Our wonderful guide Ruixi had been previously advised that Marketman was big on markets, so she made sure that a market was on our itinerary that day. After the fried pancake and hearty bowl of lamb meatball soup, we needed a short break from the eating. The market in the Muslim quarter was bustling, and we only managed to see a small fraction of it, but it was totally worth the trip. As soon as we got out of our tuktuk, we were greeted with this abundance of freshly picked strawberries. Wow!

Dried lotus seeds…

…goji berries…

…black raisins still with their stems…

…green or golden raisins (a personal favorite, so I bought a kilo’s worth) sourced straight from the farms…

…oddly shaped nectarines…

…mulberries, or I think they are mulberries…

…dressing a chicken (why do they say that, when Undressing the chicken is probably more descriptive) or is it a pigeon?…

…lotus roots…

…various green chilies…

…fresh water chestnuts…

…the most incredibly intense red dried chilies I have seen in a while…

…and crushed or ground as you pleased…

…sichuan peppercorns and star anise…

…seeds of all kinds, melon, squash, etc.

I can’t remember what these were, but if I had to guess, seaweed of some sort.

Tons and tons of apples. One forgets when you are conditioned as a child that all red apples are from Washington state, that they probably grow more apples in China than anywhere else on the planet. In fact, China grows nearly half of all the apples commercially sold on the planet, or a whopping 8x the apples grown in the U.S.!

And finally, walnuts and dates. If we weren’t headed to another city and we weren’t so limited by minimal luggage allowance, I would have filled a box with things we saw that day. More market finds in the next few posts…

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Chicken in the “hunter’s style” — In other words, cooked on the spot, possibly in the woods, with whatever game one had been fortunate enough to shoot and kill. Cacciatore usually includes tomatoes in some form, onions, herbs, peppers, mushrooms, etc. I can’t imagine carry all that in my backpack while I hunted for rabbit or wild fowl, but suspend reality for a moment… and go ahead with the spirit of “hunter’s style”. I had been fooling around with pizzas in the brick oven all afternoon, and we decided rather late in the day to make a cacciatore style dish in the remaining heat of the oven coming down from 700F and at just before dinner time roughly 450F…

First, I browned some chicken pieces in some olive oil in a frying pan and placed them in a large Spanish cazuela or clay dish. I returned the frying pan to the heat, added some sliced onions, tomato paste, mushrooms, small cherry tomatoes, peppers, olives and herbs and whatever else from the fridge that seemed to make sense. There was some leftover wine so I added say half a cup of red (can’t recall what kind) and let that simmer a bit before plonking all of that over the chicken and placing the cazuela in the oven for some 20-25 minutes to cook and for all the flavors to meld a bit more. The resulting dish was absolutely delicious, and it was so incredibly easy to make. If I had to do this again, I might add some chunks of bacon as well.

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I kid you not. One of the few places on the planet that you’ll find a quick demo on the proper technique of searing a piece of foie gras on the SIDEWALK! Done with another pilgrimage to my favorite kitchen supplies store Dehillerin, we walked down the street to other nearby stores and ran across this gentleman from one of the stores that specialize in foie gras…

… the unmistakable sizzle of nearly pure fat combined with the aroma of foie had attracted a small local crowd of mostly elderly folk, who patiently listened to the instructions, until it was appropriate to tuck in and get a free taste of this love-it or hate-it ingredient.

At Euro42 a kilo (or so I recall) it didn’t seem that extravagant, considering that just 50-100 grams would satisfy a craving! If we hadn’t been headed back to London before Manila I would have definitely tried to bring back a kilo or two in our luggage.

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Another leftover dish that was as good as the duck the first time around… Fried rice is a such an easy format for leftovers, but with a really flavorful duck, the rice is transformed into a flavorful all-in-one dish.

You know the drill, take previously cooked and preferably cooled or cold rice and break it up from clumps. Chop up all the ingredients in the photo above (onions, garlic, spring onions, red bell pepper, carrots, pickled carrots and radish, dried chinese mushrooms reconstituted in warm water and shredded and chopped duck meat). Heat up a wok or large frying pan and add some vegetable oil (peanut oil if you have it) and sauté the ingredients, add the rice and add some hoisin and soy sauce and mix until well combined. Garnish with chopped cilantro.

