Learning to Cook and Other Things

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have always dreamed of a large and a nice and elegant looking kitchen. Here's a website I found that displays the kind of kitchen furniture, I would have love to have. If only in my fantasies. Check them out here . And below I hope the site wouldn't mind if I borrow these aweso me photos: for brief tete-a-tetes and coffee sessions. But maybe I'll get it in natural finish. Whoa! And I wouldn't mind at all if I get this wow! laptop movable table.

Isn't it obvious that the kitchen and the dining areas are now my most favorite places in the house. I guess have never really talked about this aspect because, hey it is a cooking blog. Right? Wrong. I should have. After all, these two home areas are essential to cooking and of course dining. Where do we prepare and cook the food we eat? And where do we serve them? It is just that I prefer to talk about our home meaning the structure and its furnishings in an appropriate blog which I try to maintain as well. And surfing through the many online furniture sites recently, my dream of owning or building a dream kitchen and dining has been revived. Even before I even learned to really cook, I have often fantasized that our kitchen and dining room must stand on a combined floor area not smaller than 100 square meters. Spic and span, lined with elegant yet modern wood kitchen furnishings, including cabinets in natural finish, to me would be awesomely welcomed. Yet, I feel thi...

Today, is one of my son's birthday. I am borrowing this recipe from Myrna D. Segimundo's recipe book called Philippine Cuisine. (It was a gift from him). The recipe is a traditional Filipino poultry dish and is called lechon manok ( oven roasted chicken). According to the recipe book, "the lechon manok recipes vary from region to region depending on the flavor preferences of the place. In the southern regions, the most popular flavor stuffing are tamarind leaves and lemon grass." As the book required: 1.5 kilos whole chicken, washed and patted dry 1 bundle fresh tamarind leaves or 3 pcs lemon grass or 1 sachet of tamarind broth powder (sinigang sa sampalok powder) liver sauce for lechon The preparat ion instructions: 1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit 2. If fresh tamarind leaves or lemon grass are available, stuff the chicken cavity with either of those two. Otherwise, rub the chicken inside out with the tamarind powder. Set the chicken on a baking rack and roa...

The social networking site my blog log just requested me to verify my cooking blog. And so I am right now undergoing mybloglog verification. Okey, so I did. Maybe it will help increase my blog traffic? :-)

Have you heard anything about vegetable s used as musical instruments? Cool! I say if you don't want to eat them, play them instead, right? I think this is one terrific and novel way of promoting healthy eating through vegetables. I am not trivializing this now. Because, seriously, there's one orchestra based in Vienna, Austria, considered Europe's classical music capital. And they are known as the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra. "The Vegetable Orchestra performs music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Using carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos, the orchestra creates its own extraordinary and vegetable sound universe. The ensemble overcomes preserved and marinated sound conceptions or tirelessly stewed listening habits putting focus on expanding the variety of vegetable instruments, developing novel musical ideas and exploring fresh vegetable sound gardens". So if you're a vegetarian and ...

It's been quite awhile that we cooked this yellow fin tuna dish with tamarind sauce and kuki. Kuki is more popularly known as miso. And so I bought miso in accordance with my plan to cook this dish. Miso or kuki which was how it was called back in the Japanese Edo period, is a "traditional Japanese food produced by fermenting rice, barley and/or soybeans, with salt and the fungus kojikin. (the most typical miso is made with soy.)" So I bought around ten grams. Wikipedia further informs us that during "the Muromachi era, Buddhist monks discovered that soybeans could be ground into a paste, spawning new cooking methods where miso was used to flavor other foods." And on to my wet market trip, I got 4 large slices of yellow fin tuna. It looked so fresh I couldn't resist the temptation. Yellow fin, is of the tropics, usually three 12-inch rulers long and to me delectably flavored. In fact a more superior variety is used to prepare sashimi. In fact I hea...

For breakfast variation eats, I have been preparing this french bread slices topped with lots of grated garlic, diced fresh tomatoes, olive oil, freshly milled black pepper, mozzarella cheese, and some fresh basil, and then heating it in the breakfast oven since 5 years ago. That was when I knew very little about cooking and food preparation. Duh! Now, I realize it is something similar to the Italian's bruschetta. According to Wikipedia bruschetta is: "is a food whose origin dates to at least the 15th century from central Italy . It consists of grilled bread rubbed with garlic and topped with extra-virgin olive oil , salt and pepper. Variations may include toppings of spicy red pepper , tomato , vegetables, beans, cured meat, and/or cheese ; the most popular American recipe involves basil , fresh mozzarella , and tomato. Bruschetta is usually served as a snack or appetizer . In Italy, Bruschetta is often prepared using a brustolina grill. In Tuscany , bruschetta is called ...

To the Top 10 Entrecard Droppers of this blog, my sincere appreciation. I hope I am able to return the favor. Thank you all. Sher 29 GFAS 20 Smarter than Grade 5 15 Oh My Gosh 15 My Life at 90 13 Article Specialist 13 Liz Mommy's Little Corner 12 Kveer 10 Spitting Vessel 9 Emila's Illustrated Blog 9

The girl for all status or GFAS has helped this blog tremendously. According to this blog's entrecard stats, my advertisement generated 104 clicks from her blog. To quote Entrecard "The 'Top clicks by widget' table, lists the sites who provided the most clicks over the last 30 days via adverts you ran on their widget. High numbers are good, suggesting that you received many visitors interested in your card, and therefore that the site you bought the advert from did a good job of placing the widget to attract attention." Awesome! Thanks Cherry and Cheers!

I have not been around lately. My time has been consumed with "tweaking my blog templates ( as if) :-) My absence also was due to inaccessibility to a computer. I get to have 'access' at around 11:00 in the evening and by that time I am all exhausted to do my posting. But I am almost back. Thanks to all of you.

Upon the request of GFAS, I am reproducing here the Chicken soup recipe from my Mom. My M om's good old recipe is a real healthy soup because it requires not the commercially bought chicken but rather native poultry which we usually get from the province. Native chicken is poultry raised with out the usual chemical-filled chicken feeds. These are poultry raised in remote provincial backyards, allowe d to roam about, scratch their own food and if at all, fed with mountain corn grown also without the usual pesticides. Yes. Her recipe requires clean and organic ingredients and cooking implements. Tough if you ask me. But that was way, way, way back. Today, it is very difficult to find these healthy attributes from food ingredients. But anyway, if you can source the following, organic, then we're on to a good start. What we need: 1 kilo of Native chicken breast and back (Note that natives are usually not plump, unlike commercially sold poultry. We all know why) 3 organicall...