World Class Chefs
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Ramilo (Ram) Villaluna
Ram is a budding chef from Iloilo City (Molo). He gained his training in Culinary Arts at the Center for Asian Culinary Studies under food guru Gene Gonzalez, Institute of Culinary Education (formerly Peter Kumpps) in New York. He took up bread making, and he studied food styling under Delores Custer of the Culinary Institute of America. It all started in Antique where his father owned a restaurant many Antiquenos learned to love. He continued the culinary legacy of his father and now, Ram owns a catering business, Cindy\'s Catering. Food is Ram\'s life, seriously speaking. I am short in saying that he is married to the food industry that, he spends most of his time teaching and mentoring at the Department of Culinary Arts at the University of San Agustin in Iloilo. If one cannot find him in the classroom, Ram will be on the road crisscrossing Iloilo and Antique having first hand in the management of his thriving businesses from both provinces. He also has a once-a-week TV show in GMA 7 \"Food Trip\". I met with Ram once before and he exudes perfectionism, the character that will beam him up to the limelight of culinary arts. At present time, Ram is extremely busy in Manila. I believe he is one of the finalists in The National Food Showdown 2010 sponsored by ABS-CBN. We wish you all the luck, Ram! Maybe, after this showdown, Ram will have the opportunity share favorite recipe here at ILONGGO LIVING.
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Archive for July, 2009
Homemade Vigan Longanisa
July 29, 2009
My Ilocano chef and I had been craving for longanisa, Vigan-style. We used to go as far as Mississauga, Ontario just to get that kind of a sausage. Sometimes, we get the chance to taste them if friends or relatives coming back from the Philippines are lucky enough to bring it over here passed the custom’s guards at the airport. Otherwise, we have to settle for the ones made here. Vigan longanisa is quite distinct compared to other Philippine-styled sausages. Though I hesitate compare it with Ilonggo sausages, it does not even come close as the rest of them are loaded with either sugar and or red food coloring. Vigan-style is not! It’s loaded primarily with garlic and freshly cracked black pepper, sans food coloring and sans sugar. Ilocanos can atttest to that! Anyways, we initially planned to make them skinless but ended up using sausage casings and borrowed my brother-in-law’s sausage maker. The best part of making your own longanisa is that, you can regulate the amount of any ingredients you want in it. With ours, we reduced the amount of fats in it for health reasons. Essentially, pork fats makes longanisa or any kind of sausage for that matter, flavorful. Hmmm… I can smell cooking in the kitchen now. Here we go.
Vigan-style longanisa loaded with garlic, freshly-cracked black pepper, vinegar and salt to taste.
Homemade longanisa is still the best!
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East Meets West
July 28, 2009
As far as east is, there’s always a chance that it will meet west somehow. That’s true with foods, so to speak! As our food menu at home varies because of the kids, we try to marry our food culture with the western. That’s where fusion comes in handy. A little bit of this and a little bit of that in a certain dish, breaks traditional cooking. Innovation becomes the norm with most of our cooking here in Canada. Probably some of my regular readers noticed that for the past few posts. Okay, so tonight Ilocano dish rules as my chef cooked her favourite dish, the venerated denengdeng. One can practically use any local veggies for this bagoong-based soup. Just like our laswa in Iloilo. Since sweet corn, spinach, kalunay and mushrooms are in abundance here in southern Ontario right now, we try take advantage of them. For the kids they settled for roast beef with horseradish.
Denengdeng with ampalaya, sweet corn, oyster mushrooms and spinach.
This sumptuous dish is an Ilocano favourite.
Another version of denengdeng with kalunay leaf and sweet corn.
Kalunay are free growing green vegetable or can be cultivated as what my Ilocano friend does every late spring and early summer.
Roast beef with longanberry and horseradish.
Brown gravy for roast beef is a must aside from horseradish.
