Mister Donut chocolate cake donuts

The 7-Eleven across the street has this promo where you can get three donuts for Php. 30 between the hours of 9 PM and midnight.

Timely, as I've been having the strangest overpowering snack food cravings. So, tonight I went for three of the chocolate cake ones.

The choco peanut just tasted breaded and greasy. I wouldn't have that again. The peanut bit (because I only saw the flavor after I ate it) maybe explains the greasiness.

Choco butternut is my favorite of the three, despite it not tasting like butter, nut, or squash (if butternut is a variety of squash.)

The Dutch choco crunch flavor is not crunchy, and not all that chocolatey.

Also, none of these are actually all that chocolatey, or maybe that's just because I also expect chocolate to be quite sweet (and maybe not everybody has as much of a sweet tooth as I do,) but if I want something to chew on then they're all right with a tetra pack of milk or a bit of whatever flavor tea.

(Not) Arroz a la Cubana

Oddly, since switching to saba as a staple, I've been craving arroz a la cubana, which is fried yellow plantain with minced beef (or minced pork and beef) and garlic rice.

I just had a skin-steamed saba with spicy bopis and an egg instead (those last two from the canteen down the street), and it actually hit the spot well enough. The banana was thoroughly green, though, so there wasn't that bit of sweetness--which I think suited the dish just fine.

I can't get over how much like a potato that skin-steamed green saba tastes, with the convenience of not having to scrub the skin, and much easier peeling.

Next up (probably, sometime): green saba and cream of mushroom soup! Or, mashed green saba with bacon bits (or corned beef) and cabbage!

No-bake Fruit Root Crisp

Ingredients

- quick-cook or instant oatmeal (dry)
- yellow bananas
- Lily's homestyle peanut butter (I like this brand because it's runny)
- singkamas, raw and sliced
- raisins

Directions

1. Slice bananas, or in this case I toasted them and then peeled and sliced them because they're yellow saba bananas.

2. Peel and slice singkamas. Why is this usually a savory root crop? Am I the only one who's bitten into a raw one and realized that it tastes sweet? It's the perfect cheap and local substitute for apple or pear. In this recipe, of course, sliced apple or pear will do but then it will be more like Fruit Fruit Crisp. Who invited Fruit Fruit??

3. Pour quick-cook or instant oatmeal in a bowl. Technically, it's already cooked and only needs water to become oatmeal porridge, which we shall not do.

4. Add peanut butter.

5. Add raisins, banana slices, singkamas slices, more raisins, and top with peanut butter.

6. Mix it all up.

7. Got milk?

Pumpkin Spice Oatmeal

Clockwise from top-right: Cinnamon, oatmeal, ginger root, pumpkin, nutmeg, and a white sugar.

Note to future self: brown sugar would have been better.

Sugar and spice is all added to taste, so I couldn't be bothered to write up the measurements.

Basically, I chopped the pumpkin in half and left both halves in the rice cooker (skin sides, or rounded sides, up) until the whole vegetable was soft enough to use a spoon and scoop the vegetable from the skin.

Added to a bowl of cooked oatmeal, raw ginger then grated over it, dusted with cinnmon and nutmeg, and sugar added. Then, mashed the whole thing together.

In the future, I think that I would cut the pumpkin sideways so that it would become more like a bowl, and maybe serve the sugar-and-spice oatmeal in the pumpkin. However, these small pumpkins are mostly air and seeds inside, and since I don't know how to roast pumpkin seeds into nuts... I think I'll stick with the big wedges of kalabasa from now on.

Barbecue Deviled Eggs

Deviling an egg is the process of taking an egg, boiling it, slicing it in half, scooping out the cooked yolk, and replacing the empty part of the egg whites with something else (usually the yolk mixed with something like mustard, or bacon bits, or something.)

About three months back, I wrote about a simple barbecue sauce recipe that only mixed ketchup with pure molasses.

It tasted like ketchup mixed with molasses. Not so much like barbecue sauce. Adding Worchestershire sauce for a little more complexity was not a good idea.

The way to get it tasting like barbecue was actually a whole lot simpler.

Black pepper and white pepper both come from the tiny, round, berry-like fruit of the Piper nigrum, not to be confused with capsicum peppers or chili peppers. White pepper is made when the black pepper berries are soaked to remove the skin, so black pepper is technically both black and white pepper. White pepper consequently has more of a lift in its flavor.

