Lumpia Shanghai and Bonfires

So on Wednesday, my friend decided to have a bonfire and had everyone bring foods. I wanted to put some effort and actually bring something made from home (there were 12 bags of chips--I'm not even joking) so I rummaged through my pantries, searching for an idea. My friend asked me to bring something savory since most people would be intent on bringing cookies or something of the like.
I flipped through various cookbooks trying to think of something to make. Maybe tortilla cups with ground beef...
No, there's no ground beef. Maybe something with a graham cracker crust, I have a lot of those...
Oh shit, she said something savory...

*brainstorm*

I opened my freezer door and started frantically taking things out. Sure enough, I found packets of Filipino deliciousness all the way in the back. Lumpia Shanghai, in chicken and pork varieties. I thought they were going to be more of a chicken crowd (everyone there was white except for me--Welcome to orange County...) so I decided to make those. I went to sleep, making sure to be awake early so I can get ready. I was showered and ready by 11 am, smelling of Fiji scent Old Spice deodorant. Then I get a text from my friend saying "**** is not going to be at the bonfire until about 3 or 4 so I'll pick you up then"

Slightly saddened at my early franticism, I sat down in my living room and watched some movies. A session of the Breakfast Club and a Transamerica later, it was 3 pm. I got up, fetched my lumpia from the freezer, and got our deep fryer from beneath the sink. I started preheating my oil at 400 degrees fahrenheit, and breaking up my frozen-together-lumpia with a scraper blade. With success, I waited for my oil to heat up.

I fetched some sweet chili sauce from the pantry, and prepped a few tupperwares ( a large one for the lumpia, and a small one for the sauce).

In the small tupperware, I mixed :
~1/3 cup of Sweet Chili sauce
~about 1 tbls of Sriracha sauce
~1 packet of ketchup (from any fast food place--mine was In-n-Out)
~1/2 tbls of Honey
~and a dash of soy sauce

I put the cover on a zhoozed (zhuh-zd) it up a bit before frying up my lumpia. I fried it in 3 batches, lining my tupperware with sheets of paper towel to soak up the oil. I separated each layer with another sheet of paper towel. My friend soon there after came to pick me up.
Everyone raved about the lumpia. Its about the only Filipino food that is slightly familiar to Americans. Imagine their faces when I show them balut, dinuguan, or No. 5 soup.
But that's for another time.
I came home smelling like bonfire, and in turn, my clothes, hair, bedspread, and room smelled like it for a couple of days as well. Suffering from only 5 hours of sleep, I soon went to bed about 3 hours earlier than I usually did. I woke up the next morning in a daze, wearing my clothes from last night, my contact lenses still on, and smelling of smoke. I chalked it up to it being summer.

Restaurant Review: Oeeshi Sushi Bar and Grill

I entered the restaurant as I have many times before, with my family for dinner. We were immediately seated at our usual table with the gentle waitress asking us for drinks. Everyone ordered hot tea and watched Jeopardy on the flat screen tv, the other permanently stationed on the sports game of the night.


Given their extensive menu, I contemplated a sushi roll plate...or maybe teriyaki salmon? I asked my dad if we were to order a sushi and sashimi plate to share amongst us ("pika pika" as Filipino's like to share: A term I've come to define as share and munch amongst others, like a tapas or appetizer plate) and he said yes. So I decided against a sushi roll plate to see one of their many dinner entrees. They come with a bowl of rice and two house salads: A spring salad with mandarin slices and bits of chicken, and shredded iceberg salad with crushed ramen, both salads topped with wonton strips. Bowls of miso came for everyone who ordered other things, me stealing one of the bowls for myself. I snacked on pieces of sushi and sashimi while waiting for my chicken and grilled shrimp plate.

