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.

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.

Oatmeal and Soya Milk

The weather continues to be chilly and damp, and while I still have my sweet tooth I'm getting bored of rice porridge. Although I really want to make an entry on sibot chicken soup sometime soon.

Here's something much quicker:

Vitamilk is my favorite brand of soy milk right now. It's from Thailand, comes in 10-ounce/300mL glass bottles at about 25 Php a pop, with a very creamy consistency for something that doesn't actually contain dairy, and it's quite a bit sweeter than other brands of soya milk (which I can guess is probably from lots of sugar and that makes it bad for me, even though the soya bean is probably one of the first break-out stars of healthy-alternative foodstuff and so soya milk can't be unhealthy...Sugar! So much sugar!)

As of the time of this writing, Vitamilk comes in four flavors: plain (that is to say, sweetened), chocolate, double chocolate, and my favorite (pictured above)...black cereal, or "Vitamilk: Energy" as it's branded.

The black cereal flavor contains black sesame, black rice, and brown rice. While "cereal" is more of an agricultural term than a botanical classification, there is some cerealness (cereality?) to the flavor. If my body went by flavor cues alone, a bottle of that would hack my body into thinking it's had a full bowl of corn flakes.

Today, though, I want something to actually chew--that'll stick to the walls of my stomach.

Hence, quick-cook oatmeal.

Oats, scientific name Avena sativa, is a grain grown in temperate climates and some geographically elevated parts of India that can imitate a temperate climate. Oat groats and steel-cut oats, which are the least processed for human consumption, go rancid fairly quickly and must be pre-soaked before cooking, then cooked for half an hour at least, and the oatmeal made from groats tends to be difficult to chew. (According to Wikipedia. I've never eaten less processed groats myself.)

When oat groats are de-husked, steamed, toasted, rolled into flat flakes, and then left to dry, then they are called "rolled oats". Rolled oats have a longer shelf life and shorter cooking time compared to the oat groats, although are less nutritious after husk removal.

Quick-cook and instant oatmeal are essentially the same as rolled oats, the difference being that they are rolled much thinner--quick-cook being rolled thinner than rolled oats, and instant rolled even thinner than quick-cook oats so it rehydrates faster. I say "rehydrates" because they are technically already cooked and only need to be rehydrated. However, knowing this, I have experimented with rehydrating instant oatmeal in cold water and room-temperate water, and I can say that hot water is really the best way to develop the gluten and soften the oats right away.

In this case, I mean...hot soya milk. Why add the soya milk afterwards, to water-boiled oats? That'll just dilute the flavor, and it's not as if soya milk curdles or gets a skin on top of it like dairy milk would.


That's for the ingredients, now for the directions:

I pour the soy milk out into a saucepan, bring it to the slightest of simmers, sprinkle in one cup of quick-cook oatmeal, take it off the heat and cover for about five minutes.


While quick-cook oatmeal instructions advise a ratio of three cups of liquid to one cup of oats, I prefer my oatmeal to be much much thicker, about 1.5-2 cups of liquid to one cup of oats.

I won't post a picture of the finished product in a bowl because I accidentally ate it all again even if I could be bothered to set up better lighting to take a good picture, it just doesn't look appetizing. It's a gray mulch. Still, I think it smells really good and is perfect to start a dreary, gray, damp, chilly morning!

I topped it with some banana slices, too--the banana was too sweet, the slices wilted in the heat of the porridge, and it just didn't mesh well. Since it was a dessert banana variety (lacatan), I might have better luck with a milder-tasting banana such as a cavendish, or a cooking banana such as saba. Or I could just eat the banana separately.

I'm also tempted to make a sort of egg-drop oatmeal. Maybe next time. With the double chocolate Vitamilk.

Internet (Indonesian instant food)

...Well, semi-instant.

From left to right: a pack of Indo Mie (that is, Indonesian instant noodles), an egg, and a pack of Swift's Carne Norte (Philippine brand).

Internet as a food is a result of a word-mash of Indo Mie, telur (which means "egg" in Bahasa), and kornet daging (which means "corned beef/meat" in Bahasa).

I'm so glad that Indo Mie brand noodles can get exported to Philippine grocery stores now. I grew up in Indonesia, and that did some strange things to my tastes.

Even eggs were different there, I remember. Upon moving to Indonesia, my mother requested, in the little Bahasa that she knew at the beginning, for her room to be painted eggshell--which was supposed to be a shade of white. The workers painted it terracotta. My mother didn't understand what went wrong until she did the groceries. Even the best-stocked supermarkets had no white eggs anywhere. They were terracotta-colored, small, as angular as an egg can possibly be, and thick-shelled. When my family moved back to the Philippines, I had to practice working with white, plump, large (even when they were graded as small), thin-shelled eggs and get used to them again. My omelets were disasters, for months.

