Pinakbet

Yesterday, I was in Chinatown looking for a clay pot so I can make one of my absolute favourites, Cantonese claypot rice. I wasn't able to find a small one so I ended up without it. It just has to be the right size.

I love shopping in Chinatown. This is a piece of trivia, Victoria's Chinatown is said to be the oldest in Canada. Although it is relatively small and does not even compare to the size of most of the bigger Canadian cities' Chinatowns, it carries a variety of produce supplying Vancouver Island's many ethic restaurants with often hard to find authentic ingredients. It doesn't only carry ethic vegetables and other exotic ingredients, it also offers the sort of vegetables that are common to the Western kitchen and perhaps the best thing about it is the quality is sometimes better than many standard grocery stores.

So instead of a clay pot, I ended up with a couple of lap cheung (Chinese sausage), a kabocha squash, an Asian egg plant, a bag of gai lan, choi sum, baby bok choi, Thai basil and holy basil, kafir lime leaves, Thai chillies, and the more common and not so exotic french beans and snap peas. In most cases, I often get overly enthusiastic when I see all the lovely produce and the endless dishes I can make out of them. I make a list but I just ignore it. It's like being in a toy store or ok, cookbook store in my case since I'm a cookbook addict or something like that so then I buy them and when I get home, I don't know exactly what to do with them. All of my wonderful ideas just disappear, puff, gone and poor me is left trying to figure out what to do with all this damn vegetables.

As I was surveying my loot, I noticed I have most of the ingredients to make pinakbet.



Pinakbet is a very popular Filipino vegetable dish. I'm not sure exactly which region it is from but chances are you'll find it in most Filipino family's dinner repertoire. As I said, it is a regional dish so there are many variations. For example, up north in the Ilocano speaking region, pinakbet is made with a variety of local vegetables such as katuray flowers (sesbania grandiflora), fresh lima beans, young ginger and baby onions, a small and very bitter tasting bitter melon, round eggplant similar to the Thai variety and maybe kabocha squash and some slices of bagnet which is very yummy crisp pork belly. All of these veggies are then braised in bagoong monamon.

If you were curious enough to actually click the link, I'm sure by now you know what bagoong monamon is. Bagoong is the Filipino generic term for anything fermented. Yeah yeah, bagoong or fermented anything really is definitely an acquired taste, yes I get it so don't barf. The people in the Mediterranean uses anchovies, heck, the English and the Australians even spread marmite on their toasts. Yeah, marmite... as in fermented yeast extract. (Disclaimer: If somebody from the UK or Australia stumbles on this post, please forgive me. It was not my intention to bash your marmite.) To us Southeast Asian people, bagoong, terasi, teuk trei and all the that other stinky stuff adds a certain je na sais quoi to a lot of our dishes. It's one of the most common ingredient in Southeast Asian cooking.



Now going back to the pinakbet, our version is different. The Tagalog pinakbet contains a mixture of string beans, kabocha squash and flowers, the more common long Asian eggplant, bitter melon and okra. Then add fatty slices of pork. The fat is rendered from the pork for sauteing. Then the veggies are sauteed in chopped chillies, ginger, onion, garlic and tomatoes and braised in bagoong alamang and a little bit of water and finished with some crushed pork chicharron. I didn't have chicharron and I have no idea where I can get the fatty slices of pork used in making bacon so I used pork tenderloin slices instead.

Mr. Cat was very polite. I had to call him 5 times before I managed to peel him away from his sudden but very keen interest on whatever it was that he was watching on Youtube and get him to sit down and eat. Oh well, he was never fond of eggplant, he hates eggplant and as I said, bagoong is an acquired taste and he has not acquired the taste yet so I'll give him a little break. To me, it tasted just about close to what I remembered it to be.

Perhaps if I make him that clay pot rice then maybe I won't have to call him 5 times.