From HotMomma’s Kitchen: A Series
by mathe | Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 12:24 pm | HotMomma’s Kitchen |
Winter, Red Tocino and a Weekend Party
I think the cold weather and increasingly shorter days of winter are pushing me to retreat more and more to my tiny kitchen. Not that I’m complaining. I tell you, I’m enjoying it a lot. Besides, the heat from the hob and the oven makes it all worth the effort as I have a very low tolerance level for the cold. Expect that most of my postings will be about food and how I do them in my kitchen for the next few days or weeks or even months.
I promised to share with you my tocino (red-coloured sweet meat) and longganisa (pork sausages) once I’ve done them, and so they go first in the line up. I’ve decided to make one big batch of each because they get tastier as the days go by, particularly for the tocino because the curing process is longer. This batch should last until two weeks from now, which means I’ll make my next batch sometime in December, or even in January if the boys forget to request for them.
I doubt it, though, because ever since we bought some from my friend’s mother, who is here on vacation but making a tidy profit on the side selling these favourites, they haven’t stopped harking for more.
In fact, my little boy counts the days until the curing process is completed by marking the calendar, and for every day that passes by, he goes: “Yehey! ___ more days and I get to have my tocino!”
Tocino without the reddish colour is just not as good because that is how we know it ever since. I wanted to try extracting colour from beetroot but I forgot to grab a few pieces when we were at the supermarket. So, I settled for artificial food colouring which, ideally, I should not be putting in my kids’ food at all. But I’ll do this only once and then, I’ll try beetroot.
I’d like to share an experience about red-coloured tocino. When I was expecting with my second boy, I used to like eating anything red. I think Moms out there recognize that certain craving for a particular food or taste when you were conceiving as well, don’t you? So, anyway, I would eat red apples and cherries and just about anything red. I was a vegetarian then (until now – but with a gap, which is what I’ll explain next), but when I saw this gloriously red tocino, I could not control myself and I ate it. I ate a lot of it! So my being a vegetarian was tossed out the window just at the sight of that red tocino.
So, after that moment of weakness, I decided to revert to meat for a while until I have given birth, because fish was not that abundant in our part of the country then and I just needed the protein from meat (such a nice and convenient excuse). Anyway, that’s what the red colour of tocino can do.
I forgot to put ascorbic acid in this batch of longanisa, which I normally put in the mix to increase nutritional content (I learned this from the Technology and Livelihood Resource Center in the Philippines), though I am not sure if ascorbic acid, the generic name for vitamin C, is stable enough to stand the heat in cooking.
Whatever, this should last the boys a few days, I guess. After cooking my own longanisa in a small amount of water and oil after the water has dried up, just before I serve it to my boys, I drizzle them with a few drops of honey and the boys are happy as can be.
These are presently neatly stacked in my freezer, ready to cook anytime. It’s quite convenient for me especially when I am rushing to put together a decent meal for the boys. My hubby even brings some for lunch when he feels like it.
Speaking of the hubby, I will have a grand time in my kitchen again this weekend because it’s his birthday on Saturday and I’m gonna cook up a feast for him and our friends. Luckily, one of our close friends will be celebrating her birthday on the same day as well. So, the celebration will be held at her house and we will just combine the food, so that there will be more space for all the visitors, rather than us squeezing into this tiny flat of ours.
See you next post, guys!
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Tags: Life as I See it
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hubby and I love red tocino, in fact we buy it at a nearby market almost every week because we have it for breakfast with fried rice at least once a week, plus it’s convenient to have for packed lunch.
thanks, Heidi for the comments. indeed, tocino is an all-time Pinoy favourite.
galing mo talaga sa kusina. tsarap nyan
yummmy!!!pampanga’s best sarap un:)
Hi! Sheila and Mina! Mina, at least for you, there’s Pampanga’s best anytime. Here in the UK, we can’t have it as often as we want. So, we might as well make it.
Sheila, order ka? he he he!