Pork with Barbecue Sauce in Mini Ciabatta Rolls

Hubby asked me if I could make snacks for his get together with friends.  It was for about 20 people and I had little time.  He needed it tomorrow and all I had in the freezer were sukiyaki-cut pork!  I also had mini ciabatta rolls and some lettuce.  So I guess it was pork in ciabatta rolls for their snack.  The question was how the pork would be seasoned.

I thought the easiest and fastest would be to marinate the pork overnight in a barbecue sauce.  In this particular case, a homemade sauce is NOT necessary.  In fact, I used a store bought sauce for this recipe...

Easy, peasy recipe...

Marinate 1.5 kilograms of pork sukiyaki in 1-1/2 cups of barbecue sauce, at least an hour, preferably overnight.

The next day, slice 2 to 3 BIG onions and saute them until softened, not browned.  Add the pork and stir fry until done, with the sauce reduced to almost nothing but a thick clingy mass attached to the pork strips.  (Hint here, it may be a good idea to cook in batches so that the pork remains soft.  Too big a batch results in uneven cooking.)  After cooking, mix the pork together and toss with about 1/3 to 1/2 cup more barbecue sauce.

To make the sandwiches, toast the ciabatta rolls.  Line with lettuce and stuff with pork.

And here they are:

I got about 36 sandwiches (although the rolls were of varying sizes).  I'm also happy to say that the sandwiches were a big hit!

Not My Usual Crab Sotanghon

The usual crab sotanghon (mung bean noodle) that I cook (and that hubby likes) is a creamy, saucy concoction.  This time, however, circumstances forced me to stray from the usual.  The culprit?  The absence of a crucial ingredient.

The result?  A different, but still delicious, dish!

The recipe:

300 to 400 grams sotanghon, softened
1 kilo crabs, cut up (cleaned)
4 to 5 thin slices of ginger
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 onion, sliced
3 stalks leeks, sliced, white parts separated from green parts
350 grams ground pork
1/4 cup oyster sauce
1/4 cup light soy sauce
1 liter chicken stock
2 egg whites, lightly beaten

1 tablespoon sesame oil
salt, pepper and chili flakes, to taste

Saute the ginger in hot oil.  Add onions, garlic, and the white part of the leeks.  Stir fry a few seconds and add the pork.  Stir fry until almost cooked.  Add the crabs and mix around a few seconds and season with oyster sauce and soy sauce.  Add the chicken stock.  Season with salt and pepper (and chili flakes, if desired).  When the stock boils, add the sotanghon.  Swirl in the beaten egg whites.  Let simmer until the sauce is fully absorbed by the sotanghon.  Toss with sesame oil (adjust seasonings, as needed).  Serve hot, garnished with the green part of the leeks.

Basic Drop Cookies, stuffed with Snickers Peanut Butter Squared

We have a lot of Snickers Peanut Butter Squared.  Why?  Because I love Snickers and I love peanut butter (I also like the dark chocolate variant).  In fact, while I am not much of a candy or chocolate fan, it is the one candy that I cannot say no to.  The problem is we have too much that I can't finish them all!!!  (Hubby is not a fan of peanut butter...)

Solution?  Convert them into something else...  cookies!!!

Next problem?  What recipe to use?  My requirements are simple... I want... 1. a soft and chewy cookie... 2. a really easy and fast recipe... 3. a cookie that's not too sweet since the candies are sweet enough...

Solution...

Basic Drop Cookies, stuffed with cut-up Peanut Butter Snickers -

TADA!

The cookies out of the oven and cooking on the rack -  (the smells from the kitchen were magical!!!)

The original recipe estimated a yield of 4 dozen.  Frankly, I don't know how all of that would be consumed (even assuming that I was giving half away!!!) so I used only half the recipe and added a little less than 2 cups of chopped up Peanut Butter Snickers!

Yummmmyyyy!  I was done in less than an hour and the cookies were soft and chewy!  The peanuts in the candy provided the crunch while the caramel and nougat in the candy bits provided just enough sweetness!  I got about 30 cookies from half the recipe.  I'm definitely making these cookies again, and trying out its many variations! 

The original recipe is from this book:

The recipe can be found here, with a couple of its variants.

PS - I have just discovered that due to my poor Math skills, I made a mistake in halving the recipe... be that as it may, the outcome was surprisingly good!  Hubby brought the cookies to a get-together with friends and everyone wanted more!!!  Hehehe, I guess not all mistakes have "negative" impact.

Ham and Cheese Quesadilla

It's actually very easy to make!

Just take a flour tortilla, top it with ham slices and shredded mixed cheese (I like mozarella, parmesan and cheddar or quick-melt cheese).  Top with another flour tortilla.  Toast in a hot, non-stick pan until lightly browned then flip to brown the other side.  The cheese should start melting by then.

Slice into wedges.  Top with sour cream and tomato salsa!

Tada!

Or just serve the sour cream and salsa on the side...

Fast, easy and delicious!

3 Cup Chicken

I got home earlier than expected, which meant I had a lot of time to make dinner.  Unfortunately, a quick look in the fridge and freezer yielded only a pack of boneless chicken thighs (yes, time to go to market!) and some shitake mushrooms.

Off I went to look for a recipe.  There were actually lots to choose from, but I wanted to pick a recipe from one of the Chinese cookbooks (a Chinese or Asian published Chinese cooking cookbook, that is) but given the limited ingredients I had in the kitchen, there really wasn't much choice.  I'd almost given up hope until I saw this recipe for 3 cup chicken.  It was relatively simple, and cooking time was just 20 minutes or so!

