The Unofficial Cook

Muruecos is the name of a common rice stick or suman as Filipinos call it. It was supposedly my grandmother’s favorite suman. I like it too and featuring it for Lasang Pinoy 20th Edition, Binalot made the effort certainly worthwhile.

Another entry for Lasang Pinoy’s 20th Edition titled “Binalot – All Wrapped Up!”. This dish is simply called “Binalot” by Bicolanos. It’s shrimp and coconut meat wrapped in gabi leaves then stewed and braised in coconut cream and herbs and spices.

This is the first of a series for the Lasang Pinoy Edition 20: Binalot, All Wrapped Up! I’m hosting this month’s event and while I thought it might be interesting, I had no clue what I was in for! This was actually the easiest dish I made so I’m posting it first. The dishes I [...]

Okay, this dish really doesn’t have a name…Bessie, my mom, just called it “Mrs. Johnson” and the name stuck.  Mrs. Johnson is actually the former American first lady, Lady Bird Johnson.  My mom found this recipe in some American magazine in the 60′s and turned it into her own.  It has very few ingredients, is [...]

Mine started off with a vegetarian squash, longbeans and coconut milk stew. Actually, I’ve featured this same Guinataang Sitaw and Kalabasa recipe in the past but the pot looked so invitingly good that day, I took another photo to show off here. There is a slight variation though – can you spot it?

This is another common Filipino dish usually using annatto seeds to liven up the color. This particular one didn’t have the coloring because I always like the colors of the vegetables in pancit to show as naturally as possible. I wrote about it in an earlier post on pancit.

Here’s an interesting way of serving a Filipino favorite, salted red eggs or itlog na maalat.  Youngest Sister prepared it for lunch one time and it was so amazingly fresh tasting and different that I just had to make it for lunch today. The colors in the photo didn’t come out right for some reason [...]

This is a salad my mom came up with way back when I was in my teens. It’s a very Filipino salad using the commonly used vegetables, bataw or hyacinth bean and sigadillas, also called winged bean in English. This is just another was you can use these readily available vegetables, aside from adding it [...]

 NOTE:  This is just another of my pending posts that never got posted for one reason or another. This is pretty much like Eggs Diablo without the heat. This is one of the dishes I made to use up odds and ends in my refriegrator in preparation for the Big Move. It was actually pretty [...]

In a previous post, I shared how we picked up a few deli meats from Bretto’s Deli in Angeles City in Pampanga.   Here they are, the sandwich fillings and on the next page is the resulting sandwich…

Whew….what a mouthful of a recipe title! Although compared to other cheesecake recipes I’ve done in the past, this was the easiest by far…and it made a deliciously wicked dessert, a perfect ending to any meal.

    Here’s another meal I made to use up leftovers from my pantry.  This time I used a bottle of Merlot I’ve been using for cooking for a couple of months, canned tomatoes with balsamic vinegar and basil and bottled parmesan cheese.  It was surprisingly delicious and so easy to make.  I had more than enough [...]