I ate every bit of food that was on my plate, partaking in my ritual of grabbing the teriyaki-soaked piece of lettuce my chicken rested on and placing it on my bowl of rice, letting it soak up all of the sweet and salty goodness. The teriyaki sauce at Oeeshi is probably the best teriyaki sauce I've ever eaten. It's delicate balance of sweet, salty, and a hinted background of smokiness contribute to its tastiness. When I finished my plate and cup of tea, the bill came with a complimentary plate of honeydew melon slices. I contemplated asking for a scoop of azuki bean ice cream, but I noticed how enlarged my stomach had gotten, and let my body recover from its large meal while nibbling on melon slices.

I sat in the car on the way home letting it all hang out-- your body's way of saying "whoa, nice job eating that creative piece of awesome--now let it show for all to see so that others may know that you, a person of great taste, just ate a delicious Oeeshi meal".

I give Oeeshi Sushi bar and Japanese Grill a 9.0 out of 10 for a clean, friendly atmosphere, perfectly kind waitresses and chefs, and delicious food in perfect portions.

Stuffed Portobella Mushrooms

A project my mom put me on to figure out what to do with our passing mushrooms...

So here we go!


STUFFED PORTOBELLA MUSHROOMS
serves 8
(store in airtight container for up to 5 days--not that they'll last that long)

Ingredients
- 8 portobella mushrooms
- 1 lb. of ground beef
- 1 medium sized onion, diced
- 2 stalks of celery, sliced
- 2 stalks of green onion, thinly sliced (optional)
- 1 red bell pepper, small julienne
- 1 6 oz. bag of stuffing mix (you probably have leftover from thanksgiving)
- 1 egg
- 1/2 cup of liquid (water/stock/broth etc.)
- olive oil
- Worcestershire sauce
- Shredded or Crumbled cheese of your choice (optional)

Procedure
1. Prep your mushrooms- dab with a wet paper towel to clean, clean out the ribs (the funny black stuff on the bottom) and cut off the stems. Drizzle with olive oil
2. Grab a generously sized saute pan and drizzle with olive oil. Over medium heat, place your diced onion and let caramelize.
3. Take your ground beef out of the package and straight onto the pan. Break up the beef and let brown for a couple minutes. Place your sliced celery in the pan and cover for a few minutes. Then place your julienned red pepper in the pan.
4. Place half of your sliced green onion in the pan, and then put your stuffing mix in.
5. Grab your 1/2 of liquid and place it in the pan, stirring to mix. Cover for a couple of minutes.
6. Break your egg into the pan and mix quickly, making sure that the egg doesn't hit the bottom of the pan. Splash with Worcestershire Sauce as you like.
7. Take your mixture and divide evenly among your 8 portobella mushroom caps. Then top your mushroom caps with cheese as preferred.
8. Set your caps on two baking sheets (or better yet, one large one if it fits).
9. Place 1 baking sheet at a time under a broiler set to high for 5 minutes, then check for done-ness. If need be, set it under the broiler for an extra minute or two. Take it out of the oven, and garnish with the rest of your sliced green onions. Repeat process with as many pans as you have (I used two)
10. Eat, preferably accompanied by moans of pleasure.







Enjoy the recipe! I legit just improvised this the other day. Praise me...

Oh heyy...

Yeah, you know how I said on July 3rd there was going to be this bigass party where I'll post recipes and/or pictures of catering food for my aunt's wedding?

Yeah, that never happened.

instead there was a party for my grandpa's birthday (my grandpa who died about a couple weeks before said party was to occur~yeah, I have no idea why, i think it has something to do with Filipino culture? I really don't know) and there was just a lot of food that we got from Sam's Club because we didn't have enough time to cook a lot. I made a bullshit Bouillabaisse that was really just me putting shit together in a pot. Everyone raved about it. What bullcrap. And yeah. So I really don't have recipes or photos from that excursion. But I did end up cooking today.

I made tacos! I love Tacos. Tacos are very good...



Whoa, sorry there, i was just drooling. But yeah, it was really easy to make also.

