“Faster” is relative, of course. If you go back to my original callos recipe, here, it was rather involved, and took 6+ hours, at least. But since then, I have grown to love callos, the dish, and have had several versions here and abroad. I still prefer the hearty homemade versions (though we had an excellent one at the market in Florence once, and another brilliant version in a Rome market), and while I am not always up for the full-blown time-consuming recipe I first used, I realize too many shortcuts might yield a sub-standard result. Here’s a quicker version that we liked… First, clean the callos or trip thoroughly, slice into smaller pieces or strips and place in a pot with say two cups of white wine and water and bring this to a gentle boil, lower to a simmer and let the tripe soften over say 1.5-2.0 hours.

In another pot (preferably an enameled cast iron beast), saute onions, garlic, lots of chorizong hubad or sliced spanish chorizo, chopped lechon leftovers, a bit of paprika and saute for a few minutes. Add some tomato paste, de-glaze with white wine, add some chopped canned tomatoes or passatta, some beef stock and let that come to a simmer. Throw in any herbs you prefer. Add the tripe back in and let that all simmer until the flavors have melded, say 40-60 minutes. About halfway through the cooking I added a can of chickpeas and don’t forget to season generously with salt and pepper. This was really a much less involved version of callos, but the results were almost as good as the original recipe I used. Totally met the cravings, for less work. It tastes even better a day or two after you cook it (but refrigerate in the meantime, please)… :)

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Several people asked for this recipe. So here it is in brief…

Start with good cubed goat meat. Sprinkle with red wine vinegar, salt and pepper and let this sit for 20 minutes or so.

Heat up an enameled cast iron skillet and add olive oil. Brown the goat cubes well in the hot fat. Remove and set aside.

Using all the remaining fat (both olive oil and goat fat), saute lots of onions, shallots, celery and garlic on medium-high heat until they are fragrant and a bit translucent. The smell in your kitchen right about now should be wonderful.

Add a tablespoon of good tomato paste and “cook” this a bit for say 30-60 seconds. Then add 3/4 to 1 bottle of good red wine and let this simmer for a few minutes to burn off all the alcohol. Add 3 cups or so of chopped canned plum tomatoes, say 2 cups of good beef stock and bring this to a simmer.

Add the browned goat cubes, making sure that the liquid comes just about to the top of the meat. Add a little broth if necessary. Oops, I forgot season the veggies while sautéing, season the stew again now. Don’t overdo the salt, you can always add some later, but it’s hard to tone it down…

Cover the pot, and place it in a pre-heated 325-335F oven for say 2 hours or more until goat is almost fork tender. At the two-hour point, add in cubed potatoes, carrots, red bell pepper and 1-2 siling labuyo or bird’s eye chilies. Also add in some liver paste (either freshly made or canned) as a thickener. Put this back in the oven (uncovered if too watery) covered if it is about the right consistency (I like it quite stewy). Cook another half hour or so and check the potatoes and seasoning and make last adjustments.

Garnish with some Italian parsley if you have it, and serv with some nice crusty bread with butter or with steamed rice, like I prefer to enjoy this dish. Enjoy!

I have made and posted this before, though a variation of this one, here. I also have a kalderetang baka recipe (albeit needing improvements) in the archives, here.

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Sometimes we seek comfort in a bowl of soup. In this case, a 4+ hour slow-cooked beef bulalo that gurgled away on the stove while we puttered around with gingerbread, cookie dough and other kitchen duties. I have featured a similar recipe before, here, and a Cebuano-styled one here, or this “more-ish” version here, but this is an upgraded version that is sure to please most soupies…

I started with 5 pieces of Australian beef shank, rinsed then blanched in hot water to remove some of the impurities. Then we put it in a large heavy enameled pot, covered with water, and let it gurgle over low heat for some 4 hours or so, until the meat was really soft, softer than I have ever gotten it before. This was noting but beef and water. Season later as the salt may actually help to toughen the meat if introduced earlier rather than later. Keep the lid slightly askew so the broth boils down and the flavor is concentrated a bit. However, even at the end of 4 hours, the broth wasn’t flavorful enough, so I added two cans of beef broth with no added MSG. Then season generously with salt, a tablespoon or two of fish sauce and a tablespoon of soy sauce. Add freshly cracked black pepper, some sliced tomatoes (unusual for bulalo, but adds color and flavor) and onions and let this gurgle for another 10-15 minutes. Add the corn, then the cabbage and other greens if using them. Serve piping hot.

