Tabemashou!

JM and I haven’t cooked adobo on our own yet. Until tonight, that is. So that we could have something substantial to eat for lunch in the office tomorrow. (Thank God for a nice office pantry!)

Anyhow, this is the adobo recipe we followed — sort of. We didn’t have laurel leaves so we just sort of followed it. Also, we didn’t separate the sauce from the adobo. We removed the marinade after making the meat tender in it but after frying the pork we poured all the sauce in the pan and let it ‘dry up’ or ‘reduce’ — I am not sure what the proper term is but what happened is that in the end there was less sauce.

We had to add more pepper because we used crushed pepper. That was all we had in stock. We added it in while waiting for it to dry up a little.

Some pictures of the cooking experiment:

And this is the finished product!

As of the time I am writing this post, it’s more like the dry adobo JM likes. I prefer it a bit soupy to be honest but this works too! And we tasted it earlier. I could say it was Nami*!!!

*Nami = my bastardized word for “Yummy!”

Chelle says it’s tuna casserole but I don’t know. ^^;;; Gomen, I just made it according to gut feel. In high school, my bestfriend used to cook tuna and mushrooms a lot. And she would pour some cream sauce over it. It’s been ages since I ate that and because JM wanted to eat something different, I prepared something close to it. XD

Ingredients:

• 1 can of Century Tuna (the one in oil)
• half a tetrapack of Nestle Cream
• 1 small can of mushrooms
• Eden cheese – the snack pack type

Instructions:

1. Heat up the tuna in some of its oil.
2. Add the mushrooms.
3. Pour in the cream.
4. Grate the cheese into the mix.
5. Let it simmer.
6. Add some pepper if you want it a bit spicy.

Clair’s Notes:

• You can use the tuna with hot and spicy oil. It’s yummy if you love spicy stuff. I don’t think the other variants of tuna in can such as Tuna in Asado or Tuna adobo would taste as good when used in this recipe.
• Don’t use too much oil. It will end up bleh~
• If you prefer tuna in brine or in water, maybe use margarine just to make sure it won’t stick to the pan.
• Don’t cook the cream for too long. My friends say it might curdle.
• You could opt to lessen the cheese.

It could serve two to four people, depending on the appetite. Also, we had other viands around so there was more than enough for us.

The dish is pasta with white sauce and bangus fillet on the side.

Ingredients:

• 500 g of linguine
• 300 g of spaghetti
• 1 can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup
• 1 cup of milk
• garlic
• butter/margarine
• 500g bangus fillet
• grated cheese
• salt and pepper
• 100 g dried mushrooms

Bangus fillet
The bangus fillet needs to be marinated. Use salt, pepper, garlic to marinade the fish. Set it aside for later.

When you’re done with the marinade, you could now cook the bangus fillet. We used the oven toaster.

Put some margarine/butter in the heating tray. Put the bangus fillet on the tray, as well as the bits and pieces of garlic from the marinade. Set the timer to five minutes. Then turn the fish around and heat it up again for another five minutes.

Pasta
Cook the pasta according to the instructions in the packet. In this case, we had to make two batches of pasta because there were more people eating the pasta than we anticipated. JM’s method is a bit different though. We only had a rice cooker, a microwave oven and an oven toaster so he used the rice cooker. He put hot water in the rice cooker then added the noodles even if the water hasn’t boiled yet. He was constantly watching over the pasta.

White Sauce
Put the dried mushrooms in water then chop them up when they are soft already.

Heat the pan (in our case, the rice cooker) and melt the butter/margarine in it. Saute the garlic and the mushrooms. Add the cream of mushroom soup. Simmer. Add a cup of water. Add milk. Simmer. Add grated cheese. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Serving the dish
Mix the pasta and sauce. Put it on a nice dish. Put the fish fillet on the side.

Clair’s notes

We weren’t able to anticipate the number of people eating the dish and how big their appetites were individually. We were roughly 6-8 people who shared the food that night. Also, we weren’t able to add enough cheese, salt and pepper to make the sauce more flavorful. Next time, I will buy more dried mushrooms because the texture is great and the flavor so divine! Martin asked me if they were Chinese mushrooms but I wouldn’t really know. Next time I will read the label more carefully. The dish doesn’t look too nice but it’s something we could work on later.

Also, it was one of those times that JM and I really cooked together. It was a bit awkward because I found the pantry too small and his way of cooking very different from mine. But it turned out fine, I think. The sauce was just a bit bland. Jo helped us out with this dish because she loves cooking pasta with white sauce and I didn’t really know much about it.