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Hello eFilipinos!
I’m Veritas Causidicus, Vice-Minister of Culture and Arts and I’ll be your host tonight. Being British in real life I’ve decided that it’s best not to pretend that I know what I’m doing and instead approach this as a neonate, cataloguing my first exposure to the culture and arts of the Philippines.
Like everyone with blood flowing through their veins I enjoy food and I also enjoy cooking it so I thought what better way to first immerse myself in a foreign culture than through its cuisine?
Therefore, today I made dinner and desert Filipino style with chicken adobo on a bed of white rice followed by some mamon, which from what I understand is something of a sponge cupcake. So let’s get starte😛
Can’t make a meal without ingredients so here’s what I’ve got:



5 chicken drumsticks
Garlic
Onion
Brown Sugar
Bay leaves
Soy Sauce
White wine vinegar (A substitute for the apple cider vinegar I don’t have)
Pepper (Also known as: Sir Not Appearing In This Picture)


So first things first, put a 1/3rd of a cup each of soy sauce, vinegar and water in the pot as well as three bay leaves, two tablespoons of brown sugar, a couple of cloves of minced garlic, a sliced up onion, all of the chicken and as much pepper as you can handle (in my case, half a teaspoon). In other words, everything goes in the pot right off, easy so far!

After that, bring it to a boil over medium heat before reducing to a simmer over low. Turn the chicken and cover the pot.


(I am using a wok-lid to let the steam out, I didn’t want to risk boiling the sauce down too thin)

Now you’ve got to choose how long you’re going to let it cook for, the longer it goes the softer the chicken and the more flavour you get! I was hungry there and then so I let my impatience get the better of me and only let it sit for forty minutes, the recipes I looked at generally had anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour and a half.

(Camera phones, the source of terrible pictures everywhere. It looked good in person, I swear!)

So while it was stewing away for the next forty minutes I did a bit of cleaning up and sorted out my rice, basic as it gets, two cups of water for each one of rice in a pot for twenty minutes. And...





Done! Chicken adobo on a bed of white rice presented in low resolution pictures.

---

The main dish done it was time to try my hand at the desert. So let’s start with what we’ve got:


Plain flour
Sugar
Baking Powder
Lemon Juice (Substituting for cream of tartar)
Vegetable oil
Vanilla extract
A box of six eggs

First things first, a cup of flour and a teaspoon of baking powder in a bowl set to one side. All of the eggs, yes all of them, separated into whites in one bowl with yolks in the other. Add your cream of tartar (or in my case lemon juice) to your egg whites at a measurement of one teaspoon.


Okay, now what? The recipe says to beat the whites until they become ‘meringue-like but not stiff’.




…




Ah.

Now reader, here’s where things come off the rails, the egg whites just weren’t thickening, they were just getting foamy and bubbly, not meringue-like at all. So I added my cup of sugar there and then and got something half way there:


(Almost meringue-like and certainly not stiff! That’s close enough for me!)

At this point I added my teaspoon of vanilla and half cup of vegetable oil as the recipe told me praying that this was still going to work. After which, I added the yolks one by one beating the mixture all the while. And finally mixed in the flour and baking powder put aside from earlier.


(Mixing in the flour in all its low resolution glory, starting to look like a real batter now!)

Next step according to the recipe was to put the mix in the cupcake papers to about two-thirds height which I did, but…




The recipe was for 22 cakes, I’ve got 24 here and…



There’s still this much mix left! How many am I going to end up with?




Forty eight cakes! That’s more than anyone could eat! How did I end up with so many?



Now this is where you come in reader, answer me these questions three:
~ Where did it all go wrong with the mamon, was it not using the cream of tartar, a bad recipe, or am I just terrible at baking?

~ What’s your recipe for adobo? From what I read adobo is something that has countless variations and that everyone has a favourite recipe for this Filipino staple, tell me yours!

~ What should I do next? I’m hoping to put out an article every Saturday of this presidential term sharing my experiences with the cultures of both the real and eRepublik Philippines. Your ideas could push me into fantastic learning experiences or could see me make such massive screw-ups as I did with the mamon.

Have a great week ePhilippines and see you next Saturday!