Melon fever!

With the weather warming up, there’s nothing more refreshing than a nice big glass of an icy something-something to cool you off at the end of the day. In my case, I would specifically like that icy something-something to be melon juice, a Filipino beverage that I grew up with.

Melon juice is nothing more than melon, sugar, lemon juice, vanilla mixed together in a giant pitcher, poured over ice — but there’s a tiny trick to it: you’ve got to use a melon scraper. Without it, it wouldn’t be the same. The joy of melon juice lies in the way you eat it: slurp up the short pieces of melon with every sip of juice, and pick out the long strands of melon with your fingers.

Recipe:

1/2 cantaloupe, scraped into long strands
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 tsp vanilla
1 c sugar, adding more to taste
water
ice cubes

Put the cantaloupe, lemon, vanilla and sugar into a gallon-size pitcher. Fill it with water. Stir, adding more sugar to taste. It should be sweet but not over-the-top. Put it in the fridge and let it sit for about 2 hours. Serve over ice and eat with a fork.

A handy guide to misua...

Misua, a very thin noodle used in a lot of Filipino soups, is a tricky thing. Cook it for too long, and you end up with a glutinous, pasty chunk at the bottom of your pot. Cook it too short, and you’re eating straw.

Unlike other Asian noodles, misua — which hails from China and is a good luck symbol for many Filipinos — is made of flour, not rice. Traditionally, this soup includes sliced chayote or patola (a vegetable that also doubles as a bath sponge, I discovered) and straw mushrooms, but I have neither of those, so I’m going to do it my way — with a basic broth of chicken stock and fish sauce, thickened with raw egg at the very end.

But of course, you can have fun with what you add to misua soup. My uncle once put turkey meatballs and asparagus in his, and I’ve seen celery and enoki mushrooms in it, too.

Recipe:

-5 cloves garlic, minced
-1/2 large onion, sliced
-1 qt chicken stock
-Chicken fat (optional)
-handful of celery leaves
-1 package misua noodles
-3 c baby bok choy, washed and leaves sliced into thin strips lengthwise
-8 dried shittake mushrooms
-1 c shredded chicken
-1/4 c green onions, sliced
-fish sauce to taste
-1 egg (optional)

In a large pot, gently fry the garlic in vegetable oil or chicken fat until it gets slightly golden brown. Add in onions and cook until translucent. Pour in chicken stock (add water if it’s not enough broth). Add mushrooms, celery and bok choy and bring to a boil. Cook until the bok choy is tender. Pull out mushrooms and cut into bite-size pieces if using whole shittake mushrooms.

Add in misua noodles and chicken and boil for two minutes until misua is cooked through. Do not overcook! If desired, crack in the egg and stir into the soup to thicken the broth. Flavor with fish sauce and pepper. Garnish with green onions.

Buko pandan: coconut salad with jello flavored from the pandan leaf

Rellenong bangus at Tita Jean's house

Palabok with eggs, shrimp, scallions, tinapa and chicharron.

Rellenong manok: Deboned chicken stuffed with eggs, sausage, peas, raisins and then baked in its own skin. Creeeepy!

Fresh lumpia -- basically, it's an egg roll served up in an egg-crepe-like wrapper and garnished with a peanut dipping sauce

Asian-style calamari: Calamari rings fried to a crisp and dipped in vinegar with raw garlic, salt and pepper

I also drew this picture for you to show you what the garnishes on arroz caldo should look like. If you don't have calamansi, Philippine native lime, you can use lime or lemon.

On cold winter days, my Tito Maro — who used to pick my sister and me up after school — would surprise us with a big pot of arroz caldo waiting for us in the kitchen.

Min Min and I would eat about three bowls each and absolutely ruin our appetites for dinner, but we couldn’t stop.

Arroz caldo, a fragrant rice porridge with chicken, saffron and ginger, garnished with lime, fried garlic, scallions and fish sauce, just really hits the spot, no matter who you are or what culture you come from.