I can imagine that ground black and white pepper added to the ketchup-molasses mix would make it taste like barbecue sauce. Personally, I like the texture and homestyle look that the coarse grains of black peppermill give.

The above egg has been deviled, having the yellow egg yolks mixed with the ketchup, pure molasses, and finished off with a dash of black peppermill.

Barbecue deviled eggs!

I'd have these more often, but it has no escaped my notice that there's been a recent spike in the price of eggs.

A dozen regular used to be 63, and right now they're over 70. The ones pictured above, of course, I sort of have to go, "Seriously?" I love the earth and am gullible enough to believe that those would be more nutritious, but still, at the time that photo was taken, each of those organic eggs would be double the price of a regular one of the same non-brand brand.

Staple Foods

I have been cooking, I have been eating, and I have even been taking pictures of all that. I just haven't felt like writing about any of it, which is my bad.

Some entries that I look forward to making:

• My disasterous attempt at Ginataan Halo-Halo (also known as Ginataan Bilo-Bilo), which was the dish that got my culinary muses bothering me in the first place because my family's cook, Minda, made just the best version of it. My version was... such a disaster!
• A comparison of San Marino canned tuna paella to Century canned tuna paella, but okay, I can give it away in one sentence: San Marino's tastes like it has pandan in it, which might be weird, but both are okay.
  
• Pumpkin spice!!! I love pumpkin spice. I'd flavor everything with pumpkin spice if I could, and I did...or, I tried to.



• Sibot soup with misua noodles and catfish.



• I compared two different kinds of patola, which even the grocer got confused with, "Wait, they're both patola? They don't look the same. Let me call my manager because the produce code must be wrong..."



• A restaurant review! Health Break. Z-Compound, 33A Malingap St., Teachers' Village, Quezon City. I had the golden-brown coconut-oil fried cream dory with potato wedges dusted with cheese. It was good. I shall post a real entry sometime.



• Macaroni pudding: macaroni boiled in milk with raisins, orange rind, spices and sugar (and an optional splash of brandy, but I used white wine instead because...)



• Comparison between mock and cheese (cheeseless macaroni and cheese, because I was broke then), a real macaroni and cheese that's sort of a cross between carbonara and hollandaise sauce (because I was up for cheap experimentation then), and a victorious final recipe to show how far I've come (macaroni and fondue cheese, with cheddar, emmental, white wine and cayenne pepper... because I was reckless then.)

But first: getting back to basics.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization defines a staple food as a food that is eaten routinely, and in such quantities that it constitutes a dominant portion of a standard diet in a given population, supplying a large fraction of the needs for energy-rich materials and generally a significant proportion of the intake of other nutrients as well.

Most people live on a diet based on just a small number of staples.

Most of the time, I trust my body. It will express its need for iron by giving me a craving for a burger, for example. At other times, something like corn on the cob will make my hyperacidity act up, and I know this, but if I followed my craving for corn then I'd eat as much as I possibly can in one sitting--which makes me think that my body actually does not know what's good for us.

I try to develop better judgment by reading up on nutrition and seeing what's the best option that I can follow when I crave so-and-so food, or what's best to fill it while I'm hungry.

From my extensive research (meaning, Google and random health blogs)--everything is bad to eat. Everything. Every staple food.

White rice is pure carbohydrates that become indistinguishable to the body after digestion to just pure sugar. Not-white rice has phylates and lechtins that cause cramps and toxins to form in the body. Pasta has gluten, which even those without Coeliac's disease can suffer the effects of. Bread has gluten and is the same empty sugar-calories as rice and pasta that lead to sugar crashes and poor growth, healing, and organ development. Rice and wheat noodles have the same problem as rice and bread. Egg noodles, which at least have some protein, are more expensive. Oatmeal has been my default lately, although that's also relatively expensive and my godmother told me that they have something unhealthy that I forgot what exactly it was.

While I would usually conclude that we must have evolved by now to be tolerant of most aspects of stuff that keeps us alive, I did wonder what I would turn to if I listened to every dietary or culinary alarmist.

That's why lately, I've been having saba bananas.

