Recently

• Lamb chops, grilled indoors
• Chicken and cabbage spring rolls
• A casual dinner
• Carrot cupcakes
• The complete salad
• Baked mac and cheese
• Squid lo mein
• Tofu with three sauces… and cilantro
• Welcome to my kitchen!
• Martha Stewart’s plum coffee muffins

In the archive

• Butterscotch and chocolate fudge combo brownies »
• Lamb biryani »
• Tuna and fresh mango stir fry »
• Butter-fried suman and ripe mangoes »
• Fiesta noodles »
• Aromatic (and tastier!) spring roll wrappers »
• Spaghetti a la carbonara »
• Chinese tea eggs and roast chicken »
• Japanese-style beef and cabbage stir fry »
• Swiss rosti (a.k.a. fried potatoes) »

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Spaghetti with Chinese ham and peppers

They might not sound like the perfect pair but the salty and pungent Chinese ham is great with pasta. And you don’t need so much ham to make a flavorful pasta dish. With Chinese ham, a little goes a long, long way. Not that Chinese ham is absolutely essential. Any smoky, salty ham will do just as well.

This spaghetti dish, last Saturday’s dinner, has very few ingredients all of which are pretty much staples in any kitchen…

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Noodle soup with mushroom balls

They cost P375 per kilo but you can buy as little as 100 grams. I’m not a fan of processed food but my daughter, Sam, wanted crab balls and shrimp balls and I figured it wasn’t such a risk since we could only buy a hundred grams of each to try them out. Much more practical than buying the pre-packed brands. And since I can eat neither the crab nor shrimp balls, I ordered a hundred grams of mushroom balls as well… I placed them in a bowl with cooked noodles and vegetables and poured in hot home-made broth. Delicious!

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Biko (sticky rice cake)

… what is biko? It is a cake made from glutinous rice cooked in sweetened coconut milk and topped with latik (curdled coconut cream). I was surprised to find a description of biko in another site as a rice cake with caramel topping so when I went to the market earlier today, I asked the hawkers the proper names for the different rice cakes on display. The consensus? What I’ve known from childhood as biko is indeed called biko and the one topped with caramelized sugar and coconut cream is called bibingkang malagkit…

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Vanilla cupcakes with cream cheese frosting

It’s a mom-and-daughter baking project. I baked the cupcakes and mixed the frosting. Sam tinted the frosting and piped them on the cupcakes. She’s not a pastry chef. She’s turning 16 tomorrow and she’s never taken baking classes. If you want the full story on how we did the cupcakes, see “Once upon a time, she wanted to be a chef.”

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Olympic chili coco chicken

We didn’t get to see the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics live on August 8. We would have missed it forever if it weren’t for a replay last Saturday morning. I didn’t even know there was a scheduled replay until about 30 minutes before it started. I had to decide about lunch in those 30 minutes and I knew that to enjoy the opening ceremonies of the Olympics to the fullest, I’d have to cook a dish that would require minimum supervision. A slow-cooked dish was the solution…

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Yogurt in my pasta

Lunch last Wednesday was a pasta dish that made use of leftovers. I had excess yogurt from last Saturday’s chicken and mangoes in yogurt and there was enough grilled fish from the previous night’s dinner to make a decent number of fish balls. Yes, those are fish balls that you see in the photo. Flaked fish mixed with chopped onions, garlic, herbs, eggs and bread crumbs.

Where’s the yogurt? In the sauce…

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Fish and malunggay soup

A day after I cooked this soup for lunch, I finally did what I had been promising myself for a long time — plant a malunggay tree in my own garden. So, let’s just say that this fish and malunggay soup is a celebration.

It’s nothing fancy, really. I cooked a fish soup in much the same way that I cook tahong (mussels) and malunggay…

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