We served generous portions of fried rice with a dish of choy sum with oyster sauce for an incredibly quick, simple yet delicious and satisfying lunch. Hmmm, the more I think about it, the more I wonder why I haven’t come across a cookbook that focuses on leftover recipes rather than first time dishes… :)

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After several holiday dinners featuring western fare, our Christmas Eve dinner with family and friends was more Asian in nature. I had ordered a Southern ham to be delivered to our daughter’s college address just a day or two before she came home for the holidays, but an administrative mix-up meant we didn’t get our ham at all, and I had to resort to a “Plan B” for the Christmas Eve meal. Not to worry, “Plan B” is never a bad thing in these parts…

The full red tablecloth used the night before was replaced with more informal quilted red placemats, and the flowers and nuts re-used. Silver candles upped the holiday glimmer and just 8 guests made for an intimate and enjoyable meal. Snazzy napkin treatment courtesy of an overzealous crew member who I once had read a napkin folding book years ago and who never forgot the 20-25 ways one can fold a napkin… :)

We started with a winter melon soup with shrimp and bits of ham (sorry, no photo), then proceeded to a main course buffet that included a WONDERFUL roast duck that we re-heated from the deep freeze. A gift from our GM in Cebu, the ducks (we had two but enjoyed on different evenings) were from a small home purveyor called Duckk Rotiserrie of Mr. Timothy Go, in Cebu. Apparently Mr. Go went to Hong Kong to learn how to roast ducks and other meats and now offers them on a pre-order basis. They were delicious re-heated, and I can only imagine how good they would have been if we had them fresh and hot. I would definitely order this for myself again, Bravo Mr. Go! If curious, his contact details are duckkrotisserie@gmail.com.

Mrs. MM had discouraged me from buying a fabulously fat and brilliant looking fresh goose at the Borough market in London a few weeks ago, but instead she arranged for a roast goose from Hong Kong that we also served at the Christmas Eve meal. There is absolutely nothing like the fat that oozes out of a roast goose, it’s fantastic! I completely agree that a roast goose is the quintessential holiday meal. We also had a rack of szechuan spiced lamb that I forgot to photograph on its own (a rib is on the plate in the top photo).

Some szechuan cabbage (poorly executed, if I may diss my own dish).

Some chili eggplant that was delicious.

Chinese greens with oyster sauce.

We also had some XO Fried Rice using a batch of XO sauce a la Bettyq that I made a few weeks before and placed in the freezer. This was a meal on its own. So rich and fragrant and festive.

Kinda weird to follow a Chinese/Asian meal with cheese, but we brought out a large cheese board nevertheless, as my nephew and others at the dinner are HUGE CHEESE FIENDS. Trust me, they decimated this cheese board.

Finally, a simple salad of ripe mangoes and strawberries, a good excuse to use the sterling silver berry spoons…

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I was futzing around the restaurant commissary trying to think up some new dishes and decided to experiment with some chicken livers and “chorizong hubad” or naked sausage meat. Clean approximately 400 grams of chicken livers by removing any connective tissues and soak in milk for a couple of hours, while resting in the fridge. Drain the livers well and blot them with kitchen paper towels to dry them well. Season with salt and pepper.

Put a cast iron or heavy skillet on the stove over medium high heat. Add a teeny bit of lard or vegetable oil (the former is preferable) and a tablespoon of minced garlic, some minced chilies if you like it spicy, then a minute later add some 150-200 grams of good chorizo meat, casings discarded. Let this cook until it has rendered a lot of its oil and is starting to brown and crisp up. Remove the chorizo meat and put the pan back on the stove and medium high flames. Add the chicken livers and just brown them on all sides, aiming for an interior that is slightly pink. I know, I know, most pinoys don’t like their liver pink, but they taste better that way and they have a soft tender texture that way, not like chewing large monggol erasers. This will take just a couple of minutes or so, depending on how hot your pan/flames are. Just aim for an internal temperature of 72-75C and you should be plenty safe.

Add the chorizo meat back in, douse with 1/4 cup or so of lechon or pork broth with a bit of cornstarch and soy sauce to create a little sauce, season with salt and pepper to taste, and plonk into a sizzling plate if you have it and serve immediately. The results? Slam dunk the first time around! It was so good, the crew lapped it up so quickly we had to cook another batch. Thankfully, it only takes a few minutes to prepare. And yes, they all surprised themselves by eating slightly “pink” livers. :)

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Here is an excellent use for a meaty leftover roast turkey carcass. It’s a riff on a classic chicken sotanghon soup. I’ve decided I am not a huge fan of roast turkey unless it is brilliantly done and served still very warm, since it has a tendency to get a bit dry and frankly, tastes less appealing that other fowl or red meat. But I do love stuffing, and lots of the side dishes as well as the hubbub around say a Thanksgiving or other celebratory meal with turkey as the meal’s centerpiece… It’s always a bit of a challenge to come up with a recycled turkey recipe that pleases everyone in our household. If the volume of a recipe consumed is any indication, a ginormous pot of this soup was inhaled by 8 people in record time. Yup, it was surprisingly good.

