In line with our theme of Filipino celebrations, Chef Mike posted a Paella Negra Stuffed Squid with Cream Sauce Aligue, just the sound of those words coming out of my orifices turns me on. So I am obliged to make a Filipino Paella Recipe. Here are the things that you need to inject your brain before we continue:

1. This recipe will be mostly based on the readily available ingredients for Paella in the Filipino Market. So if you’re thinking that we will add Thyme later, you are dreaming.

2. Although I told you in number 1 that we will use Filipino ingredients only, I take my word back because I will be using real saffron. The one that I had a picture with in the previous post here.

3. We will not use a Paellera (a pan that is usually used to cook Spanish Paella). It is expensive and I don’t see a point (as of the moment) buying one pan that can be only used for one dish. I am not rich and dumb yet. But hopefully, I’ll get there. I’m excited to say “Duh! I have money!”.

4. Paella and Arroz Valenciana is different. You use rice in Paella and you use sticky rice in Arroz Valenciana.

5. I will screw up at the end of this post because I used real saffron. So read on to witness my impending destruction.

Ingredients for your Filipino Paella recipe

5 cups of cooked rice. Yes, we are going to pre-cook  our rice because cooking rice in a wok are only done by people with really really really high IQ.

5 really really really ripe tomatoes

1 really really really huge-as Spanish onion (alright I’ll stop with the really really really)

1 chopped red chili pepper

A head of garlic

half a cup of vegetable oil.

1/2 kilo of skinned and cubed chicken thighs. Be sure all the water is drained from the chicken after you wash it.

1 huge longganiza or chorizo. Clue, you can’t get it from your boyfriend.

1/2 kilo of raw monster-big prawns

1/2 a kilo of any combination of fish fillets, cubed. In this recipe, I used salmon and swordfish. Be sure you use fish that can hold its integrity. Tuna fillets are good contestants.

1/2 a kilo of mussels or green shells.

300 grams of squid or calamari. You can cut it any way you like as long as you clean and cut it. And when did it happen that we can only make rings out of them?

1 cup of chicken stock, or dissolve a chicken cube in a cup of water, or a cup of water. I prefer home-cooked chicken stock. Read here.

1 cup of green peas, preferably sweet peas

1 whole green bell pepper

1 teaspoon of orange-coloring. In this recipe I am a saffron-using-idiot. If you can’t get saffron, you can get that orange coloring that is also used for Arroz Valenciana. You can even add a little bit of paprika which is always available in your friendly cash-grabbing supermarket.

3 bay leaves crushed and torn into pieces like the plight of those Filipino Telenovela protagonists

A very wide and deep wok. They are cheap to buy. Just visit your local wet market and haggle. If you have a small wok, where are you going to cook kilos and kilos of these ingredients then?

Big and small containers because we will be cooking batches. Do not start cooking unless they are prepared. Do the scout salute.

How to Cook your Filipino Paella

1. Chop your tomaotes, Spanish onion, chili peppers and all your garlic cloves. Put them in separate containers. You don’t want the juices of the tomato to touch your chopped garlic. Heat up your wok and put all your oil in. Now saute your garlic in low heat. Watch out, right after it has turned golden brown, scoop it out of the wok and into your readily available container. Save that for later. As long as our oil is garlic-infused, it will be awesome. Turn up the heat to medium. Now drop in your onions, chorizo or longganisa and chicken. Wait for them to turn a little bit brown and then drop in only 3/4 of your chopped tomatoes but all your chopped red chili pepper. Cover it for 2-3 minutes until those tomatoes have given up all their juices for the cause. And then pour in your chicken stock and cover again until it boils.

2. Boiling? Crank the heat up and wait until the stock turns into a saucy consistency. Once it’s saucy, drop all your seafood in baby. Every 30 seconds you need to turn all the ingredients over and over to make sure that everything is cooked evenly. Is it crowded in the wok already? Wait till we put in your 5 cups of rice then you can panic. Alright, the seafood should only be in the wok for 3-4 minutes, so you should be turning and turning them. But be gentle, you don’t want to scar your fish cubes. Once everything has changed in color, all luminance gone from the fish, prawns turned orange and squid cuts have turned all-white and textured-up and all the mussels have opened, take everything off the wok except for the sauce. If after you’ve transfered them to your container and if the container has juices in it, pour those juices back in the wok. By then that thick sauce that we had a while ago has turned thin again because of all the juices of seafood that we’ve added. Add your coloring. If you are using saffron, you should have let them simmered in that cup of chicken stock 2 hours ago before you started cooking so the color and flavor will be released to the chicken stock. But if you are an idiot like me, you forgot about it, so you dropped your saffron in the wok hoping it will color the dish but wouldn’t. If you are not using saffron, then your coloring will do the job in a fraction of time. Wait for that stock in the wok to turn really thick, down to half a cup. You only need half a cup of very thick sauce for 5 cups of rice. You don’t want your rice to turn into porridge. And just like what Chef Mike said, “It’s just like making Sinangag!” That’s Filipino fried rice for you white-boy.

