A Scientist in the Kitchen

My sister bought garlic sausages for breakfast which I really like. It’s like Lucban longganisa which is really a favorite of mine except that is bigger in size and has lesser fat. No red coloring too, so this makes a perfect ingredient for spaghetti.

Garlic Sausage and Spaghetti

250 grams spaghetti
1 tbsp olive oil
1 garlic sausage
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 onion, chopped
2 tomatoes, seeded and chopped
2 tbsp chopped flat leaf parsley
Salt and pepper to taste

Cook spaghetti according to package instructions. Reserve a cup of broth. While pasta is cooking, remove sausage from casing and saute in olive olive until browned. Add half a cup of reserved broth and let simmer till water has evaporated. Add the garlic, onions and tomatoes and stir fry for a minute. Add the spaghetti and mix everything to coat the pasta. Season with salt and pepper. Remove from fire and add the parsley. Mix well and serve.

Check out more pasta recipes at Eat The Right Stuff, this week’s host of Presto Pasta Nights. For the week that I hosted PPN, this is the site: Presto Pasta Night #71.

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I’ve tasted chicken binacol in the cafeteria before but have yet to cook it. It is simply tinola with buko meat. Or so I thought. The Food Magazine (August 2008) was really a good buy for me as there several recipes that interested me. This chicken binacol is one of them. This dish was served by Glenda Baretto at the Aichi Expo in 2005.

The ingredients call for the ingredients for tinola - ginger, chicken, sili leaves, patis. It also required the use of lemongrass which I think made all the difference.  I guess the cafeteria version didn’t use lemongrass, as most Tagalogs don’t use this wonderful herb. But it really enhanced the flavor of the broth, that from now on, my chicken tinola would have it. The buko meat and water, lemongrass and sili leaves are all from the garden.

Chicken Binacol
- adapted from Food Magazine (August 2008)

2 tbsp oil
2 1-inch knob of ginger, smashed
2 tbsp patis/fish sauce
1 whole chicken cut into serving pieces
1 lemongrass, stem smashed
3 cups water
4 cups buko (young coconut) water
1 1/2 cups coconut meat
1 cup sili leaves
salt and pepper to taste

Heat oil in a pan and add the ginger. Saute for a minute then add the patis. Add the chicken and stir to coat the chicken with the ginger and oil. Let simmer without adding water till chicken has turned white. Add the water and lemongrass, simmer till chicken has cooked. Taste it at this point. You’ll be tempted with the whiff of lemongrass so much you wouldn’t want to proceed to the next step! When chicken is cooked, separate the chicken from the broth and strain the broth. Place the broth to a clean pot and boil. Add the buko water then bring to a boil again. Add the chicken and buko meat. Let it boil, then simmer for a few minutes. At this point, season with salt and pepper to taste. Add the sili leaves and cover pot for a minute. Serve hot.

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This is the round-up for the August edition of To market, to market… - a blog event to celebrate farmers’ markets around the world.

Here are the market finds this month:

Irish-style Lemon Honey which Sandy of Eat Real promptly paired with her own Spice Cream Cones.

Tomatoes, leeks and squash invasion, that’s what Allison (of Lemonbasil), a self-confessed farmers’ market junkie, experienced one Saturday morning.

Giant cabbages? Humongous tomatoes? Check out Tsia’s (of Eating Vancouver) adventure at the Trout Lake Farmer’s Market in Vancouver.

Alex of Eating Leeds shares with the different farmers’ markets in Leeds as well as the Oakwood Farmers’ Market, a quasi monthly fixture on the Eating Leeds calendar.

Check out too, my contribution this month, the Salcedo Saturday Market in Makati here in the Philippines for fresh produce in the middle of the city.

Thanks to all who joined. Come back next month for more harvests.  I also invite you to join and share with us your adventures in the market.

Again this from Food magazine. This dish has all of my favorite ingredients together - liempo, chilis and coconuts. What I don’t like is the bago-ong or shrimp paste. I don’t know why, but shrimp paste is one of my pet peeves (I don’t eat bagoong with kare-kare). So no pork binagoongan for me. But I do like the Cebuano fish paste called guinamos. Anyway, Bicol Express calls for bagoong, which in the Bicol region is call balao. To get my way around the bagoong part, I washed the bagoong several times to get rid of the smell and the saltiness. This time I could live with it.

Bicol Express
- based on Food Magazine (Aug 2008), with modifications

500 grams liempo, cut into cubes
4 cups coconut milk
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 inch know ginger, chopped
1 medium size onion, chopped
2 cups coconut cream
500 grams siling haba
1/2 cup shrimp paste

Boil liempo, coconut milk, garlic, ginger and onion until pork is tender. Stir occasionally to prevent the coconut milk from curdling. Meanwhile, wash the shrimp paste to get rid of excess salt. Slice chilis, removing seeds. Soak chilis twice in salted water.When pork is tender, add the coconut cream and bagoong. Simmer for five minutes while occasionally stirring the pot. Add the chilis and simmer until sauce has thickened. It actually depends on you if you want the sauce be oily or not. If not, just simmer till chilis has cooked. Adjust taste with salt.