My Favorite Month with Our Favorite Food

Here are some yummy goodness on our table for the month of January. Some oldies but goodies and a few experiments along the way.

First dish is Beef Mechado, it is simply beef stew cooked in tomato sauce. In my case, I used canned tomatoes, bay leaf, soy sauce, lemon juice and one secret ingredient :)

Mechado

Next is pork hocks cooked in vinegar and soy sauce. To make it kinda melt in your mouth, I transferred it to the slow cooker after an hour of boiling in the pot. Yummy with fish sauce of course!

Paksiw na Pata

Good thing I saw a bag of dried taro leaves at the Asian supermarket. I have been craving for Laing (taro leaves cooked in coconut milk) and fried fish. Absolutely yummy!

Laing

fried galunggong

It was Lance's 8th birthday on the 15th. I decided to make marble cupcakes for my boy to bring to school. I didn't get to taste them but he said they are more delicious than the cupcakes his classmate brought the next day haha!

Lance's birthday cupcakes

My hubby was pestering me the other day to taste the bleu cheese. I couldn't since I couldn't get past the smell. I don't think he liked it that much so he asked me to find another use for the cheese so I googled recipes. Found one, tweaked the recipe and it turned out soooo GOOD!

chicken breast wrapped in bacon stuffed with bleu cheese and bacon bits

Lastly, I tried this Baked Sweet & Sour Chicken recipe. This is my surprise for hubby since he did put up a lot this weekend. I hope he likes it, it really looks good and it smells divine as well.

baked sweet and sour chicken

Hopefully I will feel a lot better in the next days or so. I can't wait to start cooking both new and old recipes again! :D

Back to Posting About Food

I am BACK! I have been sick for the past few days so no shopping for me just sleeping all day long. Hopefully, I'll be up and running on the weekend just in time for the $1 flip flops at Old Navy!!!

I may have been too lazy to blog but I have been taking pictures of food I have cooked for the past few weeks. Here are some delicious meals we've had, enjoy lookin' :D

flattened bread on the griddle

no longer messy version of piggy in a blanket

chicken macaroni soup

tuna cheesy omelette

it doesn't look pretty but this is delicious :)

sauteed green beans with pork

sauteed spinach with bacon bits

meat sauce over eggplant

Sisig

Lechon Kawali

our weekly dose of sizzling beef

Pork in Tamarind soup with spinach

store bought frozen pizza when Mommy is having a lazy day or busy with her coupons

kids' favorite snack/dessert

first try of Mug cake was a failure :(

Strawberry banana muffins

No matter how busy I get, I still make time (I try) to make something delicious for the whole family. Now that the kids are on summer break, I need new ideas for their meals and snacks. I would love to bake more if only I knew how :D

Pre-Christmas Menu

We had another week of awesome food as usual. Cooking is probably what I do best next to eating, how I wish it's saving instead. Before I rant about coupons again, here are some of what we had been eating all week.

Tinola (Filipino Chicken Stew) is basically chicken in broth sauteed in garlic, onions and ginger. Back home, chayote and green pepper leaves go into this dish. I used chinese cabbage, bell pepper and onion leaves instead.

Hubby craved for some baked potatoes so I made twice baked potatoes with mozzarella and bacon. I'll make these again for Christmas.

I used ground buffalo meat and ground beef for my meatloaf covered with bacon. yup, that's my free bacon over there!

Hubby again craved this time for sweet macaroni salad. It's my first time to make a sweet version and we like it. Lacks color though, didn't have any carrots inside the refrigerator. Recipe courtesy of our friend Arni. Ingredients include macaroni, mayo, condensed milk, chopped celery, raisins, cubed cheese, salt and pepper to taste. I am definitely going to make this again, reminds me of KFC's (Philippines) macaroni salad.

I experimented on some fish given by my coupon buddy. I didn't want to fry them, would've have been easier but I wasn't in any mood for lingering fish smell. So I lined the fish in a pyrex, drizzled with olive oil, seasoned with salt, pepper and light soy sauce. I sliced an onion, put some whole peppercorns, chopped onion leaves and popped them into the oven. It was delicious! My experiment was a success.

Lastly, hubby's favorite, STEAK! Broiled in the oven for less than 10 minutes, seasoned with steak spice and served medium rare.

No wonder I haven't finalized my Christmas menu yet. We've been eating really good food every single day. I couldn't ask for anything more, hmmm..maybe some desserts? Happy eating everyone! :D

Thanksgiving 2011

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.  

~John Fitzgerald Kennedy

 

We celebrated Thanksgiving on a Sunday instead of Monday. We kind of decided last minute that we would be preparing for a Thanksgiving dinner. My hubby was against buying a turkey since we actually prefer chicken but the kids wanted turkey. It's Thanksgiving anyway, so we bought turkey. It won't be Thanksgiving without a turkey I guess.