3. Thick to half a cup already? Taste it. If it lacks salt you know what to do. If it’s just salty, that’s ok because that will still be distributed to your 5 cups of rice. Put all your rice in if it’s thick-ready. Add your peas and bay leaves in as well. Mix, turn and scrape until everything is covered with that yellowish fantastic color. When they are colored evenly, drop in your seafood and mix. Remember you still have tomatoes left and green bell peppers? Just put them on top of your steaming Filipino Paella recipe and cover the wok. Cover. What we’re doing right now is for the flavors to meld and for that Paella “tutong” to form. Tutong is the overcooked and toasted rice on the bottom of the pot. A bonafide Filipino will join in a fistfight just to get this stuff. That will take 2-3 minutes in high heat. Take the cover off and sprinkle your toasted garlic pieces.

4. Serve on the wok. Do not even try to take your Filipino Paella off the wok. It would be barbaric not to serve Filipino Paella on a wok.

But here’s a picture of it on a plate.

My Paella did not have the desired color because again, I screwed up on using real saffron. What an ignoramus. I failed. I hope you won’t.

Hello hello major major! I hope you guys are looking forward to a fantastic week ahead. I know I am having one because I have a series coming up for you starting Tuesday about Filipino Street Food. Monday is for our resident chef, Chef Mike Santiago and he will give us a sneek peak into what we will talk about in the coming weeks ahead in this month of May. Before I go on, 2 things:

Congratulations to our hero, Manny Pacquiao for “bringing home the tocino” again and added another name on his list of warriors eliminated. The next one is, Happy Mother’s Day! Or if you are in the Philippines and are a mommy, mama, mamang, nanay – belated Happy Mother’s Day to you! Now let’s get on to the news!

Address rice wastage right at home – Nutrition council

fetched from Philippine Information Agency

I have been going on with this rice issue over and over that I am getting tired of myself. But this is one of the issues that we need to address. If you want to know what I was up to for the past months, go on the homepage after you read this and clik on the category Kitchen Siege so you can read why in the world I am still on this topic. And the link to the news there will tell you why.

I always wonder, why some Filipinos, either at home or in a restaurant would leave a morsel of rice on the plate after they finish their meal. I’m puzzled really because one, it is definitely a waste, two, it is an insult to the server or the provider and three, why would you ask or take that much if you can’t finish it? I remember as a kid, we are not allowed to stand up on the table if the plate is not clean. It is then followed by a sermon of this and that and kids in Africa, world at war, how lucky I am, and whatever it is that my parents can think of. Is this the fault of the parents? Do these parents know what kind of monster they are creating if they let their children leave food on their plate? I mean, I understand feeding toddlers because you don’t know how much they can finish. But grown ups? Enlighten us please. Philippines is not a rich country so why this kind of culture? Is there something we don’t know why some people would leave rice on their plate after meals.

I think I am going to leave it at that. Please do speak up. Let us know. Or as what I did, rant below. It’s free! And don’t leave any morsels of disgust, delight, or any argument unfinished on your plate of thoughts.

1. It is the fattest and biggest bacon cut.

2. It is adorably sweet and it’s not salty compared to common kinds of bacon.

3. It is pink.

Although this Tocino recipe did not undergo the curing process of nuking it with saltpeter, I succumbed to coloring artificially because I don’t want to use any red powdered spice like paprika because it ruins the flavor.

Let’s dive right away on how to make Tocino for Tosilog. Like what we did with our Tapa, put the marinade on a separate bowl so you can give it a taste before you dunk your meat in.

You can use any meat. If you were thinking of using beef, normal people always use pork. But nobody said you can’t make tocino out of beef… it’s just that nobody ever did make tocino out of beef. With regards to pork, you can use the shoulder part or the ham leg cut or most likely, you will end up with the belly anyway. You will want to have some fat in your tocino cuts because those are the tastiest parts and it shows that you are brave enough to take in cholesterol. Congratulations, you will get fatter you hedonist.

Let’s do the marinade step by step:

Step 1

Boil half a cup of water for every 500 grams of meat and put it in a bowl. Be careful, you don’t want to burn yourself, melt a plastic bowl or break a thin glass bowl. The vase is for flowers.

Step 2.

For every 100 grams of meat, add a tablespoon of sugar, a tablespoon of ketchup, a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of powdered pepper, and a few drops of red unicorn tears (see coloring) for magic, in your hot liquid. Stir your liquid until all the powders have joined the water in blessed union.

Step 3

Taste it before you dunk in the pork. You can add more water, more salt, more sugar or more red unicorn tears if you         want to. Magic…

Step 4

For the next 4 hours, let your pork snort all the marinade in the bowl like what they do with their food when they’re             alive. Stick, stack and store them in a reliable freezer. Again, store them in the freezer for up to 3 days and consume them in that duration as well. I am giving you a short time frame for consumption because I do not want you to blame this website if you encounter gastric problems. I did not tell you to pick up stuff on the floor and eat it and I did not mention red unicorn tears.