This bulalo was SUPERB. And oddly, even better the day after as the flavors melded even more and the cabbage actually tasted meaty. We serve this with lime or kalamansi, patis and chopped chilies on the side for sawsawan. We a couple of foreign friends over for dinner and they happily scooped out the fabulous bone marrow and enjoyed it on toast with lots of salt. Notice how much marrow is still intact, despite over four hours in gurgling liquid. I had this with way too much rice, thank you. :)

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It was my birthday. The daughter was home. Our good friends were game for dinner and their son was also home on a brief holiday. All are foodies. And I was feeling like some meat. So we decided to eat at the wagyu butcher/meat purveyor at Sunvar Plaza on Amorsolo Street in Makati. We’ve been meaning to eat at this place for the past year, and now we had a good excuse…

Think walking into a meat purveyor with a small display freezer filled with marvelous varieties and grades of wagyu. And that’s it. Don’t think about the ambience, the decor, the comfort of the seats, the variety on the menu. Just focus on the beef. There are no airs here.

We started off with an order of raw wagyu “sashimi” style. It was surprisingly good, but incredibly rich. Maybe 80 grams was split between 4 people. We got a few green salads, butternut squash croquettes and onigiri as well. Then three orders of the house specialty steamed wagyu on a bed of vegetables. I wouldn’t have guessed that steamed wagyu would be appealing, but it was utterly delicious. The vegetables were also sweeter than you would have expected, bathed in a bit of melted wagyu fat. I went whole hog, and ordered wagyu rice, a fried rice with bits of caramelized wagyu fat and seasoning. OMG. I was beginning to regret that I forgot to take my daily dosage of lipitor…

Next were three hot stones each with 100 grams of wagyu of another grade from the steamed dish, and these were seared and cooked to the level you desired, though rare is really the only way to go. These were delicious, but I must say the maximum fatty point was being reached rather quickly, at say just 120 grams per person of meat that evening.

This meat was terrific with their dipping sauces and three kinds of salt – some plum salt, lime salt and salt/pepper. Overall it was a very good meal. But not something I would seek more than once every few years. Friends of ours are far more regular consumers of wagyu and in one case, they described a huge bowl of wagyu bulalo (made from locally raised wagyu beef from Mindanao) they ate and the oil slick on the surface of the soup, and I thought… now that’s a recipe for a massive instantaneous heart attack. :)

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This is one of the easiest dishes I have EVER made. A few people sent me an email after I posted a picture of this dish the other night requesting more details on how to make it. I am embarrassed to say it barely warrants a recipe, but here it is for the insistent ones. Take good hanger steak, also known as onglet, and cut it into say two inch wide slices. Cut and marinate just enough meat for the number of people eating at that meal. I cut four pieces, or around 1.4 pounds worth, and well, that was a bit much for two. Then put it in a plastic zip lock bag, add say 1.5 tablespoons of kikkoman soy sauce, say 1 heaping tablespoon of homemade tamarind puree or paste, a half tablespoon of balsamic vinegar and a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce. Add some freshly cracked black pepper, a bit of salt and smush this all together and let it sit in the fridge for two hours or so. Heat up a cast iron pan or the grill if you are doing other items, then sear the meat and cook it to the desired state. I seared for about 2 minutes on one side, flipped it over and stuck it in a 375F oven for say 5 more minutes. Let it rest for a few minutes (say 5-7 minutes) and slice against the grain and serve. Quick, easy and incredibly delicious for the tiniest amount of effort.

We had this with a large green salad. But honestly, I could have easily eaten this with several cups of rice. :)

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This is an extremely rare photo of Mrs. MM sitting on a low seat in a somewhat grimy alley in Xi’an, China. Let me stress, this is NOT her comfort zone. But when traveling, we almost always do things that we rarely, if ever, do at home, it’s just part of the adventure. Actually, the alley wasn’t that bad really, but just before we managed to get this particular table, it was filled with other people, and let’s just say there were projectile this and that which was enough to make one’s eyes roll here and there. :)

Stop #2 on the Lost Plate Food Tour that morning was a ginormous cauldron (batya or filipino laundry basin more accurately describes it actually) of steaming soup. Thick enough to be a stew, it was a stick to your ribs (literally) type of breakfast treat. This couldn’t have been much past 9 in the morning or so, and there were lines for this particular purveyor.