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Arroz a la Valenciana
July 26, 2009
It has been over a month now since I posted Arroz a la Paella. That post was the catalyst in preparing today’s dish, the Arroz a la Valenciana. They are both undeniably Spanish in origin and did you know that both originated from the province of Valenciana in Spain? Comparatively speaking, each are prepared differently. The paella is basically baked, whereas, the valenciana is purely stovetop cooking. As to their distinctive ingredients, the paella calls for a variety of seafoods while the valenciana, more of a variety of meat. White wine and saffron is needed in paella, while the valenciana requires turmeric powder and optional gata or coconut milk. But basically, the main ingredient for both is rice (as the name arrroz implies). Back in the Philippines, arroz a la Valenciana or Bringhe in Pampanga, is a special dish prepared only during special occasions such as town fiestas, weddings or Christmas dinner. Valenciana is at times dubbed as poor man’s version of paella. But today, I will prepare mine as lavished as paella.
My lavish Arroz a la Valenciana
Ingredients & Procedure:
This recipe calls for a 1:3 ratio of glutinous rice (malagkit, pilit) over regular rice. In doing this, your rice mixture won’t be that sticky. The rest of the ingredient are: pork, shrimps, chicken breast, Spanish sausage (chorizo), green peas, red bell pepper, chives, tumeric powder, achuwete and gata. It is interesting to note that after boiling your meats (except chorizo), use the soup to cook the rice together with the turmeric powder and achuwete. Slice up your cooked meats and save the head of shrimps to be pounded in a mortar and pestle to extract the juice.
Sautee garlic, onion, all the meats and add gata (coconut milk) and the juice extracted from the shrimp’s head. Let it boil for 15 minutes. Adjust salt. Add your cooked yellow rice, followed by your red pepper, green onions, green peas and raisins. In lieu of raisins, I used black mission figs for a change. Stir rice mixture occasionally for the next 10 minutes under low flame so as to allow admixture of ingredients. Place valenciana on a platter and garnish it with sliced hard boiled eggs. Note: Some people do shortcuts to avoid sauteeing and the final “tiring” stirring part of cooking by putting all the ingredients at once while cooking up the rice. That’s doable, but, one will sacrife the flavor tremendously.
The process of cooking valenciana is somewhat more tedious than paella.
PRESTO! A flavourful ARROZ A LA VALENCIANA!
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Month End FOOD REVIEW
July 25, 2009
While I was sorting some pics from June’s postings for my planned ”new look” blog , an idea popped up in my mind. Why not feature the best shots of the previous month based on reader’s choice or comments. It’s not that I am running short of food pics already, but, the Month End FOOD REVIEW will provide insights or reflections of last month’s posts without having to sort through the archives. What a neat idea, indeed! That way, readers who missed last month’s posts will conviniently have a snapshot of them. So, I decided this to be a regular feature of my blog and hoping it will be alright with my regular readers. Here we go, for the month of June 2009 BEST 5 entries!
ROYAL BIBINGKA - June 20th
SUAM NA TULYA - June 25th
ARROZ A LA PAELLA - June 14th
PANCIT BIHON - June 18th
PANCIT PALABOK - June 23rd
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Pancit Molo (a hybrid)
July 22, 2009
My chef and I had to agree today as to how Pancit Molo be prepared for dinner tonight. She comes from the Ilocos region, and me, obviously from Iloilo. Pancit Molo is undoubtedly, an Ilonggo dish. Molo is one of the districts of Iloilo City. That’s where pancit Molo had originated. Over the years, other regions of the Philippines adapted this dish and created their own versions. A sort of their own signature of the dish. To contrast Ilonggo style of the dish with the Ilocano, one has to add pieces of shrimps and pork-filled wonton wrappers into the noddle-filled soup. That’s what we exactly did tonight! A concession between the two regions with some few minor adjustment in the ingredients. And you may ask how was the taste ? EXCELLENT! Worthy to be called Pancit Molo in it’s truest sense!
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Red Papaya Thai-Vietnamese Cuisine
July 21, 2009
My quest for a perfect tom yum soup was realized today at the Red Papaya Thai-Vietnamese Cuisine here in Hamilton, Ontario (225 John Street South, Tel. No. [905] 540-9500). I have been scouting around for a while now for the best tom yum soup in the Hamilton area. So, today is a perfect day to do just that as my French-Canadian friend is very motivated to savour Thai cuisine. Furthermore, I have been eyeing to go to Red Papaya for a while now. So, the excitement started to build up as we walked in the restaurant.
The ambiance inside the restaurant is very appealing and is matched with real dining furniture, adding a touch of class. Each table is equipped with dozens of chopsticks and soup spoons stocked on a rack. Jamine tea was served right away and the wait time for our order was totally acceptable 15 minutes! The food was great and the servers were polite and friendly.
