Weekend Quarantining: Sinigang

Growing up, my mom cooked sinigang, which my siblings and I called soup bone, every week. Every. week. Usually beef bones, sometimes pork bones, and sometimes fish. I think I remember my mother buying frozen tamarind in the small Filipino grocery stores of towns in order to stew the meat bones in a sour and acidic broth. For my grownup cooking, I trekked to Seafood City, a Filipino chain grocery store, in South San Francisco to buy the ingredients for my sinigang. Of course I got distracted. I didn't buy this staple of Okoy from my growing up, but that's next for a family gathering after this pandemic.

Luckily I had tomatoes in the blender already. And got an onion from our outdoor larder.

I pureed the tomatoes, and it was kind of a lot. And chopped the onion, not too finely.

The recipe I found on line called for browning the meat in oil, and since the stew pork and pork bones I got were pretty fatty, I used just a little bit of pork lard.

And then I added the onions and tomato puree and boiled the bones and pork meat in enough added water for 8 quarts for probably 90 minutes. I added light soy sauce and fish sauce for salt.

Last weekend I found this seasoning packet with a base of tamarind and cheated with that instead of real sour fruit. Luckily, I hadn't added extra salt to my broth since salt was the main ingredient of the spice sachet.

While in the garden that morning walking the dog, I also picked single blooms and a posy to adorn my kitchen.

The stewing meat and onion and tomatoes broth smelled (and tasted) fantastic, and I hadn't even added the tamarind packet.  The tomatoes had added to the acid of the soup. I also threw in a can of banana blossoms.

I had also bought vegetables (to the annoyance of the hubs because we already grow vegetables, but I said my sinigang called for these veggies) at Seafood City: bok choy, Thai eggplant (and the hubs had just harvested a couple of Japanese eggplant), and green peppers. We grew lots of purple and green beans which I also rinsed to put into the sinigang. And prepackaged into bags for Cecilia and Roseanne, my Filipino neighbors with whom I was sharing our dish of nostalgia.

I forgot the taro nubs I had in my root drawer and forgot to buy okra! I did end up boiling the taro in some of the sinigang broth and made a mental note to get some okra because I was going to not eat the sinigang that night but instead cook the vegetables in it for weeknight meals. Me and the hubs were still consuming leftovers in the fridge, and I made a mojito to sip before. I did end up using some of leftover cilantro lime rice to taste a bit of the sinigang. Fantastico.