Recipes

Recipe: Baked Fish in White Wine Butter Sauce

January 11, 2016 by MrsC | Patricia Cuyugan Leave a Comment

Another week, another meal plan!

This week is going to be a busy one for me, and so I’ve chosen meals that are easier to prepare (as in, can be made or marinated ahead,) especially where baon is concerned.

I also have a lot of leftovers sitting in the refrigerator and freezer, and I really have to make sure to use these up before my next grocery trip. At the moment, I have no room to put in anything new. Time to get creative with recycling, and mixing and matching. Sigh. Small fridge woes.

If you’ll notice, Saturday is “assorted leftovers for lunch day” again, just like last week. I often find myself with small containers of random things, like a piece of fried chicken, 3 slices of tapa, tiny portions of corned beef, etc. and this is my way of making sure none of them go to waste. We sometimes call this our weekly Tupperware buffet.

Speaking of last week, I made a really nice, super easy baked fish dish for a potluck dinner party with the family over the weekend. Here’s the recipe for that, in case you guys wanna try making it at home, too.

So, on to this crazy week, then. Wish me luck! And while you’re at it, maybe you could share what meals you prepare for your families on hectic days and weeks. I’d love to have more ideas for my future meal plans.

Have an amazing week, everyone! 🙂

Recipe: White Adobo

September 12, 2015 by MrsC | Patricia Cuyugan 30 Comments

Fact: Meal planning ain’t easy!

Call me spoiled, but I’m not the type who can eat the same food three meals straight. I know some people cook a big batch of something, then that will be lunch and dinner today, and lunch again tomorrow. That just won’t work for me. It’s a good thing that I’m the one in charge of food at home.

I really make an effort to plan our meals out at the start of the week because it makes life so much easier. I know what I need to get when I visit the supermarket, and I am able to make the most out of whatever space I have in our small refrigerator and freezer.

Because I like variety in my meals, I make sure that I have small portions of food ready in the fridge in case my plan for lunch and dinner doesn’t work out. Like today. Adobo saved me again today. I was going to cook something new but I wasn’t able to thaw the meat in time. So leftover adobo it was.

I like adobo because it doesn’t spoil easily, and it actually gets better the longer it stays in the fridge. It’s great for last minute lunchbox packing, too, on mornings when I don’t wake up early enough to cook.

I already shared my chicken adobo recipe before, which has quickly become a family favorite. Last night, I decided to change things up a bit with a version that doesn’t call for soy sauce based on an Adobong Puti recipe by Nancy Reyes-Lumen that I found in The Adobo Book.

It was interesting. It tasted like regular adobo but not quite. I like the simplicity of this version, and I think that it’s a nice change to the soy sauce-flavored kind without veering too far away from the adobo that we know and love.

We’ve had this twice now, and it does taste better the following day like the recipe promises. Give the dish a try and tell me what you think!

Recipe: Bangus Ala Pobre

September 26, 2014 by MrsC | Patricia Cuyugan 13 Comments

It’s been a while since I have gone food shopping, simply because I’ve decided to use up whatever’s in the fridge and freezer before I buy anything else. Thing is, my mom keeps buying stuff in small batches (thanks, Ma!) so we never run out of food. Now, because I’m making do with what’s on hand, I’m forced to be creative with what I cook. Luckily, with the addition of a brand-spanking new bottle of Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce to our pantry, I had all I needed to make one of our family faves, Bangus Ala Pobre.

Lea and Perrins1 — This dish wouldn’t be complete without you, Lea & Perrins!

This is a perfect early morning quick baon recipe because you don’t need to marinate it for very long, and it cooks real quick too. Everything can be prepared the night before and placed in the refrigerator so that you aren’t scrambling for ingredients before dawn. If your fish is frozen, make sure you move it from the freezer to the fridge before you sleep so that it’s thawed enough when you wake up.

All you need to do is mix 10 cloves of minced garlic, a tiny bit of calamansi or lemon juice, salt and pepper, and 1 tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce in a bowl. Pour the marinade over 2 boneless bangus bellies and let it soak for 15 minutes or so. During this time, I wash and prepare my rice then turn on the rice cooker.

One belly is enough for the boys and I (for now), so I put the second one in a handy dandy GLAD Freezer bag and pop it in the freezer for another day. Don’t forget to label your food keepers or zipper bags so you know what you have on hand, and when it went into the freezer. Once you’re ready to cook, simply heat up some olive oil in a pan and fry the fish. Be careful coz this pops!

I like to fry this skin side down first, then flip it to get the belly and the garlic bits all nice and toasty. Serve immediately with hot rice, and vegetables or scrambled eggs on the side.

Recipe: Banana Swiss Miss Muffins

August 19, 2014 by MrsC | Patricia Cuyugan 21 Comments

Have you ever tried baking with Swiss Miss? As in the hot chocolate mix? Me neither, until yesterday.

I decided to make peace with our 20+ year old oven by attempting to bake a nice snack treat for Little MrC. Since it’s exam week, he’s home way before lunch time, so this week is filled with more mommy time than WAHM time. I could see he was getting bored with his usual afternoon cartoons. Blame it on him being stuck at home with a fever over the last 5 days. Because Cartoon Network and Toonami weren’t doing their usual magic, I had to think of a quick activity that we could do. And so, I went ahead and cranked up the heat on our old-timer oven. Bahala na if the temperature on the right is hotter than the temperature on the left. Lol.

I got the little boy all excited about mashing bananas, put an apron on him and set him to work. I realized too late that I should have checked that I had everything we needed in the pantry before I involved the little boy. The original plan was to make choco banana muffins like these ones by Nigella, but using tablea instead of cocoa powder. Toinks, my stash of tablea apparently went bad in the freezer during that Glenda storm, and my mom had gotten rid of them already. We also didn’t have any cocoa powder. I could have just gone with plain banana muffins, but I already said chocolate (the magic word) to the little boy. I had to think fast. I decided to use Swiss Miss. The dark kind.

They came out yummy. There’s not a lot of sugar in the recipe, so the sweetness comes mostly from the bananas. The riper the better. I like to use the nearly rotten ones for baking. Those are the best. The end result was not as chocolatey as it would have been if I used proper cocoa, but for a quick meryenda fix, a fun bonding afternoon with my kid and quick snack box fillers for today, these are more than good enough.

Recipe: Perfect Pork Steak

August 6, 2014 by MrsC | Patricia Cuyugan 16 Comments

As you know, I am one of those home cooks who likes to make meals ahead and freeze them. Whether it’s a marinate and freeze dish or an extra container of soup or stew, you are sure to find quick to cook or easy to reheat meals packed away in my freezer. Yes, takot ako magutom, and this is proof!

I love marinating meat ahead and then freezing it in portions that are just enough for our family. I find that dishes really do end up tastier this way, and for me, tastier is definitely better. I also prefer to put things away in exact serving portions already to minimize leftovers. I get to maximize our refrigerator space that way.Since we share fridge space with a whole lot of people, it’s best to keep things at a minimum.

This week, I decided to make a batch of Pork Steak for the boys. We’re a small family, so 1/4 kilo of pork loin is actually good enough for 2 meals for us already. Tipid! I have a feeling that this won’t last long, though because Little MrC is slowly but surely starting to eat like a big boy.

Pork steak was something that I got to eat at MrC’s family’s house more often than my own house. I know for a fact that he misses his family’s homecooking, and so I thought that I’d try to make more of the food that I’d eaten there before. So we started this week off with a yummy, soft pork steak that I am actually pretty proud of.

Oh hey, if you try this recipe at home, please let me know how you liked it okay? 🙂