Rice cooker meals!
Ah, the magic rice cooker. Able to cook rice perfectly with a push of a button. But since in my new apartment we’re not allowed to have stoves, I’ve had to figure out how to cook meals in my humble one-button rice cooker. Yes, there are the fancy slow-cooker ones, but I don’t have one of those anymore so shh.
Anyway I have this rice cooker recipe to share. (Disclaimer: I modified it from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, which is probably up there in my top iPhone apps of all time.)
Pork braised in spicy soy sauce
Ingredients (no measurements, just adjust to your taste):
- pork shoulder, cut into cubes
- soy sauce
- one or two chilies, chopped (or, if you don’t have any, just dump a shitton of ground black pepper in there)
- sugar
- stock (or water if you don’t have any)
- garlic
- ginger
- onions
- lime juice
Steps:
- Combine all ingredients in the rice cooker pot. If you have time, marinate for a day. If not, it’s OK! Proceed to step 2.
- Turn on your rice cooker.
- This is where it can get annoying. When it switches to ‘warm’ instead of ‘cook’ or whatever (you know what I mean), leave it for 5 minutes. Then switch it to cook again, but make sure it doesn’t boil for too long—switch it back to warm if it starts doing that. Essentially you want it to bubble gently for about an hour, but since it’s hard to keep a constant temperature with rice cookers that’s lower than all-out ‘cook’ you’re just going to have to fiddle with it until the meat is really tender (snort).
- OK now turn it back to cook and reduce the sauce until it’s noticeably thicker. But don’t burn it because burnt soy sauce smells awful.
- When it’s done reducing, add more lime juice, and salt and pepper if you want.
- Serve over rice—oh wait, you used your only rice cooker for this already. Go buy rice somewhere, or something. You can also add the pork to noodles or in a sandwich.
If you do try this, let us at FoC know how it turns out!
Home for Christmas means lots of Asian Mom’s Cooking which means my first FoC post! Hi everyone.
From the top lefthand corner clockwise:
1) Homemade mooshu pork. Growing up as an ABC (American-Born Chinese), I totally didn’t think mooshu was a real thing. I thought it was just Mulan’s friend, named for a popular Panda Express dish. But no! It’s real! And it’s delicious! Mooshu pork (木樨肉) contains: bamboo shoots, carrots, pork, wood ear mushroom (木耳), and green onions.
2) Sauteed lettuce with garlic. My mom frowned with disapproval that I included it in this picture because it’s all wilted and ugly. But it’s delicious, and that’s all that matters, right?
3) Omelette with pickled daikon/radish. According to my dad, omelette with pickled daikon (蘿蔔乾) is one of Taiwan’s most famous dishes. Back when the country was much poorer, this was a staple for many people’s lunches. You’d think this would make people avoid it in later life, but it’s a hometown favorite.
4) Steamed egg. What is there to say about steamed egg? Nom nom nom.
aloha.
i can’t submit multiple pics to your website, so sending these to you.
1) beef wellington. from www.oneifbyland.com
2) oxtail soup (the best ever) served with bok choy, shiitake mushrooms, peanuts, garnished with chinese parsley and fresh ginger at neiman marcus’ mermaid bar in honolulu (a thursday lunch special only in hawaii).
3) korean feast before and after (honolulu).
4) rice, egg, spam, hawaiian hotdog and seaweed (made by me at our apartment rental)! yeah!
Submitted by Vic (AKA Tito Mon, Cheska’s uncle)
nom nom, 
I’m always supportive of different takes on Filipino cuisine, because that means there’s always new iterations of my favorite dishes for me to try. Mmm.
Here we have the humble tuyo (salted dried fish) sautéed in olive oil with capers, along with some grilled tomatoes, rice topped with scrambled eggs, atsara (pickled green papaya), and vinegar.