A little about the history of arroz caldo: it’s originally derived from the Chinese rice porridge dish, congee — and in Tagalog, it’s called lugau. But the Spanish settlers adapted it to their taste by adding saffron and renamed it something that they could understand — hence, arroz caldo — rice broth.

Recipe after the jump.

Recipe:

2 chicken thighs, cooked and shredded
1 qt chicken stock (hopefully, saved from the aforementioned chicken)
1 tsp saffron (a.k.a. “the good shit”)
2 tbs ginger, cut into large pieces (so people will see it while they’re eating it and take it out)
1 onion, sliced
2 cups of jasmine rice, cooked
fish sauce (to taste)
salt
pepper
olive oil (or chicken fat)
1 tsp peppercorns

Garnish:
6 cloves of garlic, minced and pan-fried until crisp
2 tbs chopped scallions
fish sauce
calamansi or lime

In a dutch oven (or a large pot, whatever), heat the oil (or chicken fat) and dump in the onions and garlic and peppercorns over medium heat and stir it around until the onions are soft and translucent. Season with salt and pepper.

Add in the rice, saffron, chicken and chicken stock. Bring to a boil, and then reduce to a simmer. Cover partially with the pot cover. Cook for an hour,  but every ten minutes, stir and add more liquid as necessary (at this point, if you’ve run out of chicken stock, add water).

The consistency should be like a creamy risotto — that’s why it’s key to KEEP STIRRING and adding liquid. Season to taste. Be liberal with the salt, pepper and fish sauce. The fish sauce shouldn’t be in-your-face, but it should give the dish a subtle depth.

To serve, put the garnishes on the table so everyone can put as much or as little as they’d like on top of their arroz caldo. Serve piping hot.

There's my flan at the potluck -- front and center.

A few weeks ago, my friend Becky decided to have a ROYGBIV potluck party — everyone was required to bring one food from one color of the rainbow. I took yellow and declared I would make FLAN.

FLAN!?!?! What the hell was I thinking? Who likes flan? I mean, my mother is a great maker of flan, but most people — I mean, it’s just not something that you would go out of your way to eat, you know? Even I can acknowledge that.

And I tried to cover it up at the potluck by passing it off as “creme caramel,” which sounds exotic and fancy — but people know what’s up.

Whatever, I’m just being negative. Seriously, though, it was super easy and the recipe is pretty foolproof. If executed successfully, you will have a lovely, light, creme-brulee-esque sugar cream heaven. But if you overcook it even just a tad, you will end up with rubber.

Unfortunately, I overcooked my flan slightly. I can’t be awesome at every recipe.

This recipe for flan is taken from Nora Daza’s “Let’s Cook with Nora” Filipino cookbook.

Recipe:

2 c evaporated milk
8 egg yolks
1 tsp lemon rind
splash of vanilla
1 c sugar
1/2 c caramel syrup

Boil a teakettle of water.

In a saucepan, heat up 1-1/2 c sugar over low heat. Don’t touch it. Let it turn into liquid on its own, stir it once, and then pour into your flan pan. Place the pan in a cool place and let the sugar caramel harden.

In a double boiler, scald the milk (that means, boil it to a point where there is a film on top, about 15 minutes). Beat the egg yolks and whisk it in, with sugar, vanilla and lemon. Stir that together until combined (the batter is so good on its own…you should try it). Pour into the flan pan.

Place a large roasting pan in the oven. put the pan with your flan in it. Pour boiling water into the roasting pan until it reaches halfway up the flan pan.

Bake for 45 minutes, and remove immediately from the water to stop it from cooking. Unmold just before serving.

This squash was suuuchhh a bitch to cut...

Finally, in honor of my new Filipino cookbook, Kulinarya, I decided to make ginaatang kalabasa at sitaw, a coconut milk stew of buttercup squash, green beans and shrimp with ginger. 