The soup, made with little lamb meatballs, cabbage and various other vegetables, probably a starch thickener of some sort, or one of the veggies acted as a natural thickener, was heady with aroma and chockfull of stuff. at about $1 or just a little more, it seemed like an incredible bargain, all over again.

Several ladles full of soup are placed in a large bowl. The man serving it makes very, very pointed efforts to count the number of meatballs that get included in each bowl, then you can choose a little or a lot of chili sauce, chopped herbs and greens to go on top of it.

I love how abundant these servings are, you don’t get the feeling that it’s all carefully costed and measured to the gram (except for the meatballs, of course)… and it definitely looked like one got his money’s worth. It’s heavily vegetable inclusive, but the strong flavors of lamb also make this meaty at the same time.

You get an old or dry piece of bread for each bowl (we split one order into three bowls) and you break this bread up into little pieces. Ladle the soup over this and mix until the bread absorbs the liquid and it all gets even thicker and heartier. It’s got your carbohydrates, vegetables and protein all in one bowl. I found this a bit heavy and I have never liked starch-thickened soups, but I must say, it was delicious nonetheless. I don’t think I could have finished a whole order, but it was definitely worth the experience. It was still a bit cool the morning we set out on this tour, so a bowl of hot soup was a welcome treat.

We were increasingly flabbergasted by how economical and abundant the meals on this tour were turning out to be. I can’t imagine doing a similar tour anywhere in the Philippines with the same kind of reaction, perhaps only in places like Bacolod or Pampanga, but at PHP40-60 per large serving of anything? Not so easy… After the soup we got back in the tuktuk and headed to the nearby Muslim market…

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The lure of freshly grilled or grilling meat is almost always irresistible. It was no different on Muslim Street in Xi’an, where stall after stall offer local delicacies prepped for the tens of thousands of tourists who walk its length daily. I am told that few if any locals would ever eat here, but this was our first evening, so we were doing the touristy thing. The lines for grilled lamb skewers were often 20-30 folks long, so we took this as a sign of a good thing.

Chunky pieces of mutton are skewered on fresh branches (I never found out from what tree) and grilled over coals. The meat is heavily spiced with cumin, chili, szechuan peppercorns and other spices. It is fragrant, looks terrific and is freshly cooked, all of the hallmarks of to die for noshing.

It was NOT particularly good. So long lines are NOT always a good sign. The wooden sticks burn and that doesn’t enhance the meat. The mutton is chewy, tough and fatty, with an occasional bit of cartilage(?) somehow included. The spices were delicious and assertive but they needed much better meat (or a tenderizing marinade), and perhaps a smaller skewer. The same recipe executed on better cut or selected lamb on metal skewer would have been fabulous.

Not to worry, there was LOTS of other wonderful items to sample and we just headed to next interesting stall or two or three…

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I had three precious packages of oxtails that I had been meaning to turn into an Indonesian “Sop Buntot” or oxtail soup, but weeks had passed and I never got around to it. So yesterday I decided to try out a new recipe, which is nothing more than an oxtail stew really, de-boned, and turned into a pasta sauce. It turned out beautifully for relatively little effort (except for the de-boning which fortunately, I didn’t have to do myself).

First take several kilos (I think I used some 3-3.5 kilos) worth of oxtails and place them in pre-heated pans in a highly pre-heated 450F oven. Toss them in some olive oil and salt and pepper first before tossing them onto the pre-heated pans. You can brown them in a pan on the stove-top as well, but the oven just seemed so much easier, since I needed the oven later in the process anyway. It will take some 25-30 minutes to brown the oxtails nicely (which I was just shy of in the photos here) and remove some of the excess fat. Please don’t ask me what’s wrong with my camera, it’s a sore point, and I think it’s refusing to focus properly and could be the third or fourth casualty of the over 220,000 photos taken for this blog over the past 12+ years…

While you are browning the oxtails, into a large enameled pot, add some olive oil, chopped garlic, chopped leeks, whole small shallots, celery, carrots and salt and pepper and let this saute for about 10-15 minutes until softened nicely. Deglaze the pan with a cup or so of red wine and add in the browned oxtails, salt and pepper, some fresh rosemary, thyme and bay leaves if you have them in the yard (or dried if not). You can also add some ground cloves but it’s optional.