Take your turkey carcass and strip it of most meat and hand-shred the white and dark meat and set this aside. Put the turkey carcass in a large pot, cover it with water and any remaining turkey stock that you saved from the holiday meal, some chopped onions, carrots and celery and let this simmer for say 2 hours until you have a flavorful broth. If you are concerned about not having enough flavor, you may wish to add say a can or two of low-sodium chicken stock. I also added in a cup full of leftover dark turkey gravy and about 3 tablespoons of Kikkoman soy sauce. Once the stock is done, strain it and return it to the stove over medium heat. Add in the shredded turkey meat, some julienned carrots, and taste it and season with salt and pepper to your liking. I then added some sotanghon noodles, chopped up bok choy and some cabbage and let this cook until the vegetables are just cooked. Serve with soy sauce and kalamansi and you have a hearty, flavorful soup (with a pinoy like twist) with lots of meat, noodles and vegetables. It was so easy to make, and it was approved by all in our household. :)

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I had no intention of making this sisig dish with chopped up inasal na manok at atay (grilled chicken and livers). We had just marinated and cooked up a batch of chicken inasal (using this old recipe I posted) then we skewered a kilo of chicken livers and marinated them in some soy sauce, garlic and kalamansi briefly. Just before we grilled the livers, we soaked them in the leftover chicken inasal marinade, on a lark. The resulting skewers of chicken livers (above) were a totally pleasant surprise. Just cooked and well-flavored, they looked particularly appealing because of the color they got from the achuete oil. They were tasty and incredibly appetizing. That was our lunch that day.

We had lots of chicken and at least 1/3 of a kilo of livers leftover. So we deboned the chicken, stored the livers and later that afternoon decided to try making a chicken nasal with liver sisig. The concept is not original at all. I had heard, but not tasted, Chef JP Anglo of the restaurant Sarsa had a sisig of chicken inasal, so I figured I’d fool around with the concept. Sarsa, by the way, is one of our current favorites for casual, well-executed Filipino food with ramped up flavor, so kudos to Chef JP!

I had no recipe and just winged it, and made some errors I wouldn’t repeat the next time around. But the resulting sisig was still devoured by all and sundry and with some adjustments, it would work wonders for you too!

Chopped up de-boned chicken inasal, chopped up grilled livers, minced garlic/onions/ginger/chilies, egg (don’t scramble in your version and don’t use too many), tomatoes (I was thinking moisture, but I wouldn’t add them in the next batch I make) and kalamansi juice…

Into a cast iron pan over what I thought was sufficient heat (it wasn’t), I added some vegetable oil (would have used lard if we had it)sautéed the ginger, onions and garlic, then chilies and tomatoes and after a couple of minutes, the chopped chicken. Seasoned with a touch of Kikkoman and a few drops of vinegar. This kind of steamed instead of sizzled as I would have wanted, but the stuff was in the pan, so I motored on.

So if you do this at home, remember to have a blistering hot pan and don’t cook too big of a batch at one time. Or if you have cast iron serving plates, heat those up nicely and transfer your cooked and seasoned sisig to those plates and crack an egg over the sizzling chicken.

About a minute before taking this off the heat, I added the chopped livers, which have a tendency to disintegrate, then stirred a bit more over insufficient heat (cast iron pan too big and thick, charcoal fire waning).

And in a final boo-boo, I added two scrambled eggs to the mixture that was a serious no-no. It sort of coated the meat and deadened the flavors. Much better if you kept the egg separate or didn’t add it at all. And nix the tomatoes I think.

It tasted really good, it just didn’t have that characteristic slightly singed and crispy edges that a classic sisig might possess. Also, it might be texturally more interesting if you actually added in some of the cartilage of the chicken, chopped up. I still love the idea, just need to work on my execution a bit more. I suppose many pinoy dishes are convertible into sisig, the method, by chopping them all up roughly and re-frying or sautéing over high heat. If you can’t be bothered making it yourself, then head to Sarsa and have their version which is getting raves from near and far. :)

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I had never tried adobo with gata (coconut cream) and chilies before. Or at least I wasn’t consciously aware it was an adobo with gata. I love adobo, so I thought that was a bit odd. Into the kitchen and I cooked chicken adobo with gata TWICE in less than a week and have really taken to it — a classic sour/salty garlicky chicken now with a layer of slightly sweet creamy texture… with chili to boot!

