Pancit Malabon

Ingredients
½         kilo       miki (white, thick, and round noodles)
2/3       cup       coarsely founded sitsaron baboy
2/3       cup       flaked fish meat (tinapa)
½         kilo       pork fat (cubed)
¼         kilo       squid (adobo)
½         kilo       talaba (Filipino oyster) (adobo)
2                      eggs, hardboiled
5-6      cloves   garlic, minced
3         tbsp      atchuete seeds (anato seeds)
                         salt to taste
Procedure
1.    Boil water with a little salt. Drop miki. Cook until tender. Drain. Set aside.
2.    Soak atchuete seeds in ½ cup hot water. Extract color.
3.    Add colored water to pork fat, cook until water dries. Stir until oil comes out and pork becomes sitsaron. Set aside sitsaron.
4.    Sauté garlic in atchuete oil. Transfer oil with garlic in a small bowl. Set aside.
5.    Put cooked noodles on a plate. Sprinkle fried garlic with oil and arrange all ingredients on top of noodles. Garnish with slices of boiled egg.
6.    Serve with puto.

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Spending Summer Cooking Quick and Easy Recipes

There’s just one universal thing that describes summer time. Hot! And you want to spend your summer days refreshed and cool at all times. This is why you don’t to add more heat to your kitchen than necessary when you cook your meals. Firing up your oven will only make your kitchen hotter. The key in spending summer is cooking quick meals that involve less heat, less hassle, but fulfilling on both your palettes and stomach.

The meals that you oftentimes find yourself preparing are salads and sandwiches. These are all good. The meals are quite healthy and can be refreshing. However, even if you have a lot of choices for sandwiches and a lot of choices for salads, there will come a time that you will crave for something bigger or fuller. What you can do is utilize the stove and grill more instead of using the oven. You can cook a lot of meals without adding heat to your already scorching apartment or house.

If you still want to feel fresh and light during summer, you would be better off without heavy starches in your meals. If you want to have pasta, you can add vegetables as side dishes or make a salad using pasta. You will still feel light after the meal because of the vegetables. The same goes with sandwiches. Adding some romaine lettuce, onions, and cucumber to your sandwich filling will keep the fresh feeling and will help balance the fat from the burger, ham or chicken part of the sandwich.

Also, during the summer don’t spend too much time preparing your meals. Keep things simple. The more you move the hotter you get. The hotter you get the more irritated you become. Soon enough you’ll explode and will let it out on the people in house. Summertime is supposed to be a time to relax so chill.

Go to your supermarket and buy those already pre-cut meat so don’t have to spend chopping and cutting. Look for prepared vegetables as well. Also, when using marinade make certain that you maximize its use. You can actually use the same marinade for other dishes so why experiment. There will be other, more appropriate time to that so for now, stick to the easy and simple.

Use your grill. Do you ever wonder why summer is always a good time for a barbecue? It is because you cook outside. It is cooler cooking in the shade and quite refreshing eating out in your backyard. You can use the pre-cut I mentioned earlier as well as ready made marinades available in the market. This way, you will spend less time preparing the meals and have more time actually enjoying them. Remember to add some vegetable side dishes or salad with your barbecue meals.

There are a lot of things you can grill. Chicken, burger, and franks and even some vegetables you can put over the griller. You can even invite friends over and have some pleasant dinner. That’s another beauty of cooking outdoors.

Summer time is actually the time of the year when you can be excused for feeling lazy. Well, that can be an exaggeration. But still the summer heat and the humidity, you can’t help but bum around and relax all day. This is the reason why preparing and spending summer cooking quick and easy meals would be the best way to go.

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