My preferred method is to just wash them and stick them in a rice cooker with their skins still on. I used to peel them green and raw and slice them and fry them in oil, but I didn't like getting the raw sap on my hands. The sap turns black and sticks to the rice cooker pot, making for a lot of scrubbing later on, but overall I find this easier.

Note that the ones in the photo are already yellowing. When the saba bananas are very green, then they must be cooked thoroughly so that they can be eaten. Very green bananas have the taste and texture of a white kamote. Yellow saba bananas can technically be eaten raw because they're ripe, but I prefer just a little toastiness to them, and they can be slightly sweet to very sweet. A slight sweetness can add some interest to traditional dishes such as sliced, fried saba banana with sunny-side-up egg and garlic rice.

I prefer them either very, very green or decidedly yellow instead of something in-between, most of the time.

They turn black in the cooker pot. I turn them over after the rice cooker clicks, and wait until the cooker will let me set it to "cook" mode again. With the very green ones, I repeat the above process about four times so each "side" of the banana gets exposed to two cook cycles of heat, and then I keep them all on "warm" for about twenty minutes. Yellow saba bananas have a much shorter cooking time than the very green ones, maybe only needing two "cook" cycle repeats and no "warm" leaving.

Now to peel them! First, I begin by sticking a fork into the tip of the banana and prying the peel back:

Next, I pinch the stem and push the fruit out of the peel. If properly cooked, this should be very easy. Note that I do this all while they're still hot, because if I leave them to cool then they shrink a little like prunes or raisins, the fruit inside becomes slightly stiff, and more difficult to remove from the skins.

Because these bananas were yellow, I can eat them on their own. When they are very green, I can have them with blocks of commercial cheese, or peanut butter and raisins. Whatever goes with something starchy and bland.

Breakfast Jolly Sandwiches: Pancake Sandwich

My body clock has been nocturnal, lately. It gets that way sometimes. I try alarm clocks, make sure to get out and catch some sun so that my body is reminded that daytime exists, but sometimes it just doesn't work.

That's unfortunate, when my favorite meal is breakfast.

It's just the sorts of food that people have collectively agreed are for that time of the day, usually. I can't even say so much that it's because they're sweet or salty or starchy or whatever. They make the dawn break in my tummy. So, when I'm up early enough--or stay up late enough that it's early--then I like to go out and have breakfast.

Or I make my own.

But there's a lot of people out there that just make better food than I do and--

--Jollibee is one of them. There's their poster for Breakfast Jolly Sandwiches, a breakfast burger yum (or is that a sausage?) with bacon and egg, for Php. 70 (with a drink) and a pancake sandwich for Php. 60 (with a drink, Php. 50 solo order.)

Pancake sandwiches are intriguing. So, I had that.

Look at the size of that thing.

It's tiny. Like, four bites.

A pancake is actually a regional thing. These golden-brown American pancakes are known in England as drop scones or pikelets and tend to be smaller. I'd say that this is a pikelet sandwich. What English people call pancakes, too, I would call a fried eggy crepe--or, "that's what I made by accident when trying to make American pancakes but greased the pan too much".

The bacon and eggs are welded to the center of the pikelets with melted cheese. I do like cheese. A pity that the egg was overdone, but then again overcooking eggs is just safer if you're running a restaurant.

Overall, interesting concept, but I think I'd rather make this myself from now on.

Radish Carbonara

Carbonara is one of my favorite pasta sauces. As it turns out, it doesn't traditionally contain cream. It's just eggs, Parmasan cheese, and pepper. It's cooked by the heat of just-boiled, steaming, scalding hot spaghetti.

So, if I wanted to swap out the pasta for raw white radish, then I technically couldn't make salmonella-risk-free carbonara unless I gently heated it like a Hollandaise sauce in a separate pot.

Or...if I just got a pack of it. I like Clara Ole's jams, but their carbonara was a little runny, contained MSG, and hit the spot with the carbonara flavor like a blindfolded motion-sick toddler pins the tail on the donkey at a cruise ship birthday party.

That's why I'm going to stick with Del Monte from now on, although I might try Clare Ole's béchamel sauce in the future.

I can't find bacon bits at the grocery store, so I usually have the carbonara with a can of champignon mushrooms, and for tonight I thought I'd add some white meat...canned squid, in ink (not soy sauce, I thought that would be too salty.)

I don't know what's going on with the radish on the left. I want to put a top hat and a monocle on it.

Basically, I just chop up the radishes.