::::::::YUMMY NUMMY SHREDDED PORK TACOS::::::::

(Picture from teh interwebz- Pretty much looked like this)

::INGREDIENTS::
-leftover shredded pork (just cook your pork over medium heat with liquid and garlic salt)
-fresh salsa of your choice
>tomatoes, fresh jalapenos, onions, cilantro+salt and pepper to taste was what I used
-Hot sauce (I used tapatio)
-lettuce
-cheddar cheese
-water or stock/broth of choice
-vegetable oil
-tortillas of choice (I prefer corn, but I only had flour :c)

::PROCEDURE::
~~Set stovetop to medium heat and drizzle oil around a saute pan to coat.~~
1. Place 2 loosely packed cups of shredded pork in the saute pan and brown slightly for a couple minutes, until oil is all soaked up.
2. Add about 4 oz. (1/2 cup) of water or stock/broth of choice to the saute pan and 4 oz. of salsa.
3. Stir to combine and cook for 2 minutes.
4. While that's going on, bring about 4 oz. of oil to another saute pan until it starts to bubble/smoke under high heat.
5. Fry your tortillas to the shape of a taco shell
- place tortilla in saute pan, and hold half of the tortilla out of the oil with tongs.
- when the first half of the tortilla is fried, fry the other half side
- When tortilla is done, drain on paper towel and sprinkle with salt
- repeat process with another tortilla
6. Add hot sauce to your liking (I like a lot of heat, so I added bout 20+ splashes of sauce) to your pork mixture and cook until liquid evaporates (but still keeps pork moist).
7. Grab your taco shells, fill with your pork mixture, shredded lettuce, and the cheese.
8. Bask in the presence of food glory, and dig in.

Experience the food-gasm as you enjoy your home-made, authentic pork tacos.

Beverage pairing: Lemonade/Ginger Ale punch

Here's my bullshit recipe for Pancit Canton

Okay, wow, yeah, sorry guys, I totes forgot to write down the recipe of my mom's pancit because she was really giving me a cooking lesson in pancit, so I didn't have much time to write the recipe, so I'll just give a list of ingredients, and tell y'all what I did.

:::::INGREDIENTS:::::
Egg Noodles
Cabbage
Celery
Carrots
Snow Peas
Boiled Chicken Breasts (boiled in chicken stock)
Soy Sauce (We used Silver Swan brand, a Filipino Dark Soy Sauce: Kind of like a Japanese tamari, but not as strong, like in between regular soy sauce and dark soy sauce)
Sesame Oil (we used Kagoya)
Chinese-Styled sausage (it's a drier, sweet sausage that many are not accustomed to in America)
Chicken powdered bullion

::Garnish::
Chopped green onions(scallions)
Citrus juice (we used lemon, but its traditionally sprinkled with calamansi juice)

Uhh, and here are a few tricks my mom told me to do when cooking pancit (assuming you already kind of know how to cook pancit)

~Boil your chicken in chicken stock so that it develops a deeper flavor
~When cooking your veggies, put your soy sauce (shoyu) and sesame oil in to initiate the flavor palette of the pancit (this is where you'll cook your noodles in the future)
~Put a few drizzles of soy sauce around the pan, and about a scoopful of bullion into your cooking liquid. It'll taste really salty, but you will be cooking your noodles in here, so instead of having bland noodles and concentrated saltiness on top, you'll have fully flavored noodles with a well-developed flavor on the outside.
This picture is one I found on the internet, but it looks exactly like the one my mom makes, so naturally I used it.


Yeah, I'll put a more serious recipe up later, it's just really late and I'm really tired, so yeah.

Restaurant Review: Bravo Burgers

Bravo Burgers is a local chain of restaurants here in the Southern California area serving delicious Burgers and Mexican food. I've been here on many an occasion, sampling the plethora of burger choices, my favorite being the San Francisco Burger, served on Sourdough Cheese toast and avocado slices. But this time, I wanted to try one of their Mexican delicacies on display.

The decor of Bravo Burgers is like an upscale Fast Food joint, where you come up to order the food and to your side are fountain drink dispensers like your typical fast food restaurant, but with much higher quality food, and a nicer ambiance. The one in San Juan Capistrano has Mission-influenced interior decoration, with a palette of deep oranges and reds to enhance the dining experience. The complimentary Tortilla chips and salad bar is free for anyone who orders food. there is even outdoor patio seating, with a wall fountain.