What on earth is Carne Norte? Yes, that's Spanish for "meat (of the) north" but according to the Internet (as in, the technology with the software and all the information) this means "corned beef" in the Philippines. Uhh...no it doesn't! Swift also has a corned beef packet labeled corned beef! If Carne Norte is corned beef then that's just confusing.

I've accidentally eaten wet dog food with a more appetizing flavor and texture than Swift's corned beef, by the way. Maybe it's because I followed the directions written on the packet and kept the packet in a bowl of scalding hot water, instead of making it like I prefer to make corned beef, which is pan-fried until the oil dries and leaves meat with the consistency of a crispy potato hash brown.

But maybe not, because I've eaten PureFood's corned beef straight from the can and that did not taste anything like wet dog food, that tasted like real meat and has always been my favorite brand.

I like to try new things, though, and I'll give Swift another chance... Here's hoping that their Carne Norte is better.

So...How do you corn beef, anyway? Are the cows fed corn? Is it because the meat is shredded into striated rows, like corn? The latter one was the explanation that one of my science teachers gave me, but it turns out to be that "corning" of meat refers to leaving it in a brine with large grains of salt. These grains of salt are called kernels, or corns.

Mi goreng means "noodles (that are) fried" which is a lie with these instant noodles because the noodles are immersed in hot water until cooked and then are mixed with a flavor pack to make it taste as if it's fried when it's not. Sneaky.

Bumbu (flavor powder), is mixed with minyak (oil), kecap manis ("ketchup that is sweet"--the "c" in written Bahsa is pronounced like "ch"), and cambal (chili sauce).

I was a picky eater as a child, but spicy food was the worst to me. When I moved to Indonesia, I had to get used to the flavor or else I'd starve to death. Indo Mie instant noodles was almost the only thing I ate during the transition, because at least I had the option of leaving the chili sauce out.

Nowadays, though, I miss a little kick. After some hesitation pictured above, I included the chili sauce.

I like a little more kecap manis than was shown, but was too hungry to take the trouble to make my own by boiling soy sauce and sugar into a syrup.

Incidentally, if you boil soy sauce, sugar, sake (rice wine), and mirin (rice wine vinegar) into a syrup, then you get Japanese tonkatsu sauce. I was supposed to do that last weekend when I met up with my friend, Angel, who gave me the Indo Mie pack--thank you, Angel! We'll get around to making those rice burgers some day.

The noodles are mixed in with the flavoring and topped with the packet of bawang goreng (fried garlic chips--"bawang" also means "onion" in Bahasa, but in the packet--and in Tagalog--bawang means garlic). Add the corn beef, and the egg.

Mmm!

The Carne Norte wasn't bad. It didn't get as crispy as PureFood's corned beef, but I might have just gotten impatient. Swift's Carne Norte tastes a lot like blood with a hint of liver somewhere in all that beef, which must be the stew referred to in the corner ("Guisado na!") And it does taste mostly like corned beef--so, I still count this dish as Internet.

PureFoods corned beef remains my favorite brand, though--and my definition of corned beef, as juicy with short strings and ability to crisp up to a meat hash or even up to beef bacon floss. In Indonesia, the corned beef was usually overly spiced, came out of unwieldly key-and-roll cans, and had the consistency of clay--which I thought was just wrong, but apparently that's the corned beef that the rest of the world is used to.

I wonder if PureFoods corned beef got imported to Indonesian grocery stores by now.

Anyway, good Internet today--PureFoods corned beef might even have been too salty to mesh with the other ingredients, so I can be comfortable in declaring that this had the best of both worlds.

Dairy Barn (Zesto) and Lil'Orbits

New things I got to try the other day: Dairy Barn chocolate milk by Zesto, which the man running one of the neighborhood general stores that I bought this at told me this tasted exactly like a candy that was discontinued before I was born but always gets him nostalgic. That got me curious, although I can say now that this wasn't wasted on me.

That is chocolatey.

I declare that it has replaced the chocolate truffle Magnum bar as my go-to premenstrual treat, it is so chocolatey, and more affordable.

From a kiosk at the Cubao LRT, I tried out Lil'Orbit mini-donuts. One advantage that this could have over the more prominently-branded Dunkin' Donuts or Mister Donut is that you get to watch them fry along a conveyor-like belt of oil, and they're served piping hot. Six for Php. 21 sure beats the munchkins! They get a dry, cakey texture pretty quick, though, but even then I'd say they aren't bad... especially dunked in Dairy Barn chocolate milk. The flavorings dusted on Lil'Orbit mini-donuts range from cinnamon sugar, cheese, cookies and cream, strawberry, and a few more that I can't remember.