It was incredibly easy to make — I had no idea it only took 5 minutes for squash to cook (I thought it would take FOREVER, like potatoes do). The only tricky part was making the homemade shrimp stock, but it turned out easier than I thought. 

I grew up eating this with my gramma, and as a kid, I didn’t like it too much. But now as an adult, I love it — and so will you. Recipe follows. 

Squash city, population squash!

Straining the shrimp heads for the stock.

RECIPE:

2 tomatoes
1 onion
4 cloves garlic
1/2 unpeeled shrimp with head on
2 handfuls green string beans
1/2 buttercup squash
1 can coconut milk
1 1/2 tbs. fish sauce
1 small piece of ginger

TOOLS: blender

Peel the shrimp and take off its little head. Do not discard. Take the skin and head and put it into a small pot. Add enough water to cover and simmer for 15 minutes. Pour it into a blender and grind. Press this mixture through a sieve and set aside.

Recipe I used from Kulinarya

Chop tomatoes, slice onions into thin pieces, smash and mince garlic. Chop the squash into bite-sized cubes. Trim the beans. Cut the ginger into sticks, about 1/2 cm in diameter. 

Adding stock and green beans.

Saute garlic and onions in regular cooking oil, and when it’s translucent, add the tomatoes and cook for two minutes. 

Add in shrimp broth and green string beans. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 5 minutes. 

Add in the coconut milk and squash. Simmer for another 10 minutes, or whenever the squash is cooked. Add the shrimp, fish sauce and cook until the shrimp is orange. Season to taste. 

Serve over freshly steamed rice.

Sinigang really isn’t that special, but for some reason, I loved it. It’s just radish, spinach, tomatoes, eggplant and meat in a sour, fishy broth. Usually, you use pork or fish, but you can also use shrimp or beef.

This is not the kind of food you order at a restaurant. It’s something that you have to eat from home. And every Filipino family has their own recipe for it (I was mortified to discover that my friend Josie’s family uses CORN in her sinigang…WEIRDDDDD!).  So I am happy and proud to finally give you our family’s recipe for SINIGANG. Here we go!

Sinigang is traditionally eaten for breakfast, over sinanag — garlic fried rice. But I never eat it at way. It’s always served for dinner in the winter, over freshly steamed rice.

The flavor base of the soup is tamarind, calamansi and patis. You will never be able to find tamarind here in the States, so don’t bother. And unless your gramma FedExes you calamansi — native Philippine lime — to your DC rowhouse from her garden in SoCal, then you probably won’t find that, either. But you will be able to find Knorr’s Sinigang Tamarind Soup Base from your local Asian store.

But if you seriously can’t find it, email me and I’ll send you a pack. Jeez.

RECIPE:

1 1/2 stewing pork or beef with as much fat on it as possible
1 1/2 pack of Knorr’s sinigang mix
1 bok choy, cut into 2 1/2 in pieces, green part only (or 3 handfuls of spinach)
1 onion, quartered
1 tomato, quartered
2 Japanese eggplants, cut into 1/2 in thick circles
1/2 of a whole daikon radish, cut into 1/2 in thick half-circles
1 siling panigang (umm, sorry I don’t know what this is in English, but to help you out I’ve provided a photo…that’s not very helpful either. Whatever you do, don’t use a Thai chili, it’s too hot for this dish. Use a green pepper that is not so spicy.)
Fish sauce (to taste)

Sawsawan (garnish):
1 tbs fish sauce with lemon or calamansi squeezed into it

Fill a pot with water. Dump the meat, soup base, onions and tomato in. Bring to a boil and then reduce to a simmer for an hour and a half until the meat gets really soft. Then, dump in the hard vegetables — the radish and eggplant — and let that cook for about 5 minutes. Then, add in the bok choy and cook for another two minutes. Add fish sauce to taste.

Serve over white rice, using the sawsawan as an accompaniment.