I ordered their Bravo Chicken Bowl, a bowl of spanish-styled rice, refried beans, and Grilled chicken, topped with melted cheese, cilantro, and diced white onions. It wasn't my first choice, but I only had $6.17 with me, so I went with whatever would fill me up, taste great, and at a cheap price too.

With a medium sized drink (and don't forget the complimentary chips and salsa bar), my total came up to $5.75, a meager price for a great meal. I expected the bowl to be around the size of my morning cereal bowl, but was surprised to see a bowl of about 10 inches in diameter, something truly of greatness to a student who just got out of school. Hungry. (I had finals, so my school provided no lunch break)

The chicken was perfectly grilled, and the fresh flavor that the onions and cilantro provided contributed to a phantasmagorical orgy of sorts in my mouth. The rice was well to my liking (something very hard to accomplish, especially to an Asian), and beans were good too. Until the beans seemed to keep pixellating out of nowhere. Like seriously, there was A LOT of beans. Too much to my liking. I wish they had replaced a 1/3 of the beans for more rice, and it would have been perfect.
I enjoyed my beans and more beans bowl with a passion fruit tea (unsweetened, I might add), with about 4 packets of sugar. Yeah, I really think they oughtta invest in some sweetened tea. I hate having to wait for my sugar crystals to dissolve to my liking.

I sat there, enjoying my meal, waiting for a few friends I was supposed to be meeting, listening to my iPod, being a happy camper.

I will definitely come back to Bravo Burger, but maybe for one of their American food choices instead, or maybe a mexican combination plate.

I ended up waiting for my friends so I could satisfy my fried-food craving by eating seventeen too many of their french fries.

I give Bravo Burger an 8.5 out of 10 for great food at ridiculously affordable prices, a clean establishment, and for a relaxed, but contemporary ambiance.

Cooking adventures, here I come!

Yeah, sorry I haven't been posting a lot of recipes. But I'm planning to make this a "everything-related-about-food" blog as opposed to a "recipe" blog. Just so I have more reasons to updates his more.

So expect some restaurant reviews, recaps on parties involving a lot of food (they'll usually be Filipino foods if it falls within the party category...hehhe...) and other shenanigans dealing with the sustenance we all enjoy consuming.

And seeing how I only have one more day of school before Summer vacation, that may happen sooner than you think.

So future blog posts for the following summer:

~Tomorrow, June 23rd: Restaurant review for Bravo Burgers, a local burger and Mexican food joint here in the California area

~Thursday, June 24th: Recipe for my mama's pancit canton. I'm going to be making it for a friend's birthday party, and all throughout Eastern Asian Culture, noodles on your birthday means you'll live a long successful life ^^

~July 3rd: Housewarming party for my family's new house in Las Vegas. We're going to have family and friends over, so there will be food to talk about. It'll also be a test run for some catering food that my mother and I are going to be making.

~July 31st(or somewhere around that time): my Aunt's wedding. this is the catering job my mom and I will be practicing for in early July. Hey, I know we're not hired professionally, (more nepotistically) but any practice is good for the future

~Randomly sometime in the summer: Restaurant review for In-N-Out. Seeing as I'll spend a lot of time in Vegas this summer, chances are my Dad will have us stop at some In-N-Out, in one of the many in Las Vegas. Come to think of it, there is a brand new one opening up in my neighborhood in Vegas...

And yeah. More time at home means more possibility that I will cook at some point. Even though in my school district's shorter-than-the-American-average-length-of-summer, what with summer work for my three College Level courses in Advanced Placement, Driver's Ed and working to get my license, and shuttling between my home in California and our new home in Las Vegas, I doubt I'll have THAT much time to update this here blog...but we'll see, I mean there's already five new prospects for food-related blogs. So the future is looking rather bright.

So yeah, so long. Im'unna go update my other blog.