The dish was so named due to its 3 major ingredients, which, if tradition is believed, to be a cup each of soy sauce, sesame oil and rice wine.  Personally I think a cup of each is too much unless the meat component is truly plentiful (a couple of kilos at least!) after all it would take too long to cook for the sauce to reduce if that were the case!

Anyway, here's my dish:

The recipe is from this book:

It's from my mom's collection, published in 1989 in Taiwan.  Apparently my mom bought it from National Bookstore for Php169.75 (the sticker was still stuck to the original plastic covering)!  The book is still in relatively good condition but the plastic covering had shrunk so I had to take it off to keep the front and back book cover from warping.  And when I opened the pages, the binding had "weakened" so I took out my handy-dandy glue and tried to fix it (in my amateurish way).

Anyway, while I was pretty faithful to the recipe, it has an ingredient (a Chinese herb) that I had no idea about so I just skipped it.  Here is what I did:

1.  After defrosting the 1 kilogram of skinless chicken thighs, I cleaned, trimmed, and rinsed the pieces then patted them dry.  Then I sliced them into bite-sized pieces, about 3 to 4 cuts per piece.

2.  Then I sliced 10 thin slices of ginger and smashed 1 whole head of garlic - not chopped just smashed whole, skins removed, of course.

3.  I also sliced a stalk of leeks, green part only.  And got out 3 pieces of dried chili.  And a large handful of shitake mushrooms (about 15 small pieces thereabouts).

4.  Then I measured the 3 major ingredients... sort of...  I thought a cup of each was too many so I tried 3/4 cup of each.  Except that my sesame oil only came up to about 1/3 cup so I filled the rest with canola oil.  I also used glutinous rice wine, and for the soy sauce I used partly thick soya sauce and partly light soy sauce.

The cooking part is easy too...

5.  Place a flat casserole dish on the stove.  Layer the ingredients:  ginger first, then garlic, then mushrooms, then chicken pieces.  Pour in the oil, rice wine and soy sauce.  My liquid ingredients covered everything.  Toss in the chili pieces.  Cook over high heat (uncovered).  When the pot boils, lower the heat and simmer about 15 to 20 minutes, until sauce is greatly reduced (I've seen this dish in restaurants with virtually no sauce but we like our dishes saucy, simply because we pour sauce over our rice!!!).  Stir occasionally to prevent sticking.  Serve hot, garnished with sliced leeks.

I liked it, but hubby commented that it was a bit too "soy sauce"-ish.  Hmmm... maybe next time I'll just use the light soy sauce and skip the thick soya sauce...

But this is a dish that I will definitely make again... perhaps with squid next time...

Homemade Apple Pie Spice

When my mom made her apple pie many, many years ago, she used apple pie spice that she got abroad.  There simply wasn't one available in the local market.  Many things have changed throughout the years, but today, I still cannot find apple pie spice locally.  (In fact, there were spices available before that are no longer being sold these days, perhaps due to lack of popularity or marketability... but that's a different story).

The next best thing?  Make your own!

Here's mine -

And what's cute is the tool that I mixed it with.  A whisk is popular enough and there's lots in the market.  But this is what I found in one of the boxes of my mom's stuff - a "baby" whisk!  I say "baby" because it really is little, so much so that a spoon is bigger!  And I remember it well from my tween years (if I remember correctly my mom had several of them!) and I've never found a practical use for it (except to beat eggs but honestly, I just use a fork!)

These days, however, I realized how useful that little tool could be.  It was absolutely perfect for mixing together a batch of spices to make my proprietary blend of apple pie spice!

Anyway, here are some apple pie spice recipes that I followed - here's one, another one, and yet another one.  Sometimes I add more of one ingredient or less of another, depending on my particular mood.  I guess what I'm trying to say is, you can pretty much blend your own depending on your personal taste!

Dexter's Chicken and Apple Biscuits

In another attempt to find a doggie treat that Dexter will like... this time with the little girl helping me out (I sure hope she doesn't get tired of helping me...)

I found a recipe in one of my doggie cookbooks and made some major adjustments.  The original recipe called for ground beef and diced carrots.  While Dexter likes carrots, he can't have beef - for some reason beef makes him ill, seriously so.  The last time (years ago) that we made the mistake of giving him beef, he was hospitalized for a week and the vet was afraid he wouldn't make it (I was worried out of my wits!!!)  Anyway, since then his diet is largely vegetable with chicken meat, or sometimes (not really that often) minced pork.

I also omitted the baking powder and salt (vet orders - Dexter is on a no fat, low salt, low carb diet) and and substituted whole wheat flour for the plain flour. 

What I did -

1. Preheated the oven to 325F.

2. Sifted 1¼ cups fine whole wheat flour and ¼ cup skim milk powder together.

3. Added an 1 egg white and 3/8 cup cooked ground chicken and 1/4 cup diced apple (diced in very small dices).

4. Mixed the mixture with my hands.  The goal was to have the mixture resemble pie dough.  Not too dry but not wet either, just moist enough to roll out.  (I thought the mixture was a bit dry so I added about 1 to 2 tablespoons chicken broth and mixed until I got the consistency that I wanted.)

5. Rolled the mixture out to about 1/2-inch thickness (use a floured rolling pin on a floured surface) and used my doggie bone cutter to cut into shape.  The little girl placed the cut out dough shapes onto a paper-lined cookie sheet.  We actually stuck the pieces very close together since they wouldn't be expanding anyway.

6. Baked them for about 22 to 25 minutes until the cookies were dry.  Dexter prefers chewy over crunchy so we baked them just about 20 to 22 minutes.  For a crunchy cookie, bake a little longer.  Take care not to burn them though.

7. Cooled the cookies on a rack.

Dexter loved them!!!