cook: filipino new year’s eve dinner

Have I said how much I love winter decorations?

I had yet to invite my neighbors, Nancy and Helen over to a Filipino dinner, and it was New Year's Eve last night. I went to the ceramics studio in the morning and came home in the afternoon to cook. I knew I was going to cook lumpia, adobo, a cucumber salad, and a vegetable dish of some sort with kabocha squash from our garden and found a simple recipe. Filipino food encompasses a lot of vegetables, not just pork and chicken. I started my mise en place with the peeled and chopped kabocha squash, a bag of green beans and salted cucumber, draining. Next I put the chicken thighs into a medium heated pot to start rendering its fat and browning the skin.

 

While I was browning the chicken, I smashed garlic and cracked whole black peppercorns and then added bay leaves and coconut vinegar, filling half of the mortar. I then filled it to the top with soy sauce.

 

The chicken was seared, to which I then added the soy vinegar mixture. I had three bone-in pork chops and trimmed the fat and marinated it in 4 tablespoons of fish sauce. I started browning the pork fat in a Dutch oven.

 

Aargh, I was cooking too many things at once, albeit over low or medium low heat. I forgot to add the onions and garlic to the frying pork, to which I'd already added water and coconut milk. Oh well. Never too late and the aromatics still added a lot of flavor to the sauce along with more ground black pepper.

Helen and Nancy arrived, and I had already been frying the lumpia and putting them in the oven to keep warm. I had reserved some of the crushed garlic and black pepper to add vinegar and dip the lumpia into. While I ate and played hostess a bit, I was still simmering the chicken and adding the vegetables to the stir fried pork. 20 minutes later, dinner was ready. Chicken and pork adobo to the table.

Green beans were tender though the squash was a bit overdone. Next time, I'm making more sauce for the vegetables with more broth and coconut milk. I had divided the can of coconut milk between the adobo and the simmered vegetables, but no matter, I was setting the dish on the table.

My low sodium Filipino dishes, complete with brown jasmine rice on the table.

12 Hours later, I'm back at it. I'm cooking garbanzo beans for hummus and roasting eggplant for baba ghanoush and then pan baking pita bread for meals the rest of the week.