I’m still cooking

For the past few weeks, I’ve been cooking food that I want to eat. The problem about eating what I want is that it’s always bad for my health. Think about cartilages, bone marrows, chicken skins, sugary stuff and fatty pork belly. Not something you want to eat if you are prone to heart disease.

But I’m a bit open minded this time. I want to eat blanched asparagus with hollandaise sauce. I tried to eat hollandaise for few times now and I can say that it’s not bad at all. I just don’t like eggy and buttery flavor but if you make hollandaise sauce properly, it provides a distinctive good flavor. The first time I made hollandaise sauce was really bad. It turned out very liquidy. It didn’t curdle though which I thought was fine but the taste was disgusting. But when I make hollandaise in our soup and sauce class, it tasted better because I cooked it in the right way. It has right consistency. I used the clarified butter which is better to use than regular butter. I whisked the egg yolk with water and whisk it till its thick enough, and that frothy mixture is known as sabayon. Then you add the clarified butter slowly, whisking constantly to form an emulsion. Finally, you can add salt and lemon juice. Making hollandaise isn’t easy at all. It takes a lot of patience and practice. When I made it this time, it was thick because I whisked it too long (picture above).

When I was at the grocery store, I saw this gigantic size sweet potato and I thought of camote cue (caramelized sweet potato on a stick). I remembered eating camote cue growing up. When I think about comfort food, I think about this and grilled milk fish (bangus). It’s something I would never get tired eating. My husband, on the other hand, hates sweet potato even though its caramelized. He said he hates it more. He is annoying sometimes.

I have no idea what to do with our ground beef. My father-in-law gave us all kinds of steaks, from T-bone to sirloin and lots of ground beef when he bought us the deep freezer. It was last year and we still have some left. So I decided to make meatloaf. It’s funny because I didn’t know that you can make meatloaf using ground meat. I never have american meatloaf before, all I had was the canned one. At work, we make meatloaf from scratch. I guess you can’t have good meatloaf if you don’t make it from scratch. I copied the recipe at work because it has the best flavor out of the meatloaf I’ve tasted plus it has bacon on top, so there you go.

I never cook pork hock before but I’ve eaten it many times when I was still in the Philippines. My father, who is the best cook I’ve known,  kicks ass when it comes to lauya or nilagang baboy (boiled pork). But I didn’t cook my pork hock that way. I cooked it in adobo style because I don’t have the ingredients to make the soup. I boiled the pork hock until the cartilage, fat and meat are off the bone. Then I started cooking like the way I cook adobo. It was okay. I’d prefer the soup better than adobo though.

Today, I cooked asian wings. But seriously, I don’t know how to call it. I created the sauce to coat the wings after I panfried it. The sauce is just basically the stuff I found in my fridge. I won’t consider sharing it here because it is my special secret recipe. My husband loves it and it has a different flavor than the wings you’ve tried at hooters or buffalo wild wings.

I’m still cooking and kicking…and eating.