Family Lunch

If you stumble upon this blog a few times, you would probably notice that our family tends to gravitate to our house every Sunday. It's been quite frequent lately, most of our gatherings though were not blogged here because I was too lazy to take pictures.

Our family tends to make our meals very simple and "down home" during these get togethers lately. Hubby seems to get the blunt of my recipe experimentations. Fortunately, most turn out edible. Ha ha ha. I meant to blog about these forays in the kitchen but I usually do them around midnight, to keep it fresh for Hubby when he arrives from work. I've done pretty good with some Vietnamese and Japanese recipe experimentations.

Anyway, back to my Sunday story. We had some simple dishes last Sunday. We had some Fried Chicken with Cropeck. The chicken is a bit more brown than usual because I used palm oil. Rice bran oil is the best for frying but a bit pricey and it was out of stock when we went to the grocery store. Here's my Southern-Tagalog Style Fried Chicken recipe:



Chicken pieces
1 can evaporated milk
Salt and pepper
1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup fried chicken breading mix
1/2 cup cornstarch
Oil for frying

1. Wash chicken well. Pat dry. In a glass bowl, marinate chicken with milk, salt and pepper. Cover with cling wrap and leave in the fridge for at least two hours, overnight is best.
2. Mix together all purpose flour, chicken breading mix and cornstarch.
3. Dredge chicken in the flour mixture or place flour mixture in a large Ziploc bag, add the chicken pieces and shake well to coat.
4. Shake off excess flour from the chicken. Fry until half-cooked. You may have to fry in batches. Drain in a wire colander while you cook the rest of the chicken pieces.
5. Fry a second time until golden brown. Drain on paper towels or a wire colander to remove excess oil.
6. For a Chinese-style presentation, add store-bought cropeck around the chicken.

If you don't have a breading mix on hand, you can omit the breading mix and just use 50/50 flour and cornstarch. Add a bit more salt and pepper also to the the flour/cornstarch mixture.

Aside from the chicken, we also made fried liempo on a bed of kang-kong with a bagoong and vinegar dressing.



My mom bought some Lumpiang Ubod from Conti's and my house keeper arranged them like a flower :-)



My in-laws brought a huge bowl of dinuguan. Dinuguan is blood stew, it sounds worse than what it really is. It's quite good actually, a little salty and a little sour. If you haven't tried it, give it a go. Dinuguan is one of the hardest food to style. I mean, it tastes good and all but it's all black, no interesting angles anywhere you look, not photogenic at all. So, we'll skip the picture this time :-)

We had no dessert. :-( I know, right? My house with no baked goods or any type dessert on a Sunday. Such blasphemy, ha ha ha! I have an excuse.... my old age and aching bones. Ha ha ha. Fortunately we had some really good local coffee and some chocolates on hand.

For our mid-afternoon snack. My housekeeper made some pancit canton and my nephew Jay-jay's favorite, turon.



How was your Sunday? :-)