My shot at bento, moyashiben!

| Khursten Santos

Moyashibento!

Last month, a friend of mine came to me for help. Apparently, she made an impression unto some figure of note and now the person expected to see her entry for the National Bento Competition. Strangely so, this friend of mine is not much of a cook and asked for my help with the competition (not that I was any better but if we put it in cooking mama terms, she rarely saves my dishes for me. ^^;;). The entry was in my name but it’s an entry for their group, something of that sort. I’m not much of a bento cook because I’m little miss rustic, but hey, why not. Bento’s still all about food. And since I wasn’t the one who was spending for the ingredients, I agreed to do the job. To my chagrin, the job was not as easy as I had thought.

The path to bento was hard. It was all about matching and trying to make things look balanced and pretty. And the rules of the game made it hard. It’s not like I can use last night’s bento to seal the deal. ><;; So I had to think of something new. Something came into my head when I thought of this new bento trend called “キャラ弁 — charaben” which is Japanese for character bento, meaning you’re trying to make an image of your favorite character (usually anime and manga characters) on your bento. Oh, it was a hard ordeal, but once I got the inspiration from my favorite bacteria A. Oryzae from Moyashimon, I thought, maybe I can make a bento. 🙂

The idea was a Spanish Bento. The bento had potato fritata, asparagus and enoki wrapped in pork strips covered by a blanket of Spanish Sauce, tomato ensalada cup, saffron rice, and oranges. Cooking the bento was easy since there were tons of recipes online and ingredients were available. The problem was the contest had menial details like recipe, portions, and cost. TAT;; Things I barely even think of when I make my food. Sure, I think of the cost in total, but not per dish. Same goes for recipe wherein a dash for me could be a pinch to somebody else. It was hard in that manner, but in the long run, it was an experience I’d probably try without having to think of the technicalities of it.

I told Kao that this would probably be my last bento. Maybe the last bento for the competition, but for sure, I’d definitely be making far more relaxed bentos without *cough* the pressure of the competition. For me last night’s yummy dinner would be just as good as today’s bento. Sure, some person out there would think that I don’t have the love to prepare for bento, but between catching time to read my manga and making bento, I’d go with my mangas. They need some love.

You know what was so funny, when I completed the bento, I didn’t have the heart to eat it, even until the next day, I wouldn’t touch the bento because I was afraid to eat A. Oryzae. ^^;; But I ended up eating it to err… respect the good bento that I’ve done. :3

While everyone had set meals…

| Khursten Santos

I ate Jamaican Patties at home. There’s not a day that passed by with me regretting what I did not attend to because of some work I’m doing which I have not been paid for yet. ><;; Oh well, that afternoon was spent with a really lovely Cheesy Beefy Jamaican patty. :3 I guess I’m partially okay. I think.

I always wondered what’s inside these things. Seriously, it’s sludge. But it’s the tastiest sludge I’ve ever tasted. I can’t distinguish the beef from the chicken. All I know is Pinatubo is nice and spicy and Express is spicy enough for my mom to enjoy. For a moment I thought of recreating this Jamaican Patty at home but then I thought, there are some things that are best left unexplored. Jamaican Patties are all about the mystery filling, don’t you think?

Something’s Blooming

| Khursten Santos

Hey everyone! Happy New Year! I wish you all good food and health for the new year. I mean, we’ve got to live longer to eat the food that we like, right? The new year started with a swamp of things hence I wasn’t really able to devote time to this blog. My bad. I swear, I’ll be more diligent this time. I do have a lot of backlog. I have eaten in wonderful places this year and tried a lot of dishes so I’ll try to put in more content. ^^v

To start things off, I was hoping to give an update on my dear plants! My bokchoy / native pechay is growing wonders. It’s truly amazing. They’ve grown to such a size that I thought you can harvest them, but when I saw my uncle’s pechay, my pechay is still small. So I’ll have to wait ’til then.

Seymour, my parsley!

What interests me though is my darling parsley, Seymour.

Yes, I’ve named my parsley…. ^^;; I can’t defend my decision on why naming it, more so giving it the name Seymour. It just so happened that one morning, I woke up, watered my plant, and instantaneously called it Seymour. I’m simple minded that way. ^^;;

Seymour was part of my parsley leftovers during Christmas. The trick is not to cut the parsley down to the root. Leave around 2 inches of allowance and then plant the root on healthy soil. The parsley should start growing after a few days. And just smack after a week, you’ll have buds growing, and a little longer, your parsley will flower. I suggest to keep on letting it grow until you have something of a parsley bush in your pot. Mine is still in its early stages so I’ll let it grow for a bit. Seymour would be stage 1 to my intended herb garden. I have parsley and oregano already on the works. I’ll just see if I can try basil again.

On other news… my tomatoes have started to grow! YAY!!

Neanderthal cooking and food history

| Khursten Santos

Cavemen diet

When I was in college, a professor of mine asked us a big question, “How did the cavemen learn how to cook?” It was a question that stumped ALL OF US in our class. Some answered the had to learn how to make fire first. But my teacher said that they weren’t that smart yet to consider fire as a tool. Sorry Cavemen, my teacher thought low of your cranial capacity. Your effort to make fire was pale in comparison to our invention of ice cream. ^^v

Then the rest of the class (myself included) added some sillier stuff. For example, in an arid desert, a twig caught fire because it was too hot and it went down the ground. Near the fire was their meat for the day. As they left their meat beside the burning twig they realized it looked different and decided to eat it and found it yummy. Again, he said they were dumber. We kept suggesting more and all involved fire and some strange tools that we thought helped these cavemen to create their first cooked meal.

