Tabemashou!

Chicken Casserole experimentation

clair — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 07:11:25 +0000

I tasted the chicken casserole an officemate brought to the office on time. His mom cooked it for his birthday ‘libre’ for us. I really liked it and was curious so I asked him to give me the recipe. He said his mom just got it from a magazine. Because I cook for me and JM as well as other people, I had to tweak the recipe.

Ingredients:

350 g shell macaroni (his mom used penne when she cooked it so i suppose that or fusili or rotini should be fine)
diced chicken breasts (not sure how many grams, I threw the pack away sorry! but should be enough to be used for 350 g of macaroni)
1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup
1 large onion, finely chopped
1 medium sized green bell pepper, finely chopped
half a bar of regular processed cheese, grated
2-4 tablespoons of butter
1 small pack Del Monte tomato catsup
salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

Cook the macaroni (or whatever pasta you’re cooking) according to the instructions on the pack. Set it aside.
Melt butter in pan. Sautee the finely chopped onion and bellpepper.
Stirfry the chicken with the onion and bellpper.
Add the condensed cream of mushroom soup, ketchup and grated cheese. Mix it well. Let it simmer.
Add salt and pepper to taste.
Add the macaroni. Mix it well.
Cook it on the stove until it is ‘baked’ :) Make sure you use an aluminum foil to cover it until it gets ‘baked’

In my case, I didn’t have aluminum foil so I put the mixture in a microwavable container and made sure I buttered the sides of the container. I let it stay in the microwave for 6 minutes using Med-High settings. It became a bit baked. :)During the first attempt, I mixed in tomato sauce, not tomato catsup. It wasn’t quite enough to taste as well as my officemate’s mom’s cooking. Today, he said that it lacked some catsup but suited him. Another co-worker suggested I could add more cheese. So, there. Please feel free to check it out and if you find that other variations on the recipe taste well too, let me know I’d love to know what you did with your chicken casserole.

Yet another adobo recipe

clair — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:36:33 +0000

And I still didn’t have bay leaves.

As I type, I have the pork and chicken on the stove. Waiting for it to become tender. The recipe I based it from is here.

The recipe also required paprika but, uh, it’s not a common thing in the office so I am not using that.

Anyhow, I wasn’t able to properly follow the measurements. I have to cook it tomorrow by frying the meats then adding the sauce then reducing it. Rawr.

That will be all for now.

Lunch at Sonya’s Garden

clair — Sun, 25 May 2008 03:48:27 +0000

This is a long overdue post. Hey, at least, I posted something! JM and I went to Sonya’s Garden in Tagaytay last May 1. It was an interesting trip because just commuted from Java Jazz Coffee. There are jeeps to Nasugbu, Batangas from Olivares. We were panicky because it was waaaaay past Breakfast at Antonio’s already and we couldn’t really see a sign for Sonya’s. Many more minutes later, we were able to find a sign and after that, we panicked again and ended walking for 5 minutes to reach the sign of Sonya’s Garden and took a tricycle ride to it. It was our first time to go there but I already knew what the menu was because I checked their website.

So we were greeted by a fresh glass of dalandan juice and JM was really hungry by then. While waiting for the salad, I admired the table setting.

We were served the salad first.

The lettuce leaves were so big and fresh. I don’t think I saw lettuce leaves that fresh in the supermarket! There’s only one dressing and even if I included fruits like mango and jackfruit in my salad, the dressing went well with it. If I go to Sonya’s Garden again, I’d buy a bottle of their salad dressing. It’s not too strong unlike some vinegar based dressings. It’s not too creamy either. I don’t know but it’s just right. A bit sweet, not salty.

After enjoying the salad, we had some bread with interesting spreads. JM had an interesting experience when he spread some peppercorns on his bread! Hehe. The bread was soft but the crust was a bit toasted so I liked it a lot. The spreads were interesting. The dips: pesto, white cheese, anchovies, tapenade. I love the white cheese and the pesto!

As for the main course, we had pasta. I especially loved the sundried tomatoes. And the salmon too. For me the chicken with cream was not too great because I am not a big cream-based sauce fan. I guess it’s because I found it a bit too sweet. In any case you have a choice of adding mushrooms, olives and other food I don’t recall at the moment because this post is really long overdue.

JM actually didn’t eat much bread in order to have space for the pasta. Hehe. He loved the pasta!

