COOKING INA 911

Years ago, oh please just don’t ask how many moons ago, I wanted to traipse into my first foray into gourmet cooking by making a meat loaf. Yep, a meat loaf that looked so sumptuous and so delectably picture perfect in my brand new cookbook. So there I was in the supermarket, a virgin shopper, looking for each of the ingredients with the determined must have this look. I bought every pinch and dash that needed to go into that meat loaf.

Then off I toiled in my teeny-weenie kitchen, chopping and cutting and mashing…finally my most cherished meat loaf was ready for baking in my…ooops…had no oven but I had my wedding gift turbo broiler. So I carefully laid it down in the middle of the rack…ahhh my meat loaf in a baking loaf pan. After 30 minutes, well according to the darn recipe book it was supposed to be done by then; to my horror it was swimming in some soup on the sides, and some of it was dripping into my brand new, never been used turbo broiler.

So maybe the recipe wasn’t carved in stone after all…maybe, but I had to break the 30 minutes and cooked it for 15 minutes more and a little more, some 10 minutes more perhaps...well it finally looked good after an hour and a half and there was this smell that may just be the hint of burning meat. I let the meat loaf rest, not wanting to confirm my worst fears…that it tasted awful, that the meat loaf would fall apart when sliced, that it had that slightly burnt after taste…I could just go on and on in my mind. The tension of gourmet cooking was seeping into my veins.

The meat loaf tasted fine…yeah, yeah, alright…was just trying to rewrite history for awhile there. Oh well the meat loaf fell apart as soon as it was released from that tin loaf pan. Adding insult to injury, the cheap aluminum loaf pan turned gray where the meat loaf lay; my conclusion? Well I must have eaten quite a dose of aluminum that day okay??? So that’s why I never ever used aluminum pans again, especially when cooking something with suka (vinegar) like say my all time favorite adobo. We ate that meat loaf for a week and there was still some leftover which I just had to discard without looking so as not to feel guilty about the so many starving children around the world.

With that first failure, my passion for cooking grew by leaps and bounds. Much as I wanted to have cooking independence at that time, I knew it was time to call on my personal cooking 911. My mom!!! Yeah good ole Mom, so to all non-native speakers, of Pilipino I mean, the title of my blog, Cooking ng Ina Ko, simply means…My Mother’s Cooking. There’s a certain naughtiness about the title which I might say is very Pinoy.

I called on Mom to please give me her recipes and please to make the recipes good for two only (note that my Mom’s a Kapangpangan and cooking for two is not in our lingo, so she couldn’t ever make a recipe for two…ever!!!). So in a flash, Mom was there with her index cards of recipes, written in a rush I was sure because I could hardly read some of her writing. Mom would have made a good doctor you know, with her writing skills and all? But I digress. Anyway, I browsed through my treasures, asked and rewrote words I couldn’t decipher, as though that would have made a difference for I did get her writing skills…digressing again…anyway, here are the recipes which I wish to share with you. These are simple, unpretentious, easy to follow everyday home-cooking recipes...