Weekday Dinners

My refrigerator is packed with leftovers: quiche, a bratwurst with a bit of cabbage, rotisserie chicken, and chicken curry (using said roasted chicken) and thawing meat (a rib eye cap steak, chuck beef, ground pork, and a boneless pork rib). Sadie loves the rotisserie chicken with her kibble, and I love it in a Cobb salad.

I marvel that I had all the ingredients, prepped and ready for a cold dinner on a Monday evening after a long work Zoom meeting.

On Tuesday, I decided to use up that ground pork. I saw a recipe in my stack of papers for Vietnamese meat balls and rice noodles, but I had also the makings for a childhood dish of Pancit Palabok.

 

This was my second time ever cooking this dish. Previously, I used a different spice packet that was the Pamanang brand instead of Mama Sita's. The Pamanang definitely had more of that tinapa or smoked fish flavor, but I'll be sticking to Mama Sita's, the taste of which is more reminiscent of my mom's dish. And I think I previously called it Pancit Luglug which is exclusively a Pampangan dish. This turn around I knew to cook the time-consuming corn starch noodles first by soaking it in water for 20 minutes or so and then breaking them up as best I could before boiling them for 15 minutes or so and then letting them sit in the warm water for 30 minutes. I separated the noodles with my fingers when I drained them. I also peeled the shrimp and boiled the shells to make a broth to combine with the spice packet. I chopped onion and garlic and scallions after making the broth. And fried garlic and crushed pork rinds. And hard boiled eggs.

Closer to dinner time, I sautéed the onions and garlic and pork and then added the spices and msg diluted in shrimp broth. The gravy wasn't dark enough, and so I added dried annatto powder to make it an even more vibrant orange red. Since I had made this dish three weeks ago, I still had calamansi in my refrigerator. I've a Filipino neighbor, Cecilia who was jubilant that I was cooking one of her favorite childhood dishes too. I laid the noodles into a casserole dish and then spooned the pork gravy over the noodles generously. I sliced the shrimps in half and laid them over the sauce and sprinkled lots of crushed chicharrones and the fried garlic and then laid the quarters of two hard boiled eggs atop and sprinkled scallion. Lastly I sliced the calamansi into halves and nestled them into the rest of the ingredients. I like dishes to look beautiful and colorful.

And not only was it visually appealing, this Pancit Palabok was very flavorful. I may try making it again without resorting to the shortcut of an Oriental (the archaic use of that term on the packaging cracks me up) gravy packet.