Food and Oral History: Garlic Rice

-
Garlic rice photo by Hamilton from Evart Michigan

Simplicity sometimes makes things so much better.  I have been describing simple recipes with complicated nuances of in between twists and turns.  The truth of cooking as well as anything in life is that less is more.  I can not think of anything more basic and simple than rice.

Rice is the fundamental staple of Filipino food.  It is the foundation upon which we pour our soups over.  It is the centerpiece of our sweets to make our gelatinous desserts.  My grandmother even made her own libation, saki, out of fermented rice.   I confess that I am probably the only Filipino who does not own a rice cooker. You can imagine how panicked I was when I decided to have a Filipino party.  I could not make enough rice to feed twenty-five people in a little pot, in my tiny kitchen, on my limited counter space stove top.  So I put a text out to family members who owned a rice cooker.  I text messaged "help, please bring rice."

Those who attended the Merienda party at my house may recall that the three hour party lasted all night long.  I woke up the next morning to find my brother and brother in-law snoring away.  As I wandered sleepily into the kitchen, the second thing I found in the house were several containers of left over rice.  Perhaps I went a little over board on the call out for rice.  I shrugged off the finding to the fact that rice does not last long in my house. 
My brother woke up and stated that you can not have a party without garlic rice.  He quickly cooked us up a batch and we ate the left over chicken adobe on top of the garlic rice, with an egg on top of course - otherwise it would not be breakfast.  Ironically, the simplest of dishes is made to top off a party of the grandest mosaic of dishes.

Ingredients:
Rice (leftover and cold to room temperature)
Olive oil
Garlic sliced
Instructions
Par cook the garlic slices in the olive oil and then add the rice.  Mash the rice and mix the ingredients until they are mixed together.  This cooks best if it is done in a wok.  Many add other things in the dish like green onions or Filipino sausage called longaniza.  We keep it simple so we can eat with other complementary left overs like adobo.


Reference:
Garlic rice photo by Hamilton from Evart, Michigan:  http://allrecipes.com/Cook/11910811/Photo.aspx?photoID=386475

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Food and Oral History: Pulpog

-
Image
Andre made Ilocano Pulpog a derivative of Sisig So, I am trying to wrap my head around the differences between the provincial culture my parents grew up in and that of a Filipino city slicker from Manila.  The reason why I am puzzled is because of a perplexed response I got from a Filipina girlfriend at work.  Note, I do not have many close Filipina girlfriends.  Period.  Unless we are relatives, distantly related or our parents knew each other, and you are Filipino, and you are not connected somehow within two degrees of separation, we may not know each other.  Now, that may leave only five people in Houston, given those statistics, but the point is - I did not seek out to make Filipino friends exclusively growing up.  I was already surrounded by them.  I did not see the differences in people that way.  For me the silo of uni-cultural just felt unnatural, which is a complete 360 to the way my parents operated. Thus, my youth angst of not real...
Read more

Filipinos and Hoarding

-
Image
What do you admit to hoarding?  Me?  Gift bags.      As the weather cools, my mind often drifts to fixing up the house because it is finally comfortable enough to work outside.  In Texas, the one hundred degree August heat was so unbearable, there was no need to move to break a sweat.  Air conditioners were breaking down everywhere.  There came a point where I was looking for excuses to go shopping because the stores were cooled to frigid temperatures for temporary relief.  Thus, my shopping habit increased due to some survival motivation to find a cool area to combine two things that bring me joy:  buying something I did not need and free air-conditioning.      This brings me to my topic of hoarding.  I ask myself if hoarding is an individual thing or should I stereotype my own culture?  If I frame my culture as my familial experience, then I think I can truthfully make this argument without surveying all th...
Read more

Food and Oral History: Pork Sinigang or Sinigang na Baboy (Hotpot Pork-Tamarind Soup)

-
Image
      This is the Filipino dish I ask for every year on my birthday.  There is something about the sour taste of the tamarind mixed with warm pork flavored broth that literally brings me back to my childhood like a time machine.  This soup is also made by other Asian cultures, but slightly different.        My cousin and her mom proudly show off their sinigang.       The word “ sinigang ” means the process of cooking meals ( usually sour ) in a clay pot while controlling the ember’s heat by blowing through a pipe of bamboo. There are also different varieties of sinigang and the souring ingredient may also vary.           The sour is from the tamarind.  The first time I ever ate a tamarind was when my grandmother arrived from the Phillipines.  She brought over a large container of goodies from the ancestral village in Agoo, La ...
Read more