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.