Rarely Ordered | Adventurous dining or insanity? You decide.

Other than our usual activities of humiliating ourselves in David’s kitchen, we decided to humiliate ourselves further by coining this idea of making crazy burgers. I think the next time we try this again we shall be disowned and or be hanged in their yard.

Chocolate Burger

I know what you’re thinking right, what came to our minds to actually come up with this crap. Well this is just one of my brilliant ideas.

As expected it tastes what exactly the ingredients are burger and chocolate (We were aiming to have a chocolate center which I guess caused this). Read More…

I would like to share a very common family dish usually prepared by my grandmother – Lola Liling I love you po! Thank you for feeding me everytime I visit you.

This is a good, interesting dish for the savory-sweet Pinoy tastebud. This is very easy to cook in under 40minutes – making it perfect for any sudden guests and unplanned eat-ins. In my case, I simply passed by the grocery store on the way home for the ingredients and an hour later, I was digging in. Since ribs are very low in fat and cholesterol and pineapple contains phytochemicals and antioxidants, this is a very healthy dish too!

Ingredients:

1 kg pork spareribs, chopped into approximately 2×2 inch slices if you want it on the bowl (good for 4-6 people)
1L Pure, unsweetened natural pineapple juice
1 tsp whole black pepper corns
4 Laurel Leaves
1 Small garlic, peeled and chopped

Preparation:

1.Under a low fire leave he pineapple juice to a simmer.
2.Add the rest of the ingredients, and cover but with a slight opening to let the steam pass – this should be for about 25 minutes.
3.You know it is ready when the pineapple juice is thick and brownish. Check with a fork if the meat is cooked just right.
4.Serve with rice.

Tips:

There is a longer version to this dish which can be applied to any dish with meat – which is to slowly cook it under a low, low fire for about 3 hours. After which, you can follow the steps shown here. The advantage here is that the meat will be much, much more tender.

You can cook it without chopping it into pieces!

Experiment with the thickness of the pinapple juice – some may like it more viscous or more watery. Just add a bit of water while cooking to adjust,

Okra Tempura

The first of our series of Rare Recipes!

I always love it when a certain way of preparing makes me love an ingredient I would usually hate. Okra is something that dissuades a lot of people – me included. But having this dish prepared at home by my beloved mother, successfully made me LOVE okra for the very first time. It is one of the simplest and most straightforward ways of preparing it too – making vegetable tempura out of it. Due to the oil, the sticky taste of okra is minimized and due to the deep fried golden batter, it is actually crispy. With the sauce, it has an oriental but Filipinized taste.

Ingredients:

Okra (any number of pieces, sliced as shown below)
Tempura Flour
Tempura Sauce: A chicken stock cube, 1 piece grated radish, 2 teaspoons soy sauce, ¼ cup 7-Up or Sprite boiled for about three minutes in 1 and ½ cup water.

Preparation:

1.Follow directions in the tempura flour box. Typically however, it is simply mixing it with cold water and leaving the mixture lumpy.
2.Heat the deep fryer to 170 C (340 F).
3.Dip the pieces of sliced okra in the batter and deep fry until golden. Typically, this should only take a minute or two.
4.Pat dry the pieces and / or serve them on paper towels on a plate.
5.Best eaten straight off the fryer with steaming-hot rice and the sauce prescribed above.

Tips:

Do not slice the okra too thick – or they might lose their potential crispiness. A fairly large okra piece should do about 3-4 pieces. The okra piece shown in the picture is medium-sized. Oh and by the way, the two ends shown are to be thrown away. (for obsessive-compulsive people out there)

The Japanese name for vegetable tempura is Shojin-age – and is done with a wide variety of vegetables. We all know some of these vegetables – kangkong, zucchini and eggplant are all common. It takes a the Rarely Ordered spirit to experiment with other veggies – so go ahead use the steps above with a different vegetable!

Deep frying isn’t really unhealthy – it is in the kind of oil used and the technique of cooking it that makes deep frying retain a lot of the unhealthy trans-fats. Ideally, use new canola or soybean oil and quickly remove the pieces after they have become golden brown. The moisture in the food used usually repels the oil – unless it is overcooked. Besides, overcooked veggies taste horrible! Thus, if you prepared a good tasting batch, be rest assured its a healthy batch too.