I was supposed to cook this elaborate stew on Mother's Day, but unfortunately didn't because of an emergency hospital visit. However, I still wanted to express my love and support for family, and so I shopped the Filipino grocery store and found the fish sauce I grew up with. Rufina has some sketch ingredients compared to the fish sauces I usually buy like Red Boat or 3 Crabs, but I had to get it for nostalgia's sake. I also cooked a chili con carne y frijoles to put into my brother's refrigerator that has the usual suspects of ground beef, pinto beans, kidney beans, tomatoes, onion, tomato paste, cumin, cayenne, chipotles in adobo sauce, oregano, and granulated garlic and of course, s&p.


I had also bought a can of sliced banana blossom, Asian eggplant, and cut-up long beans at Seafood City for the mise en place. As soon as I got up that Saturday morning, I trimmed the fat and rinsed the oxtails and got them boiling for a couple hours.
In the last hour of boiling, I also added some boneless chuck short ribs and made a thick slurry of peanut butter and shrimp paste (salted dried shrimp with water). After the meat was fall off the bone tender, I set it aside and then sauteed onions and garlic in some beef fat I skimmed off. I then added a bit of the commercial packet of spices for the kare kare which contained the toasted rice flour and annatto coloring plus some I had in my pantry for the stew. Next went in beef broth from the boiling, the peanut butter slurry, and the oxtails and chuck beef. I kept tasting and added salt and black pepper and the Rufina.

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When the stewing meat and gravy cooked down, I put all the vegetables on top.

My brother and his son said they simmered the stew on medium heat until the vegetables got tender and then spooned it atop fluffy steamed rice. Success! I wished I had taken some kare kare for myself. I pondered the repetition of words in Tagalog vocabulary. Kare translates to curry or thick sauce. I'm taking it upon myself this summer to teach my nephew to cook (and plan and shop for a meal) because he needs that life skill for self-sufficiency and be more helpful for his dad.
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