For dessert, we had the following: glazed sweet potato, turon, chocolate cake. It was served with tarragon tea.

JM couldn’t eat much of the desserts already because he was full. But I just had to taste everything I am a huge fan of turon, to be honest, and theirs wasn’t overwhelmingly sweet so I loved it. ? The glazed sweet potato was also tasty. Nothing like the camote cue we’re used to eating for snack. The glaze didn’t make the sweet potatoes too sweet and it looked appetizing. The chocolate cake was heavenly! I actually wished I could eat more but I was too full for that. The tarragon tea was perfect.

We had to take pictures of the garden too:

There were nice little house-shaped lamps on the ground and lots of pretty flowers at the side of the dining area. There was also this droopy sunflower and JM just had to pose beside it, as if commiserating with it. Awww.

It was a great trip to Sonya’s Garden and I wouldn’t mind going back again

Pork adobo

clair — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:09:42 +0000

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!”

Tuna with Mushrooms in Cream Sauce

clair — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:54:03 +0000

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:

Heat up the tuna in some of its oil.
Add the mushrooms.
Pour in the cream.
Grate the cheese into the mix.
Let it simmer.
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.

Experimental pasta with white sauce and bangus fillet

clair — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:08:49 +0000

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.

Moving on to Tabemashou

admin — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:59:29 +0000

My bento blog is now assimilated by this food blog. Since JM and I have been really considering this kind of blog, I figured I might as well include my old posts here. The current layout is still messy though. Pardon the moving in mess. ^_^;;

For now, let’s just be amused at this quiz result:

You Are Japanese Food

Strange yet delicious.
Contrary to popular belief, you’re not always eaten raw.

What Kind of Food Are You?

Today’s lunch was: veggie pasta cooked through the microwave and salad

clair — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 14:29:18 +0000

I was thinking of bringing lunch to work again but considering that where I am staying right now doesn’t have a stove, I had to find out other ways of cooking. Then I thought of cooking using the microwave! We don’t have a microwave oven at home so I never really had much experience cooking in it. I only searched for recipes online and how they did things then I went to the grocery the other night and got me some ingredients.

For the pasta, I used vegetable pasta. It tends to cook waaaay faster. Even faster than how whole wheat pasta cooks! Anyhow, I put some hot water in a microwavable container then put the amount of pasta I’d consume/fit in the container. I put the microwave on high heat for five minutes and when I took out the microwavable container, the pasta in it was already cooked! And it was the colorful kind of vegetable pasta so I found it really cute.

For the sauce, I put some tuna, oil, spaghetti sauce and mushroom bits in another container. I heated it for around 5 minutes. Then I mixed the pasta and the sauce and put them in my bento! Hooray!

As for the salad, I bought some greens and mixed in some tuna, mushroom bits, tomato slices and I had a small packet of thousand island dressing. It turned out nicely.

I can’t wait to prepare tomorrow’s bento!

Oh and look! I have a new bento bag

As usual, got it from Japan Home in Park Square 1

Corned Beef Sinigang!!!

clair — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 09:28:19 +0000

Corned Beef Sinigang!!!

Originally uploaded by happyeclair.

I just have to blog about Sentro’s sinigang na corned beef My boyfriend and I finally got a chance to eat at Sentro the other night and we ordered sinigang na corned beef, Rated GG, their blend of gulaman drink and garlic rice. It was a fantastic dinner!

We had a really sour bowl of Sinigang. Maybe I should have asked if they could make it a bit spicier too Hehe. Anyhow, the beef was tender and the vegetables weren’t overcooked. As for the Rated GG, it was not very salty so I liked it a lot. An interesting dish to accompany the sinigang, I swear!

The gulaman drink was sweet but not sugary. They probably used molasses or something. Yummy! It was an absolutely satisfying meal

Yummy chicken with Veggies!

clair — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 04:58:25 +0000

Yummy chicken with Veggies!

Originally uploaded by happyeclair.

Singkit is one of our favorite places to order food from. Singkit is basically Chinese food in takeout boxes. We work in Makati and there’s one in the area. Whenever we work late and feel like ordering food, it’s one of the considerations.

This is one dish that we had the other night. I really like it but I have no idea what it’s called. I wish I knew. And I would definitely love to try cooking it! It’s not too salty and I love the green peas and quail eggs so it’s something really nice. Aside from that, it doesn’t have much sauce so it’s also good for bento. Not much sauce to spill!