Hi! Hivers, it's me again ylaruj. Welcome to another chapter of our family adventures. In my latest blog I have shared our adventure to TCM. So today's blog is about gathering the ingredients of our food that we brought to TCM and our culinary creations. Dive into our story as I recount the unique experience from garden to table to heart.
It was a rainy morning when my partner and my cousins decided to host a food trip. It was a low budget food trip, because they had to gather their ingredients in our neighborhood. They carried out their plan and were not bothered by the pouring rain.
They came home and got soaked in the rain. They changed their clothes because they were wet. Then they worked on what they had gathered. Botyok chopped the banana blossoms they gathered, sprinkled them with salt and crumpled them to remove the sap and their bitter taste. Then
he rinsed it with water, several times to remove the salty taste from the salt he had put in.
He will make it into a banana blossoms meatballs (puso sa saging nga bola-bola). After rinsing the chopped banana blossoms now everyone unified to season it. They added some spices to it, chopped green onion leaves, onions and garlic.
They put it again with a bit of salt.
2 sachets of Magic Sarap ( the all time favorite seasoning of our family)
1 sachet of Ajinomoto
They cracked three eggs into it.
Pour one fourth amount of flour.
Then my partner mixed it all together using his bare hands, mekus mekus it for some times, so that the ingredients and taste will blend. Then they mold it into balls ( gi lingin lingin) ready to be fried.
Prepare the frying pan, we are suing firewoods for cooking. They add a general amount of oil to the pan and wait for it to heat up before adding the banana blossoms meatballs to avoid them sticking to the pan.
Put the banana blossoms meatballs in the heated oil over the medium heat. Since our firewood is a bit wet, then we have to fan it to help the fire ignite because it's painful on the eyes if we keep on blowing under because wet firewoods produces a lot of smoke.
When the banana blossoms meatballs turn brown, it's a sign that they are already cooked. Cooking meatballs is so costly when in terms of edible oil because it absorbs the oil.
Now our banana blossoms meatballs are already cooked.
Since our banana blossoms meatballs are now cooked, now we have to deal with our second recipe, lumpia made with papaya. They gathered two papaya and they said that it was not enough for our recipe, so my cousins gathered some more.
We sliced the papaya into smaller pieces and then rinsed it with water. Then we half-cook it along with it's spices. Why half cooked? Because we will cooked it again with lumpia wrapper and by doing it, we are avoiding of over cooking the filling.But we didn't season it perfectly because lumpia wrapper is already salty. So if we season our fillings perfectly then our lumpia will become saltier which is not good to consume.
So I place a plate where I lay the lumpia wrapper and fill it with the half cooked papaya. And some water on the side which I will use to seal the lumpia wrapper.
Roll it .
Seal each side and on the top.
After quite some repeated rolling. This is the amount I've made and ready to be cooked. Some of you will wonder if papaya will be really made into lumpia, yes! It's really possible as long as it is edible and not poisonous.
These are the two menus that we brought to TCM and that we shared with our family. Low budget preparations but it sure did bring a great joy to us. We enjoyed our meal and felt satisfied with it.
I said to my self that even if our money is limited but we can still prepare some delicious food because there are lots of foods in our surroundings. As long as we put some efforts and be creative alongside with unity , gathering and making is the thing that is left to do .
I will end my blog here and see you on my another blog post