In Our Kitchen

It seems the only time I get to post lately is when a deadline prompts me to do so. This round of Lasang Pinoy is hosted by Mike of Lafang, and it is to highlight the different ways that we Pinoys celebrate the holidays all over the world. For us, in the American South, we have embraced the local customs in our celebrations, especially concerning the foods we celebrate with. In the past we have prepared the usual ham, turkey and all the trimmings. This year however, our second year celebrating with just our immediate family instead of our usual company of extended cousins and friends, we decided to also try something new. For some reason it also took us longer than usual to recover from the turkey dosage of Thanksgiving and couldn't bear the thought of facing another turkey on Christmas day.

So, we went with our guts literally and decided to have an Asian feast instead. Unfortunately, with the recent upgrade of our PCs to XP, we found out the software for our ancient digicam is not compatible with Windows XP and so we couldn't photograph our feast :-(

Our menus for Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner borrowed heavily on these cookbooks:
For Christmas Eve Dinner we had a Japanese menu:

Miso Soup
Sushi
Shrimp & Vegetables Tempura
Pork & Chicken Potstickers
Steamed Rice
Tea
Chocolate Cake for dessert and for Santa

For our Christmas Day Dinner, we had a Chinese menu:

Simplified Peking Duck (Inspired by the Baby Rambutan)
with Home-made Mandarin Pancakes and Steamed Buns
Lettuce Wrapped Chicken
Gai-lan (chinese greens) with shitake mushrooms
Chicken Pan-fried Noodles
Steamed Rice
Fresh Fruit: papaya, fuji apples, pears

Christmas always seems to be a great time to experiment with new recipes, and this year, experiment we did. I was rather pleased with how the mandarin pancakes came out, and judging by the steamed buns, I think I will be making sio pao soon. The pancakes were thin, and delicious around the peking duck, hoisin sauce, scallions and cilantro. The buns were a pleasant surprise though. I made them as I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to pull off making the mandarin pancakes without drying them out. The dough for the buns is the same as for making siopao, except in this case, I didn't fill them but rather made fat "tacos" with them and filled them with the duck and scallions also. Hopefully, we can get our camera problems fixed soon and I will post recipes.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

lasangpinoy5