when life gives you calamnsi: lomo saltado!

So my mom has a calamansi (Pilipino citrus, sort of similar in flavor profile to a lime) in our backyard. And when life gives you calamansi, the possibilities are endless. Calamnsi juice, bistek, a dipping sauce for lechon, a marinade for meat/seafood, squeezed on top of your pancit or arroz caldo-- ENDLESS!

I, however, decided to take things in a different direction. Since I had just cooked something #hellapilipino, I decided to instead cook a Peruvian dish (and one of my favorite dishes of all time) lomo saltado. What's cool about lomo saltado is that it actually is a chifa, or Chinese-Peruvian stirfry dish. The Chinese, many of whom were brought to Peru as laborers in the 19th and 20th century used cantonese cooking methods and ingredients (rice vinegar, soy sauce) with new world ingredients (potato and tomato).

As a Pilipino-Chinese American, feels close to my roots. A little reading uncovered that Chinese immigration to Peru has its first roots in the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade that was responsible for bringing some of the first Pilipinos and Chinese to the Americas. Given all this history, I felt it appropriate to use calamansi, a Filipino ingredient, as a substitute for rice vinegar, the more traditional acid.

To get started, I marinated pre-cut strips of sirloin (about a pound and a quarter) in a marinade of 2 tbsp soy sauce, 2 tbsp canola oil, hella calamansi (probably 6-8), a splash of rice wine vinegar, 3 minced cloves of garlic, and cumin, paprika, salt and pepper (to taste). I also put some beer in the marinade. Beer acts as a tenderizer, but I mostly just wanted an excuse to open a beer, since I only used a third of the bottle for the marinade. I took about half that marinade and put it in another bowl with a red onion (sliced in slivers). The meat and the onion get to swim in the marinade for at least an hour, so everything can make a flavor-packed Chino-Latino marriage.

A word of caution: making lomo saltado involves making french fries that are later tossed with the stir-fry. This will make it extremely hard to resist eating french fries while completing your cooking! I cut up and fried 2 yukon gold potatoes while waiting for the meat to marinate, and managed to eat fewer than I can count on one hand. Or maybe it was fewer than I could fit in one hand full? 

Once that was done, got some oil nice and hot in a large pan (couldn't find my mom's wok) then got going with the stir-frying. First I seasoned the meat with a little more salt, pepper, cumin, and paprika the meat brown with the marinade , then added tomatoes and let it simmer for a couple minutes. Then I added the onions, hot yellow pepper, and cilantro.

To finish it off, the stir-fry is tossed with the french fries and plated over white rice.

 While fusion might be considered a "food trend," the best fusion often comes out of necessity, when people are given a new ingredient to place within their culinary canon. In my case, the ingredient was calamansi, and the result was delicious!

certified #hellapilipino embutido sliders

 "Faithful friends, who are dear to us, gather near to us once more" Just like the song says, the holiday season never fails to bring people together, and these holidays have been no different. This past Sunday, former members of Filipino Choir from St. Peter St. Paul got together for our annual Christmas potluck and white elephant. I used this as an excuse to cook embutido, a Pilipino meatloaf that is traditionally made around the holidays.

For those who are unfamilar, embutido is one of those "throw everything into one bowl and mix it" type dishes,  with about a dozen ingredients all held together in a loaf of ground pork. The loaf is steamed, then sliced and can then be eaten either hot or cold, as finger food or, as I served it, in pan de sal sliders.

My embutido included the following: ground pork, chinese sausage, vienna sausage, hardboiled egg, carrot, raisins, red and green bell peppers, green onions, garlic. I used panko breadcrumbs and eggs as binding agents, and seasoned with salt and pepper. In lieu of having an actual steamer, I half-filled a baking pan with hot water, placed the embutido (rolled in foil) in the water, and let it steam for an hour in a 350 degree oven. 

To get saucy and dress the sliders, I made some atchara (pickled green papaya) and a banana ketchup/sriracha mayo. Damn, atchara and a sauce with banana ketchup? Das #hellapilipino!

The end product was pretty dang good and got eaten up. Before the potluck, I let my mom try some. While she had a few critiques, she commended me for even trying, and said that most kids wouldn't even bother to learn a recipe like that. That felt good-- mostly because I could tell that there was truth in that. Embutido isn't exactly the most popular or sexy well-known Pilipino recipe, but I hope to refine how I cook and package it to help keep it relevant for folks.

Walk on the Sun

"You know, this is the first time I've felt the sun in two months."

While every ounce of my being has been acutely aware that my father been in the hospital since before Halloween, his words caught me off guard. But the more I thought about it, the more it made so much damn sense. After all, this was the same sun that beat down on him as a boy, raised in Bailen and Manila. The same sun that he chased across the Pacific when he joined the US Navy. Even the same one that shone down on us on a Saturday morning, when I was about 9 years old, and my dad taught me how to shoot at bank shot.

So as my dad sat there, basking in the sun's golden rays in all their glory, I reflected. I had thought this was merely the first of many trips back to the hospital that we had gotten to know all too well. However, my father saw this as an opportunity to reunite with an old friend. His face expressed a sense of peace that I hadn't seen in too long. And so I sat there with him, in the sun, taking it all in and realizing the profundity of the simple moment.

It made so much sense. In literature, sun is a symbol of power, energy, and vitality. In high school biology, we learn the sun is literally responsible for nourishing the Earth and its creatures. It tells our society when to wake our ass up and get to work. It even adorns the Philippine flag (and Pilipino flags that date back to the Katipunan). I'd imagine that, when compared to the cold, florescent light of the hospital rooms my father stayed in, the sun might even remind my mostly non-religious father that there very well may be a God out there.

And yet, like many other simple pleasures of life, I had taken the sun for granted. I hadn't fully realized what being away from the sun for two months might mean for my  dad. Not until he asked me to push his wheelchair out in front of the hospital, and into the heat of an abnormally warm December day.

While we have quite a ways to go to recover my father's health, at least he can feel the warmth of an old friend, once again.