Cooking: BBQ Pilipino Pork Skewers

Remember how I went online for a recipe of BBQ pork skewers that my friend Cecilia cooks?  How I found a recipe online and marinated two nights ago my pork ribs in coconut vinegar, fermented black bean chili sauce, Coca Cola (because I didn't have Sprite), banana ketchup (Which my neighbor Cecilia gave me), oyster sauce, soy sauces, chopped garlic and black pepper? Which I put in the refrigerator overnight?

I finally grilled it last night. That is, I took the marinated pork out of the refrigerator, trimmed off fat and skewered with bamboo sticks, tore butter lettuce, mandoline sliced cucumbers and red cabbage, denuded Anaheim peppers of their membranes and seeds, chopped scallions for a final sprinkling of herbs, and prepared my mise en place.

I fired up my grill and put the Anaheim peppers over the indirect heat of the goals because I wanted them to cook slowly and have a bit of crunch to their chew. Once my coals burned down some more, I placed the skewers of pork in the center. The recipe I viewed called for making a glaze of banana ketchup and sesame oil, but I had a lot of the marinade in the bowl. I remember how my dad used that liquid to baste the meat on the grill, and so that is what I did.

Peppers done, and yeah I like them simply prepared to eat like a vegetable rather than stuffing with cheese and meat and slathering with sauce. They are delicious.

My meat however needed more tender grilling and a slight charring and caramelization of the sugars in the marinade. This was the hard sweaty part, hovering over them and slathering more liquid marinade as well as constantly turning them over so they wouldn't burn. But you know what?

I'm glad I grilled them low and slow--cutting the meat in such small pieces also assures them of cooking long enough to get tender. And this dinner has become one of my all-time favorites.

Filipino barbecued pork skewers are so evocative of my childhood. I'm sure my dad used only soy sauce, white vinegar, garlic and sugar for his marinade because ethnic ingredients where my siblings and I did some growing up in Rockville, Maryland was limited in availability. I don't remember going to a Filipino grocery shop in that city. Most if not all of our food came from the weekly trip to the U.S. Navy military commissary, where families could buy groceries at cost. Luckily, as a Filipino in the U.S. Coast Guard, my dad and our family was able to find items like the 50 pound bags of rice because military families who were briefly stationed overseas and grew to like ethnic foods would request such items to be stocked. And because food was so cheap at the commissary, we always had lots of meat in our freezer. On weekends, my dad would take my mom and siblings and me to a park like Rock Creek with a dish of the marinated meat on metal skewers and a rice cooker bowl full of steamed rice. While my brothers and I played on the swingset or seesaws, my dad would squat and grill the skewered tenderized meat on our little hibachi or stand before the public grill in the park. I've such fond memories from some of my cooking in this pandemic that now I want to find a vanity publisher to record recipes and reminiscing in a bound book.