Drained the mushrooms, drained the squid, mixed them both in the carbonara, and topped the chopped radishes with it.

The last time, I had radish carbonara with mushroom and cubes of steamed chicken breast. The squid wasn't awful, I think it meshed well with the carbonara, but was still a tad too salty so I think it either would have tasted better if I'd gotten them not canned (though at Php.400 per kilogram in the chilled and frozen seafood section, maybe not) or I'll just stick with poultry next time. Or bacon bits.

Inside-Out Taco

Hrmm...needs some shredded cheese.

But anyway, here's what I used:

1 cup Rico Corn Rice
1 snack pack Hunt's Chili Beef & Beans
1 cabbage

If possible, double-boil cabbage leaves over water in rice cooker. When the water begins to boil, add corn rice into the pot and allow them all to cook.

When the rice is done, mix in the 1 snack pack of Hunt's, lay out the cooked cabbage leaves ready for wrapping...

...and wrap the beans and corn rice in them. Done.

Inside-Out Colcannon

Local corned beef, as I've mentioned before, is different from what the rest of the world considers corned beef. And imported corned beef happens to have a rather steeper price as well, so I figured that beef loaf would be a decent substitute that was close enough to what this recipe is kind of sort of supposed to be...

I was inspired by learning about stuffed cabbage, which is actually a misnomer because it's less that the cabbage itself is hollowed out and stuffed, and more like the leaves are used for a wrap.

Colcannon is mashed potatoes with bacon and something green. There are recipes out there, the pages often padded with comments about how it's a peasant dish so it should only have bacon bits on a special occasion, absolutely no cream or butter because that'd make it to rich and inauthentic, and curly kale instead of cabbage, and whoever wrote the recipe had probably never really had real colcannon...

Where I live, curly kale is extremely expensive if I can even find any kale at all. I consider it very authentically peasant-like to just work with what I can get. Cabbage it is!

Still, here's the major downside to getting interested in exotic food. Even if the exotic ingredients don't exceed my budget, I can never really be sure to have gotten it right flavor-and-texture wise.

So...I'm not even really trying. I'm now just going for something probably vaguely Irish maybe.

Oh, and baby potatoes are always a better idea before I actually have to cook with them...I had to scrub the ones pictured above, with a toothbrush. Still, once they've been washed and chopped, I put the double boiler of my rice cooker to use...

When the potatoes begin to soften, maybe about 8 minutes of steaming, I add the cabbage leaves...

And leave them to fully cook:

Meanwhile, slice and crisp up the beef (corned, loafed, baconed...whichever...)

Here are the ingredients, ready to be assembled:

I put some potatoes on a cabbage leaf, topping it with meat...

...Still being very Asian and using chopsticks instead of just rolling it with my fingers. Well, the cabbage was hot, and it didn't need to be hand-molded into something that would hold its shape, actually, cabbage wraps tend to take care of themselves as it turns out...which was good, because with tortilla wraps or lumpia wraps they sometimes need a line of cornstarch mixed with water to stop them from unraveling. I wondered if I might have to figure out a way to do something like that with cabbage leaves, but it was no problem.

I'd made more than 3, but I kept eating them.

Stuffed Peppers

Learning about the technique of stuffing vegetables became an inspiration. I brainstormed different combinations of capsicum stuffing, trying to think of the best: yellow capsicum stuffed with brown rice, togue, cauliflower...tofu, or quail eggs? I thought that red capsicum should have earthier flavors, like liver and red onion, or catfish and champignon mushrooms, with red rice. Green capsicum would have cubes of sayote, patola, and green papaya--herbed and salted.

And then somebody on these culinary discussion forums I go to said, "Poblano peppers stuffed with macaroni and cheese."

Bye-bye, attempted health consciousness. I'm making that instead.

With Lucky Me mac & cheez, and baked mac style, and some bell peppers (according to the person at the marketplace) that are not shaped like bells at all.

Here's my attempt, which was an eventual success, at hollowing out the peppers for stuffing.

Simply slicing off the top was the wrong way to go about it.

Cutting around the stem and into the fruit allowed me to pull out the fillings by the stem. (Peppers are a culinary vegetable and a particular species and/or processing method make it a spice, but in botany, peppers are a fruit.)