All along I thought we'd be celebrating the next day (Monday) so I didn't thaw the turkey right away. Around lunch time my husband called me and said we'll be celebrating that night. Imagine thawing a turkey in time for dinner and it was already past 1pm. Good thing I made bread pudding when I woke up that morning, at least I got dessert already.

I seasoned the turkey with salt, pepper, sage, marjoram and generously brushed it with butter. I stuffed it with lemon, apple slices, celery and onions. I cooked it for about 4 hours, making our Thanksgiving dinner a late one at past 9pm.

While roasting the turkey, I baked some potatoes and later topped them with mozzarella and cheddar cheese and bacon bits. I made Greek salad and deviled eggs as well. Hot dinner buns and white rice completed our Thanksgiving meal plus the Ice wine we brought home from Inniskillin.

What made the meal more special was Lance leading the prayer and everybody saying what we were thankful for. Another year, with its ups and downs and yet we're still standing strong.

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice.  

~Meister Eckhart

Easy Comfort Food

Bacon wrapped shrimp

I do run out of ideas on what to cook. Cooked shrimp saves me as I can easily make buttered shrimp. Another life saver is bacon. Since we buy bacon ends, they are thicker and cooking a few slices makes you full compared to cooking a whole package of the real ones which could sometimes be paper thin depending on the brand.

I use bacon like there's no tomorrow. I serve it alongside pancakes for breakfast, sometimes I put it on our fried rice or I include it on tomato based sauces. Instead of ham, I put chopped bacon when I make Embutido (Filipino Style Meatloaf) and when I make Meatloaf, I wrap the whole thing with slices of bacon as well.

That makes bacon a regular on my grocery list. One of my experiments was shrimp wrapped in bacon. This was few days before we left for our summer vacation. Hubby says it was good so I'll probably try it again tonight. It'll be good with the Greek salad :D

Surprisingly and Sinfully Yummy!

Rice surprise! My version of fried rice with salsa.

Late one night, as he arrived from duty, hubby held this menu from Humpty's showing me their Arroz con Huevos which is basically a fried rice with salsa on top. He wanted something like that, I grumbled but I then set off to the kitchen and started preparing the ingredients. I put chorizo, turkey, bacon, scrambled egg and I mixed the salsa instead of putting it on top. It turned out great, the salsa gave it a twist making it more flavorful and it was so delicious I made another batch the next day.

I could eat this all day, sinfully yummy!

And dessert was this to die for cream cheese buns from Klassy's. Yet another day of nothing but good food :D

Egg Talk

Lance's Easter eggs

Lance had to bring three hard boiled eggs to school today for their Easter egg painting activity. I decided to boil some extra just in case he drops them before the activity and the rest of the extra eggs went into our breakfast.

Deviled Eggs with Bacon

This morning I made Deviled Eggs. I was originally planning to make these for Easter but since I got plenty of hard boiled eggs, I went ahead and served it for breakfast along with canned sausages. They're perfect for appetizers and in our case, perfect for breakfast as well since hubby likes eggs.

last night's HUGE chunk of meat

Yesterday, I was looking at some Egg Curry recipes to partner with our huge steak but I couldn't decide which recipe to follow. The ones I saw have so much ingredients and all I wanted was a simple Egg Curry recipe (simple, meaning less than 10 minutes of preparation). By the time I finished viewing the recipes, the steak was almost done and I was too lazy to prepare anything that would go with it. But I made a mental note to myself that the next time I cook chicken curry, I would include eggs. Now, that is a simple Egg Curry recipe!

Accidentally Sweet

Bacon, Lettuce, Tomato and Cheese with my sweet sauce

After watching a Throwdown with Bobby Flay episode featuring BLT sandwiches, I immediately prepared one for our midnight snack. I was nowhere near the remoulade sauce they made but I accidentally created a sweet and simpler version. I started with mayonnaise, mustard, ground pepper, salt and a whole lot of sugar instead of a dash which made it sweeter than I would have wanted but decided to use it simply because I didn't want it to go to waste. Hubby was intrigued by the sweet taste and told him it was a sauce I created inspired by the remoulade sauce. The sweet sauce blended well with the saltiness of the bacon and cheese. It was a delicious and heavy sandwich and today we had one for breakfast, again with my sweet sauce!

Conserving Energy

Our share for the Earth Hour was not to use the rice cooker for one day. A huge sacrifice for both hubby and I because we eat rice everyday, we could miss a meal without rice but not a whole day without it.

I missed breakfast and lunch while hubby had leftover spaghetti for his lunch then, we had Tacos for dinner and sandwich for our midnight snack. It's a good feeling having helped conserve energy even if it's just for a day, and the best part? WE SURVIVED!

Bacon, cheese and tomato sandwich