Apple Pie, Patis, and Pâté

Ginataan is a Filipino cooking technique where ingredients such as vegetables, seafood, or fruits are simmered in coconut milk. It can be sweet or savory depending on the ingredients — the term ginataan by itself refers to a warm dessert soup traditionally served in the Philippines as merienda, mid-afternoon snacks that help make the long wait between lunch and dinner more tolerable.

Eggplants and green beans make up the gulay or vegetable portion of this recipe. It can also include squash (kalabasa), bitter melon (ampalaya), and okra, but this recipe calls for the vegetables that cook quickest. This version is done in about 15 minutes after all the prepping is done.

This green and purple ginataan dish is exactly how I remember it prepared in our household. Incidentally, that same juxtapose of colors is the reason I wouldn’t eat it as a child. It reminded me of none other than Batman’s arch-nemesis, The Joker. I found his wide maniacal grin disturbing, but even worse, he also reminded me of clowns.

View Ginataang Gulay - Vegetables Simmered in Coconut Milk recipe »

Famous for dishes that highlight quinto quatro, the “fifth quarter” or oft-ignored parts of an animal, Rome sounds like my kind of town. Alla vaccinara is old Roman for “butcher’s style” and no other cut could be more appropriate for such a designation than oxtail. Unappealing to most, a butcher would know that when properly prepared, oxtail can be much more enjoyable than pricey ribeye or tenderloin.

Unlike other offal that hide behind cutesy names (sweetbreads for thymus glands, adidas for chicken feet, rocky mountain oysters for uh, cow “berries,” and soup number 5 for see preceding item), oxtail is exactly what it sounds like. It is, in fact, the tail of an ox-slash-cow, so unless there’s a nuclear spill nearby, there’s only one small sliver per beast. I’m convinced, however, that the neighborhood meat counters rarely carry oxtail not because of low supply, but because the white-clad guys behind the counter keep it for themselves.

View Coda alla Vaccinara recipe »

Ancho chiles, the most commonly used dried capsicum in Mexican cookery, give this thick and earthy dish its characteristic maroon color. The muted red hues of pipián rojo hides its complexity — toasted sesame seeds meld with Mexican herbs and spices to create an intense sauce with a consistency similar to mole.

There are two distinct steps in preparing pollo en pipián rojo. The chicken is first poached in an aromatic broth to season and cook the meat. The red sauce is then created separately. It will be used to poach the chicken a second time.

To make the pipián rojo, the ancho chiles and sesame seeds are toasted and combined with spices and garlic to create a paste. The chicken broth from the first poaching is used to thin the ancho-sesame paste, only to be thickened again to further deepen the flavors of the sauce.

View Chicken in Red Sesame Seed Sauce recipe »

Growing up in the Philippines, I was a really picky eater. There are foods that I absolutely would not touch and I was, quite frankly, a pain in the ass to cook for. Some things in the fairly long list are atchara (pickled shredded papaya), anything with ampalaya (bitter melon), tutong (the burnt rice at the bottom of the pot), and our embarrassingly hacked up interpretation of spaghetti, cloyingly sweet and studded with neon-red hotdog slices.

We do, indeed, put hotdogs instead of meatballs in our spaghetti.

It’s kind of funny how one ends up longing for foods avoided as a child. I still can’t get over the sugary spaghetti sauce, though. Like any good Filipino brat, I merely picked out the Purefoods Tender Juicy Hotdog slices, leaving the clumpy starch behind before running off with friends to play sipa.

Others things I wouldn’t touch fall under the category of “leftovers.” If it was cooked yesterday then I’m not having it. No exceptions. I couldn’t stand it when told that such-and-such is best made a day ahead. It didn’t make sense to me at all.

Now that I know better, it turns out that there was no conspiracy to use me as a means to get rid of leftovers.

View Chicken Adobo in Coconut Milk recipe »

Family recipes are great, especially if they’re not from my own. Having said that, my food-obsessed relatives are sure to disown me, so I’m going to explain myself in case my grandmother finds this while googling my name in search of my Twitter account.

I’ll never get tired of the foods of my childhood and will always have a Ratatouille moment each time I have Pinakbet. The thing is, I’ve had such dishes so many times already and would rather have something completely new. It’s like having that first awkward bite of sushi and thinking, “Where have you been all my life?” Thinking that wasabi was some sort of minty candy, my first memories of sushi actually involved shooting white nostril heat and gushing tears, but you know what I mean.

Regardless of cultural provenance, other people’s family recipes will always be appealing to me because it’s often a confluence of several good things:

• It will be easy to make
• It will be easy to like
• It will be affordable

Take this recipe for steamed lemon chicken, for instance. From Eileen Yin-fei Lo’s The Chinese Kitchen, my favorite thing about the book is the wide array of family recipes in addition to well-known regional Chinese classics. She points out that this specific preparation will not be found anywhere else, yet one look at the ingredient list and it seems instantly familiar and accessible.

View Steamed Lemon Chicken recipe »