this pairing so I omit it. Champorado will also taste good when eaten cold.

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Filed Under: Breakfast, Merienda, Rice

Many versions of fried rice

August 9, 2009 By Gay Leave a Comment

Living alone in a house is no joke. Keeping up with housekeeping is tedious for me.  I’ve always been vocal about not too keen on cleaning the house. The kitchen is my domain, the rest of the house not! But not, gotta find someone to fix the lights and the Moen faucet in the bathroom and get a plumber to fix the faucet in the garden. Otherwise, I won’t be watering the plants for some time.
fried-rice

Cooking for one can be a bit tedious, too, specially after a long day at work. Cooking rice is a problem, in particular, since it can be time consuming and expensive to cook rice each time I eat. The solution is to cook several cups at once then pack them into small servings and refrigerate. Having done this, I usually resort to making a quick stirfry of whatever I can find in the ref and then just add the rice to make a one dish meal. I love fried rice! The basic ingredients I always use is chopped ginger, garlic, oyster sauce and pepper. Just saute them together, add the meat or fish then the vegetables that are chopped finely. What vegetables to add? Staple vegetables I get each week are asparagus, bell peppers, carrots, Chinese cabbage, mushrooms and whatever unusual vegetable I find in the market. Bamboo shoots, for one, is quite common here and there are several kinds. Just take a small portion of each and stirfry. Add chili flakes for some kick, if you want. Once vegetables are done, add the rice which have been crumbled already. Stirfry a few minutes till rice is heated through. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Drizzle with some sesame oil and stir some more. Transfer to a bowl then eat while hot.

Filed Under: Asian, Rice Tagged With: Rice

Sawtoothed coriander

November 19, 2008 By Gay 7 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve contributed an entry to Weekend Herb Blogging, but now I am back to share with you this wonderful Thai herb called pak-chee or sawtoothed coriander, named so because of the leaves which are long, slender and serrated. It has a similar but rather more pungent flavour than the cilantro leaf. It is easier to cultivate than cilantro, so now this takes the place of cilantro in most of the dishes I cook at home. They are perennial so they tend to last long unlike cilantro. Here is how it looks.

The scientific name of pak chee is Eryngium foetidum. Pak chee is one of the herbs used in Southeast Asian cooking (except Philippines *sigh*) and is one of the flavors in the Thai soup tom yum. Other names are Mexican coriander, fitweed and long coriander. Interestingly, while it tastes and smells like the cilantro, it grows well in areas where the cilantro doesn’t grow well because of the heat.

So hurray for me, I have an alternative to cilantro. We don’t use this herb in Philippine cooking (hence the sigh above) but I was lucky to have neighbors from Myanmar. They eat a lot of this and it grows well in their garden. They gave me the carte blanch to “raid” their pak chee plots anytime I want! Since they are so easy to grow, I have my own patch of pak chee in our garden already. One of the dishes I savor with pak chee is Thai fried rice.

Thai Fried Rice

2 tbsp vegetable oil
2 tsp Thai shrimp paste
1 tbsp fish sauce
5 cloves garlic, chopped finely
1 tsp chili flakes (add more if you want)
4 cups leftover cooked rice
2 eggs, scrambled, fried and sliced into strips
4 pak chee leaves, chopped
green mangoes, sliced thinly
fresh chilis
extra pak chee leaves

Heat oil in a wok and add the shrimp paste. Stir in the garlic and mix everything till garlic is translucent. Add chili flakes. Add the cooked rice and stir constantly till rice is well-heated throughout. Add half of the eggs and mix well. Turn off heat then add the pak chee. Put rice on a plate and garnish with mangoes, chilis and extra pak chee leaves.

Siri from Siri’s Corner hosts this weeks Weekend Herb Blogging recap.

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In need of new bed frames?

Filed Under: Asian, Rice Tagged With: fried rice, Rice, Thai food

Grow Your Own: Cilantro Rice

April 15, 2008 By Gay 7 Comments

For April’s Grow Your Own, I am sharing with you an age-old practice in my father’s hometown. It is basically a rice growing town, with farmers still practicing traditions handed down for generations. One of these traditions is patilaok or the sharing of rice harvests. It is the practice to share with friends and neighbors the first batch of milled rice from their rice harvest. So often we get a share, a kilo or two, from neighbors. We get to taste different rice varieties as they are really proud of their harvest. Since April is harvest season, we have enjoyed these gifts each week.

We eat rice three times a day. When cooking rice for dinner, we often cook extra rice so that the leftover rice can be cooked as fried rice for the next day’s breakfast. Sometimes, we cook fried for lunch or dinner if the dish calls for it, if there is extra rice and if I feel like cooking fried rice (which can be often).

Cilantro rice with dried fish

Cilantro rice

2 tbsp vegetable oil
5 cloves garlic, minced
4 cups cold cooked rice, crumbled to separate grains
a bunch of cilantro, chopped
salt

Heat oil in wok. Add 1 tsp salt, stir to dissolve salt then add the garlic. Cook garlic in oil, make sure it does not get burnt. When garlic is light brown in color, add the rice. Stir quickly to prevent rice from sticking in the wok and to distribute heat evenly throughout the rice. I usually cook it like this for around 5 minutes. When rice is heated through, remove from fire then add the fresh cilantro. Stir again then serve.

I served cilantro rice with fried salted fish. The fish is called espada or swordfish, about 12-15 inches long flat fish with thin flesh. The fish is cut in the middle to open it up, cleaned then salted and dried. This was my first time to eat this kind of dried fish. The saltiness was just right and it was very crunchy when fried.

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Need a cure for acne? Spices, such as turmeric,  might help.

Filed Under: Asian, Blog events, Rice
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