American Filipina

My sister shows off her contribution to the Merienda.      This edible surprise will scare you if you are not familiar with this Filipino appetizer.  I know of many Filipinos who dare not touch this unless they are drunk.  It is exotic and it is strange.  It even looks a little disgusting.  My father said something to me growing up about the etiquette of eating this culinary freak of nature.  He said "you must eat it in a movie theatre so you do not have to look at it."             The mysterious delicacy I build up here is the legendary balut.  According to Wikipedia, a  balut  is a fertilized  duck  (or chicken) egg with a nearly-developed  embryo  inside that is boiled alive and eaten in the shell.      Popularly believed to be an  aphrodisiac  and considered a high-protein, hearty snack, balut are mostly sold by street vendors in the regions where they are available. It is commonly sold as streetfood in the  Philippines .  The  Filipino  and  Malay  word  balut

This recipe blog entry is dedicated to my Tito Filimar Blanco  who passed away on Tuesday, April 12, 2011.  May he rest in peace. My cousin Frances shows off the dish his dad, my Uncle Leo, cooked      On your birthday, you must have someone make this dish for you.  The dish is called pancit or pansit, which is the term for noodles in Filipino cuisine. Noodles were introduced into the Philippines by the Chinese and have since been adopted into local cuisine. The term pancit is derived from the Hokkien pian i sit (Chinese: 便ê食) which means "something conveniently cooked fast".      If you have ever been to a Filipino party anywhere in the world, this dish will be there 99% of the time.  If it is not on the table, the host ran out of time to prepare it.  I think this dish best appeals to Americans because it is not too strange and exotic looking on the table.  The taste also does not have a distinct single strong ingredient to frighten away the baseline palette.  The dis

My cousins Paul and Diana.  Diana made the rice cake.      My grandmother taught me how to make this dish when I was maybe ten years old.  I remember only that this was a caramel tasting delight of sweet chewiness.  Some call this dish sticky rice, but there are so many kinds of Filipino dishes made of sticky rice, it is difficult to tell which one people are talking about.  We just called this rice cake and this is grandma's rice cake.  Nobody has made this like my grandmother that I have tasted in Houston.      My brothers and sisters and I were sad because we thought that this recipe was lost when our grandmother died.  We take these things for granted, that a recipe is a recipe and with the internet you can find almost anything.  Maybe to some extent this is true.  If it is, then why were we unable to duplicate my grandmother's rice cake?  Was there some secret ingredient she threw in there that we could not distill in our own taste buds?  After grandmother died, we us

      This is the Filipino dish I ask for every year on my birthday.  There is something about the sour taste of the tamarind mixed with warm pork flavored broth that literally brings me back to my childhood like a time machine.  This soup is also made by other Asian cultures, but slightly different.        My cousin and her mom proudly show off their sinigang.       The word “ sinigang ” means the process of cooking meals ( usually sour ) in a clay pot while controlling the ember’s heat by blowing through a pipe of bamboo. There are also different varieties of sinigang and the souring ingredient may also vary.           The sour is from the tamarind.  The first time I ever ate a tamarind was when my grandmother arrived from the Phillipines.  She brought over a large container of goodies from the ancestral village in Agoo, La Union.  I remember she gave me a yellow cellophane wrapper with several black sticky circular candies inside.  I was six years old and relu