On the plate, pictured above: hollowed-out and de-seeded peppers, and some cabbage leaves that were steamed until soft. Beside them, bowls of Lucky Me macaroni, which cooks for four minutes and then you just add the flavor packet goop. So, the baked macaroni is not actually baked, but boiled and then has a flavor packet added to make it taste like it's baked when it wasn't. Sneaky.

In general: stuffing raw peppers was a huge mistake when no sour cream was involved! The texture was totally wrong, so I would toast, roast, or steam the hollow peppers before stuffing them next time. I steamed the peppers after stuffing them this time.

baked mac + pepper = good, could use barbecue sauce though*
baked mac + cabbage = very good, would have again
mac & cheez + pepper = mediocre, maybe should have gone for a spicier pepper to stuff.
mac & cheez + cabbage = boring, but if I'd made a bunch of these I'd just mindlessly chomp at them and not be able to stop until they were all finished off


* I did try out the ketchup-mixed-with-molasses trick again, adding some Worcestershire sauce--Not going to do that again, and I don't really recommend it for this.

Corn Rice

My aunt and I used to be really curious about what makes rice really yellow when it's served at Chinese restaurants, or, in my case, Indonesian festivals.

Egg yolks don't do that, at least not without sticking to every grain and changing the shape so that it looks lumpier.

Butter doesn't do that. Margarine doesn't do that without making it taste like margarine, which it didn't.

As it turns out, making a rice pilaf with turmeric spice or, if you can afford it then saffron, is what gives white rice a vivid yellow coloring.

Also, feeding genetically-modified golden rice to Chinese kids without telling their parents. But hey, it worked! Vitamin A for every body!

And now there's corn disguised as rice.

I've seen risoni pasta that's shaped like grains of rice, but corn is new.

Rico corn rice goes for about Php. 70 per kilogram, it does expand (just not as much as rice), and it cooks pretty speedy-quick. The instructions at the back of the pack say to wait for the water to boil first, then pour in the corn rice.

It doesn't taste very much like corn, which is too bad because I really do like the taste of corn even though it makes my stomach acids act up...and, I think corn rice kind of makes my stomach acids act up. Not as badly as actual corn, which gives me water brash, but just that I digest corn rice much faster and get hungry again after a couple of hours.

For that reason, I wouldn't change my staple to this, but it's an interesting ingredient to work with...

Here's me stuffing cabbages with corn rice...

The directions on the pack say that, unlike with real rice, it's better to wait until the water is boiling and then add the corn rice.

So, as the rice cooks below, the cabbage leaves get steamed up top...

I've been having a tactile food craving. I've been wanting to wrap something, like a tortilla or a crepe or something. Cabbage leaves would do, but I wondered how to get them to stay rolled. A tortilla, I could stick with some melted cheese or even cornstarch and water.

But as it turns out, cooked cabbage is very pliable. Once it's rolled into a wrap, it sticks to itself.

I thought the recommended amount of water on the pack, per cup of corn rice, actually left it quite dry. I overestimated the water the next time, and came out with a porridge.

So, I thought that I'd make it into champurrado. Not champorado, but champurrado substituting corn rice for corn meal, adding chocolate and cinnamon sugar.

Maybe I should specify...

- 1 cup corn rice
- 3 cups water
- 2 star anise...things...
- 2 Tbsp brown sugar
- 1 1/2 Tbsp cocoa powder
- dash of cinnamon

Although, I don't recommend this recipe that I made up because this was actually pretty intensely flavored. I steeped the star anises in the water, and kept them in there when the water boiled and I added the corn rice. When about halfway done, and the water had turned cloudy with what I supposed was corn starch, I plucked out both anise seeds. The corn rice retained the tangy numbing flavor.

...I still prefer the sticky rice version. While cornstarch is one effective thickener, corn rice doesn't seem to have any left after processing, so it was like ordinary rice dumped in hot chocolate.

I might have put too much anise, since the lift it gave to the dish was a little intense...

Also, the recipe I based this off mentioned star anise as a possible spice, but stuck with cinnamon. Good call, I think, since cinnamon in the chocolate did give it a very woodsy sort of groundedness. Both together...intense, is all I can say. Maybe if I'd doubled the amount of corn rice...because these are flavors that, though new to me in combination, I do think all worked really well together.


But I've thought up of other recipes to use corn rice in, which I'll write more on later.