A+, would eat again. —Eush
http://nomnomnaimas.blogspot.com/2011/11/maybe-no-more-spam-for-my-kiddies.html
i decided to cook all the eggs at our center so they wouldn’t go bad over the holiday break. the medium ended up being garlic fried rice with spam and eggs (how fattie is that, right?). the end result: a bunch of off-the-wall brown kids. perhaps it’s the holiday vacation. perhaps it was the fried rice. perhaps we’ll never know…
nom nom,
danny
http://nomnomnaimas.blogspot.com/2011/11/whole-wheat-oatmeal-chocolate-chip.html
holy hell, it’s a pancake bear! with peanut butter! (follow the link for a recipe)
nom nom,
danny
Chicken adobo!
Just reblogging an adobo recipe I posted a while back, because no Pinoy Fatty of Color can resist a good chicken adobo (unless you’re vegetarian). This and sinigang na baboy (pork in sour broth) are my favorite Filipino comfort foods.
I finally learned how to make this shit when I started grad school, because I was in serious need of some comfort food, and it is delicious. Now, chicken adobo is like mac and cheese—everybody has a different recipe, and everybody is convinced their personal variation is the best—but it’s really just soy sauce, white vinegar, peppercorns, bay leaves, and a shitton of garlic in varying proportions according to taste. Some people add other things like coconut milk, which I tried and don’t care for, so once you’ve got this basic recipe down, feel free to experiment.
Anyhoo, here is what I use, adapted from How to Cook Everything (I’ve tried different recipes, and I like this one the best). This is for chicken adobo, but it’ll work just as fine with pork. (If you want to make it healthier, maybe you can try it with tofu or seitan or some other meat substitute? I’ve never done it myself though.) It’s pretty simple and makes for great leftovers.
Chicken adobo (serves 4)
Ingredients
3-4 lbs of chicken parts (I like thighs)
3/4 to 1 cup soy sauce (I use 1 cup, but I really like salty things. If you don’t, you can use less.)
1/2 cup white vinegar
1 tbsp chopped garlic
1/2 tbsp peppercorns
2 bay leavesSteps
1. In a pot, mix the soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, bay leaves, pepper, and 1 cup water. Boil at high heat. Once it’s boiled, add the chicken, reduce the heat to medium-low, and cook, turning the chicken a couple of times, for 20 minutes.
2. Heat the oven to 450° (or just set your oven to ‘broil’. Also works great in toaster ovens). Take the chicken out of the liquid and dry them off with paper towels. Boil the sauce until it’s reduced to about a cup’s worth. While that’s happening, bake or broil the chicken for 10-15 minutes, or until the skin is nice and crispy.
3. Pour the sauce over the chicken, and serve with white rice.
Feel free to let Fatties of Color know if you have any favorite adobo variations!
I made munggo for the first time! Munggo is a Filipino dish made with mung beans. Since about college, munggo has been one of my favorite dishes. If you don’t add any meat products, I’d say this is one of the healthier Filipino foods. Other dishes tend to be loaded up with tons of fat, carbs, and sodium.
For my version, I used the following ingredients:
- 2 cups mung beans, soaked since this morning
- About a quarter of a very large onion
- A whole bulb of garlic
- Tiny bit of olive oil
- Salt, pepper
- Soy sauce, patis (fish sauce)
I had the munggo with brown rice and sauteed asparagus with a touch of apple cider vinegar.
It was so DELICIOUS, which made me very glad to have decided to make a healthier version of what my family makes (with pork or Chinese sausage and a ton more oil).
As Fatties of Color, it’s important to be mindful of the reasons why we use certain ingredients in our foods, and explore healthier substitutes. For instance, Filipinos, like many others in heavily militarized countries in the Pacific, love spam because it was shipped in huge amounts to feed American soldiers who couldn’t get fresh meat on the front. It’s totally fun to try out different ways to replace a traditional ingredient with a much more nutrient-rich one, like Danny’s spam hash with sweet potatoes. Thankfully he didn’t get rid of the spam, but sweet potatoes… (Borat voice) “Very niiiice!”
FoC <3,
Cheska