Here’s the current version of the recipe I have been working with. Ideally, you should brine your chicken parts for about 3-4 hours before you start this recipe. If you’re in a hurry, you may choose to skip that step. Next, in a large pan, add 3-4 tablespoons of lard or vegetable oil and put the heat up to medium high. Brown two kilos of chicken parts that have been blotted dry with paper towels, in several batches so as not to “crowd” the pan. Remove the browned chicken and place it on a dish for a few minutes until all the chicken is browned. The pan will now have quite a bit of lard/chicken fat in it — drain all but 2 tablespoons of the fat and turn the heat to medium. Add some 6-10 smashed cloves of garlic (more if you desire) and stir for a minute or so until fragrant, then add the browned chicken parts, about 3/4 cup of cider vinegar, a little less than 1/2 cup of dark soy sauce, about 1 tablespoon of whole black peppercorns, 5-6 small dried bay leaves and let this come to a boil for about 5 minutes WITHOUT stirring the pot. After the five minutes, try to stir the chicken pieces so everything gets bathed in the sauce. Next add about 2 cups of freshly squeezed coconut milk and two finger chilies chopped into 3-4 pieces each. You may want to add more chilies to your desired level of spiciness.

Let this all gurgle for about 15 minutes more until the sauce thickens, then serve hot, garnished with some young garlic chives (because I happened to have them) or fresh sprigs of coriander. If you want to add some boiled eggs, add them (peeled) to the adobo about 5 minutes before turning off the heat. I find that the chicken pieces lose moisture into this “stew” hence my suggestion you serve this freshly cooked rather than hours later. The flavor is classically adobo in nature, but the richness and smoothness of the coconut cream with the hint OR hit of chilies makes it more interesting, complex and delicious. It reminds me a bit of a curry, but not quite. And you will absolutely need a phenomenal amount of steamed rice and perhaps a fresh salsa of tomatoes on the side. Enjoy!

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This dish is for “Lee”, in his far away, off the grid, military location, toiling the “salt mines” while wishing he was home in Bacolod. Whenever I experiment with new dishes, there are a few items that just scream “Lee” and while I have met him only a few times over the years, he seems like an old friend with an affinity for food and humor. So, Lee, this one’s for you. Think of peking duck skin at its best and you salivate. Have a bite of crisp lechon skin, and you forget your meds. So I have been curious about making something out of chicken skin. And while I have tried fried chicken skin in lard or vegetable oil, dredged in all kinds of flour, cornstarch, boiled then baked or fried, etc., I haven’t quite found that version I would be proud to serve out of my kitchen…

But these flat, crisp and salted chicken skin chips were pretty darned good. Kind of hard to cook evenly in a big pan, but this early version of the experiments to come herald only good things ahead. Get yourself a kilo or so of chicken skins, in larger pieces if possible. Remove any excess fat or meat on the back of the skins using a knife to scrape or cut them off. Wash the skins and dry thoroughly, and I MEAN dry thoroughly. In a large rimmed baking sheet, place a sheet of parchment paper. Lay the chicken skin pieces on the paper, skin side up, and season with some kosher or sea salt. Be careful not to overdo the seasoning, the skins shrink by at least 50% or so. Place another sheet of parchment paper over the top, weigh down with another baking sheet of the same size. Place in a 350-370F oven for about 30-40 minutes. About 10 minutes before they are done, remove the top pan and layer of parchment paper so the skins can brown. Let the skins cook a few minutes more and you should have these amazing “chips”… They seem like a cross between lechon skin and chicharon, but with that distinct aroma of chicken. The only hassle is that they don’t necessarily brown at the same pace, particularly if your oven has uneven heat spots. Do NOT let the skins get too brown, they rapidly turn bitter. I am thinking of spraying the skins with a solution of something sweetish and some soy to achieve a darker color without coming close to burning the skins. A GREAT pulutan to enjoy with an ice cold bottle of beer. I suspect Lee could finish at least a dozen chips before he started to feel guilty about the calories…

Btw, the rendered fat that remains in the pan is essentially schmaltz, which is used as a spread for bread or to fry things in… It’s deadly but good, if you know what I mean.

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