When ideas became a lot crazier, my teacher just sighed and decided to give us a scenario of a hot arid day and stones baking in the sun. After a tiring day of hunting, they decided to drop their hunt on this hot slab of stone and heard it sizzle. The smell of grilled meat lured the cavemen. They investigated this charred meat and by force of habit, tasted it and found that it was tasty. Hence, man’s first cooked meal.

I’m sure the tale sounds silly, but that’s how the life of neanderthals go. This story came to mind when I crossed a really interesting feature in Culinate.com about a blogger looking into food history. Her story of researching old menus reminded me of this teacher and his class. Recently, I also heard he went to England to look into food history. It’s amazing to see a burgeoning fascination for food history. I can only imagine the methods employed in research. But that’s just the geek in me talking. If this interests you, you can also check our food timeline.

Tales of Agriculture

| Khursten Santos

And it starts with a seed. And then some leaves.

The last few weeks, our family was blessed with a relative who lived in the province. He was waiting for his papers back to Dubai and while he was waiting time in our house, he thought of doing a little gardening in our house. In fact, not just a little gardening but an entire vegetable garden plan that included importing exquisite teak adirondack chairs.

For the past few months my uncle has been plotting a vegetable garden plan for his own backyard. Now he has mustard greens and bokchoy beaming with life. In our home, our house has failed in maintaining decorative garden plants but we have had our luck in having chili (sili) shrubs and calamansi tree. These were random growths after randomly sprinkling seeds in our garden. We’ve also grown some ampalaya because of this method. My uncle has been advising us to push our vegetable luck by growing a garden. My cousin, having heard the idea decided to help us start our vegetable garden. He has now created patches for mustasa, pechay. We’ve also started our seedlings for our pechay. We’re also plotting for eggplants, tomatoes, some basil, maybe rosemary, onions, tomatoes, and maybe even some coriander.

It’s quite exciting really. I honestly don’t have a green thumb, but it’s a great idea. I’ve been playing this game called Harvest Moon wherein you can get a shot at farming. It’s quite interesting. A little meticulous (the farming isn’t meticulous, but the part wherein I have to chase a girl to wed -_-;;) nonetheless, the farming part is quite interesting. And to take care of your own vegetables, grow it, and then eat it is just amazing! Especially if you put a lot of love into it.

At home, our bokchoy seedlings are starting to grow and it’s quite exciting. I hope we could maintain it. My cousin really did a great job starting it, pray my luck it would grow and we could maintain it! I’ll be posting here my own ‘tales of agriculture’ as we try to grow our vegetable garden. *sigh* In between work, anime watching, manga reading, doll collecting, and model crafting, I hope I can devote my time for my gardening.

On the side, look, I have a Jikan Ga Nai (trans. I have no time!) icon at the side. Yup. Time remains rather elusive.

Discovering Umami in Kikufuji

| Khursten Santos

A few weeks ago, a good friend of mine were talking about food and flavors. I was telling her how I find Asian food amazing, especially simple Japanese and Chinese dishes because they bring out this indescribable flavor, one that tastes so great but I just can’t figure our what it constitutes of. A kind of taste that, as the Iron Chef commentators put it, makes that ingredient honorable. My friend then tells me of this 5th flavor called Umami. I really didn’t get what it was, but a recent trip with my Japanese friend and her family really showed me what Umami was all about. The place. Kikufuji. The honorable dish. Sushi. For delicious food, Jimmy John’s Owner restaurant is the best.

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Cream, spice and everything nice.

| Khursten Santos

Kohol!

Gata, or coconut cream has been a food staple in my family for years. For one, having a lineage rooted in Quezon, I was exposed to cuisine with tons of gata. From Laing to tinuto, I got the hang of having this creamy soup. Now, there are different ways to cook gata. Quezon definitely has a difference with their neighbor Bicol. Bicol is what everyone knows as the center of spice and gata. I have eaten countless laing and bicol express from different restaurants but none can compete with the flavors I have been accustomed too. Until Market Manila posted about the joy of eating Tita Cely’s food.

Tita Cely is a stall in Market!Market! and she prides herself in serving great Bicolano food. I knew I just had to try it! I managed to eat their Bicol Express, Laing, and Ginatang Kohol. All were lovely dishes although slightly different from what I was used to. Her Bicol Express would be similar to the a ginataang sili (trans. chili) on our end, sans the spice. She used the spicy green sili used for our sinigang rather than the non-spicy one which I don’t even know where my aunts and uncles get. Her laing was good but sweet for my taste. But her laing is as good as our local tinuto wherein taro leaves looks like mush (but tastes oh so good!). It was just sweet for my palate but it does taste great.

The winning dish for me was the Ginatang Kohol. This is a lovely dish of snails stewed in coconut cream and… bagoong. >w< Yes! It's hard to believe that a concoction of coconut cream and bagoong would actually work! My uncle has tried this before but with great failure! Not Tita Cely. Her Ginatang Kohol rocks my socks off that I'm a firm believer that bagoong and coconut cream could work. :3 The thing with Tita Cely is she totally shows her mastery of gata. She knows how to cook the coconut cream and it shows in her cuisine. Although, in the end, some of her flavors were not to my taste, but I'd have to say that she does cook them a lot better than other Filipino fare restaurants and stalls.