Beef Tom Yum Soup
Crying Tiger Shrimps - very spicy hot!
Tofu Pad Thai
Our server, Tommy (with permission to post his photo) was all smile when I rated their restaurant 8 out of 10! Red Papaya is owned by Tommy's brother.
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Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Bread Pudding
July 19, 2009
You wouldn’t believe that a popular doughnut will end up as bread pudding. My eldest son scrapped a recipe from the net using Krispy Kreme doughnuts as main ingredient for bread pudding. It looks like I will have a second “chef” in the making! This is the quick and easy version. You can goggle it and you will find the most popular versions of Bill Nicholson’s or Paula Dean’s adding more ingredients such as butter rum sauce, using condensed milk in lieu of heavy cream. If you want your bread pudding to be more fancy, you can add fruit cocktail and raisins. It’s your choice!
Ingredients & Procedure
The recipe calls for 2 dozens of regular glazed doughnuts, minced into large pieces, a small can of heavy cream, white chocolate chips and 8 pieces of whole eggs. The original recipe calls for half cup sugar but I told my son to skip that part as Krispy Kreme is already “loaded” with sugar! Mixed them all together in a big mixing bowl and bake it in a 12″ X 6″ baking pan at 350 degrees oven for 10 – 15 minutes.
Presto, there goes your Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Bread Pudding. Courtesy of my second chef!
You will notice the texture of the bread pudding is made up of bits of doughnuts and white chocolate chips.
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Where is Summer?
July 17, 2009
This querry seem like an echo of last spring’s rant. People here in Ontario are just wondering if indeed summer arrived last June 21st. It seems like it did but left too soon, I guess. I am not complaining but, it’s been cool for the past 2 weeks with evening temperatures hovering around low teens. What is this? A close friend of mine told me that, it’s either late spring or early fall. Definitely not summer. Pretty weird weather huh, not a decent summer yet or is yet to come? So, we’re still on the BBQ mode here even though it’s cooler out. And I vehemently refused to wear sweaters nor jackets going out or to work (my sort of little own protest!). I love to wear my short sleaves shirts and short pants. Hey, it’s only mid-July and it is still summer! So, here we go, grilled juicy ribeye steak and sweet corn for dinner. We had hot pandesal on the side. Enjoy your summer while it lasts.
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Crispy Pata and Tapa
July 16, 2009
Today’s entry is quite a mouthful! Crispy Pata and Tapa. My chef has been dreaming of making crispy pata of her own. Usually, we just buy it at the store, but this time, she will prepare it from scratch. It’s really easy to make one. She boiled a piece of pata (pork thigh) in salt, peppercorn and bay leaf. When tender, deep fry it slowly so as not to burn the skin right away (about 30-35 minutes of deep frying in low flame). Serve it with Lechon sauce or just plain vinegar with hot pepper (sinamak in Ilonggo or artem in Ilocano). Since my kids are not too keen on Filipino foods, unfortunately, we prepared beef tapa for them. Beef tapa is also know as beef bacon or beef jerky.
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Adobong Bihod ng Isda (Caviar Stew)
July 15, 2009
Today’s entry is quite intriguing and innovative dish. This is not for the light hearted as the material I will be cooking is fresh fish eggs (bihod, bogi in Ilocano, caviar). I used to remember during my childhood years, we squabble over bihod in a fried fish. It’s like egg hunting during Ester, only that time it’s fish eggs! My sister in Estancia used to bring home burong bihod and we loved it guinisa (sauteed). During my last visit in Iloilo, we went to Breakthrough resto and I was surprised they serve grilled bihod. Due to the declining global fish population, authorities put on restriction selling fish eggs. Regulation was also in place for caviar processing and selling as well. My material was procured at a Chinese-Vietnamese store. They told me that it came from tuna fish and I paid $5 for a bagful of fresh fish eggs. Try preparing Adobong Bihod ng Isda for dinner!
Fresh tuna fish eggs.
Sautee lots of garlic with the bihod, add vinegar, enough water, bay leaf, achuwete powder, salt and pepper to taste. Spritz it with lemon or kalamansi before eating.
ADOBONG BIHOD NG ISDA (CAVIAR STEW)
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