cook: sinigang

After the alfresco lunch of Asian rice noodle bowls, I told Cecilia not to cook dinner either because I was going to cook the Filipino dish regularly in rotation of Sinigang. Growing up in Groton, Connecticut, my mother would go to a tiny Filipino grocery store in New London to buy the unripe tamarind or sampaloc that was in the freezer in order to make the sour soup. She boiled onion, pork or beef neck bones, the sampaloc, tomato, taro and cabbage (either white or bok choi or whatever was available). My dad would add okra and eggplant to his Sinigang. I had trekked out to Seafood City in Daly City a couple days ago and bought the Knorr's sinigang flavoring packet as well as bok choi, Filipino eggplant, taro, and long beans as well as pork shoulder attached to the bone. The instructions called for dissolving the packet in quarts and quarts of water and then boiling it. I added the pork bones into the pot too. While the broth heated, I washed and trimmed and cut the vegetables.       

 

I recall helping my mom cook this dish. She would have me skim the marrow and scum and fat at the top of the pot. Whereas I used a big spoon as a child, this time I used just a colander and didn't remove the fat which to me is flavor.

I let the meat and bones and broth simmer on the stove for a couple hours. I didn't add the vegetables, nor started cooking a separate pot of rice until 15 minutes before serving.

The vegetables lost their vibrant emerald color as they got tender. I resigned myself to gray soup though it was delicious. Just as I did in my childhood, I put soy sauce on my rice and vegetables and meat instead of stinky fish sauce. Before cooking dinner, my one mission that afternoon was to find my favorite flavor of Thrifty ice cream: chocolate malted krunch at a Rite Aid drugstore. I had to drive to two in order to find it, and the second store had none on its shelves either. But a store clerk kindly asked if I wanted to order the flavor. Yes! And even better, he found 8 half gallon containers in a back freezer. At 2 for 8 bucks, I had to buy two even though I had already bought pints of cappuccino krunch and mint chocolate chip. Yep, you can also see the 10 pints of Haagen-Dazs. Coffee chip which the hubs eats with his brownies and the 2 pints of vanilla that I want to make ice cream sandwiches with.

Dessert was divine last night after my sinigang dinner, and the stomach ache from all the lactose was worth it.