Add two tins of chopped or whole tomatoes, two tins of (or homemade if you have it) of beef broth, a tin of water to just about cover the oxtails and other goodies. Cover this, bring to a boil and then place in a 320F oven for some 4+ hours until the meat is so tender it’s just easy to take it off the bone.

Discard all the bones and return everything to the pot and adjust your seasoning. At this point, it looked like I had too much meat and too little sauce, so you may want to opt to add three tins of tomatoes instead (I am a saucy type). If you like some heat, you can add some dried chili flakes and bring this back to simmering temperature.

Serve with polenta or do as we did, over fettuccine noodles and sprinkled with lots of freshly grated parmesan cheese. It was delicious. Rich, unctuous, comforting, familiar but special all at the same time. I can see using the leftovers (there are a LOT!) for very chi-chi sloppy Guiseppe (hahaha) or even with some good old steamed rice. Overall, this required relatively little effort and it was the perfect Sunday afternoon to cook and I even managed to fit in a two-hour massage while the dish was in the oven! :)

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I recently read this 2011 article about a roast beef recipe credited to Anne Serrane, that dates back to 1966, published in the New York Times, that sounded too simple to be good. But it is brilliant. Just brilliant.

First start off with the best roast beef you can afford. We used a 5.5-6.0 kilo, 4-5 rib bone-in roast beef. Weigh the hunk of beef precisely (or simply read the price tag from the butcher). Ours turned out at 11.78 pounds. Pre-heat your oven to 500F. It’s not in the original recipe, but I salted (generously) the roast beef 12 hours before I cooked it and let in sit in the fridge, uncovered. Two hours before cooking, I took the roast out of the fridge to bring it closer to room temperature. Just before cooking, I salted the meat again, rubbed it with lots of cracked black pepper, and sprinkled it lightly all over with all-purpose flour. Rub the flour into the fat and meat. Place your roast on a rack in a roasting pan (so air circulates under the roast). For each pound of the roast, count 5 minutes in the hot oven. So for a 12 pound roast, cook the roast for 60 minutes at 500F, then turn off the oven and leave it there for 2 hours. Do not open the oven. That’s it. I kid you not. This yielded a perfect medium rare and it was absolutely delicious. The method leaves you lots of time to do other things, and I used this two days in a row and it worked like a charm. The first day I was worried and let it cook for 10 minutes longer than the recipe states, and I had a more medium roast (photo up top), perfect for some guests who otherwise like their meat medium to well done. But if I do this again, I will stick strictly to the 5 minutes per pound of cooking time. We did this a second night and followed only the 5 minute per pound rule and it turned out nice and rare.

So I have posted this, just in case any of you were thinking of doing a roast beef this holiday season. This is going to definitely be the go-to recipe in our home from now on. This was served with a port wine gravy with bacon and roasted shallots, which I have in another post in the archives.

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The food at L’avant Comptoir in Paris a few weeks before Christmas inspired a homemade version ofcarpaccio… I rarely do carpaccio at home because I don’t trust the quality of most raw beef available in Manila (provenance, sourcing, handling, freshness, cooties, etc.), so the only other time I wrote about a carpaccio, I seared the surface of the meat first, but left the interior basically raw, see the old post, here. But serendipity was kind on a visit to the grocery, where the butchers were putting out some incredibly fresh looking imported tenderloin, so I decided to take a chance…

Back at home, I sliced the newly defrosted meat from the grocery into roughly 1/4 inch slices, placed the slices between plastic wrap and flattened the pieces until rather thin. There is a school of thought that this process ruins the meat, and one should slice it very thinly instead, so do whatever you prefer…

Season the meat with some salt and pepper, drizzle good extra virgin olive oil and fresh lemon juice, and top with young arugula leaves (I also used thinly shaved radishes) tossed in the same dressing. Top with lots of shavings of parmiggiano reggiano and enjoy. Everything really hinges on good fresh beef, but otherwise this is one of the easiest dishes to prepare and it tastes terrific!

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