Foodie of Home

It's really challenging to live far away from home, let alone not in a place where there are a lot of Filipinos. The closes Phil store is in Chicago so that's roughly three hours one way. Not to mention all the traffic!

On the bright side, I'm super glad that there are a lot of Asian stores here - mostly Hmong. They carry a variety of Asian brands and some popular Filipino items. I'm really glad that they do. Now it's up to me to improvise to actually make the things that I love to eat. Obviously I'm a foodie so I crave certain things every now and then.
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Ginataan

I was just browsing around Facebook and came across all these different meryenda foods back home. Meryenda simply means a snack between meals. No, not a light snack. I mean like a delicious and usually filling snack. So I experimented with my own!

I just wish that we had fresh langka here, but still glad I was able to find canned ones. I was also able to use Saba bananas that I got from Chicago when we went to Seafood city. I froze them so they turned out a bit too mushy. Next time I'll probably try some regular plantain bananas.
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Pancit Palabok

Ah Palabok... or what we call in Cavite City "luglog".

This one, I have never tried making before so it was something brand new for me to make. I cheated tho, I used a sauce mix LOL. I still added more stuff into it and seasoned it to my liking. I didn't have the tinapa or the dried shrimps so I had to improvise. I got some calamares and added that instead.

​Needless to say, Hubby Bear approved!
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Tikoy (Nian Gao)

Come the Chinese Lunar New Year, I was definitely craving for some tikoy.

I tried to look for it in various Asian stores, I figured it should be somewhere, but apparently not. I then looked it up online. Thanks to Google, I found the original recipe and it wasn't so hard to make at all!! It's just rice flour, some sugar, coconut milk and some flavor (I decided to add pandan on mine) and steam for like two hours!

I'm not even gonna be humble about this because I'm gonna brag that it turned out really, really good - just as I expected! I was afraid it will taste weird but it tasted great, in fact a little better.

I'm also glad that it's also Hubby Bear approved. Cooking it sounds pretty unusual because you have to dip it in egg before you fry it, but AlexBear still liked it. That makes me very happy yay!
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