Step 5

You can cook them anyway you like. You can boil them, fry them, grill them, broil them, you can bury them in your backyard for 24 hours before you dig them out and put them straight into your orifices for all I care just as long as you cook them well done. But just to be safe, shallow-fry them. Do not burn your babies. You want them pink with a little bit of brown smudges.

I assume you have fried your egg and rice for your Tosilog.

If you’ve been itching to know why do we color our Tocino red (and most likely ends up like a glimmering pink seductress),  you can ask Mr. Kitchenero.

How to make Tapa for Tapsilog

How to make Longanisa for Longsilog

How does one make steamed rice without an electric rice cooker/steamer?

Have you chosen any of the suggestions there? Have you heard of rice poisoning? Anybody know if any one of them are still alive?

Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to give you Oryza Sativa. And no, she is not from the collection of DVDs of your shady uncle, she is actually your mother. She is the life source of the vast part of the human population, the Eve monocot, the ever attendant participant of  every meal from the East and the most wrongly cooked grain in the West – our Mother, rice. Please do not manhandle her.

Unlike any other group of people in the world, Filipinos have a very intimate relationship with Mother. Unlike the Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Koreanese who have noodles as a substitute for rice, Filipinos love Mother and Mother only. The Indians with their Basmati version, they too are not faithful to Mother. They have Naan, their father. Italians decided to name it in 3 syllables, Ri-sot-to, because they have their well preferred companion in 2 blurbs, Pas-ta. And the rest of the world who would rather be poked by corn or stoned by potatoes, we, the Filipino people, in unswerving allegiance, are the Mother’s most faithful followers.

Here are some fun facts that come with it:

The International Rice Research Institute‘s headquarters is in the Philippines. I have been there myself and all I can say is that they have a lot of rice there.

The Banaue Rice Terraces are an ingenious tribute of Filipinos to rice and was recently listed under UNESCO’s World Heritage List. This is not only one huge boulder of rice paddies but mountain by mountain of rice paddies you would really wonder how the crazy ancient Filipinos did it. But unlike the Mayans, the native tribes there are still hopping in between ranges in their g-strings.

Last 2008 the world suffered under rice shortage and the hardest hit is the Philippines because it is the largest importer of rice. Think about it; Philippines has the International Rice Research Institute and has mountains and mountains of rice paddies, why then is there a shortage of rice in the country that it has to be the largest importer of rice in the world?

Because Filipinos do not only eat rice. We actually boil it and use the water as an eye-drop solution for sore eyes. We grind it and rub the powder on our underarms to protect us from bad body odor. We culture it to make Yakult. We put it in the altar so it can cry and then we use the tears to heal old people. We make it as pets. We put it to sleep and give it a bath. That is how we really need Mother.

It is a mortal sin for us not knowing how to cook it. And if you are a Filipino who doesn’t know how to cook rice, you are going to the fiery furnace.

So without further ado let’s examine the easy steps on how to cook rice perfectly.

Wash the rice with your pretty hands first because you don’t want to eat dirt and fertilizers. Put the rice in the pot, put water in and gently run your hands through, rubbing them and as if squeezing them. If you are doing it grain by grain you need to look down the floor and check if you dropped your brain.

Pour the water out but be careful and make your hand as a sieve for grains that go with the water. Do this twice or if you are anal retentive, as much as you want to.

After rinsing, put water for cooking and measure it with the first line from the tip of your thumb. Put your thumb in the pot, let its tip sit on the rice and the water must be at the level of the first line of your thumb. My grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother never remembered why they do this but they have been doing it so don’t question the ancients. If you are 10 years old or less or have a weird thumb (no offense), use your thoe (that is the toe version of your thumb)… or let somebody measure it for you.

Cover the pot and turn on the heat in medium and wait for the concoction to boil. When it boils, turn the heat down to the lowest and wait for it to dry up and then turn off the fire. Do not open the cover more than 3 times because the spirit of Mother will go away thus making your rice dry and soulless.

The Filipino way of cooking rice is easy, smooth, painless, effortless, and with wings.

Now, if you did make a mistake because you are dyslexic like Jamie Oliver (Bourdain, may God have mercy on you for hating Jamie before), we shall make a rescue plan:

If the rice is still raw and grainy, your mistake is, your water is not enough or you did not follow the medium to low to turn off heat model. Sprinkle at least 1/3 cup of water in low heat. Do not pour the water, sprinkle it using your fingers.

If the rice is sloppy, the only way of rescuing it is turning it into fried rice, or porridge. Unfortunately the title of the article is “How to cook rice perfectly”.

So, everyone happy with their Mother?

I left a comment in the link above (click comment after the first answer). I really hope they are still alive or I’ll feel that this article is too late to save.

DISCLAIMER: Do not use the liquid from the boiled rice as eye-drops or you will poach your eyeballs even if the liquid is not hot. Do not use powdered rice as deodorant, because you are not sure if your underarms are glucose intolerant. Do not put rice anywhere except inside your mouth and only when it is cooked. I do not know how Yakult is made. Ask Dr. Shirota. You can make rice as pets. Batteries not included.

Heavenly white rice is best eaten with Adobo.

The people from the islands would also like to suggest eating it with fish.