Bibingka

Rice cake made with fermented rice flour and coconut milk. It's very slightly sweet with a smoky flavor. It's baked in a banana leaf, and is best experienced literally out of the charcoal oven.

Pili Nuts

The CC had never heard of them before he went to the Philippines.

They have a very high fat content, and are completely unique in taste. The best way to describe it would be like the bastard love child of hazelnuts and brazil nuts.

They are a delicacy because they have an incredibly short shelf-life (that's because of the high fat content which would cause them to go rancid quickly in the hot climate of the Philippines.)



They are frequently blanched and turned into sugary desserts but they could equally well work in a savory dish like any other nut.

Needless to say, they are quite impossible to find outside the Philippines.

The Yikes Meter!

Seen today on a menu, "pad thai tacos".

There is so much wrong with this the CC can't even begin to enumerate. Perhaps there's a reason that those two countries are so far apart?

This is the kinda bullshit that gives "fusion" a bad name.

The Mathematician's Approach to Japanese Cooking

One of the key insights into the nature of cooking is that all cuisines respect the role of limited resources.

One of these limited resources is the number of ingredients that can plausibly be obtained. Traditionally, this has always been limited by the seasons.

If you have limited resources then you might think that you'd have a limited number of dishes. But you'd be wrong!

Humans recognized quite early on that we are easily bored. We crave novelty and variety. The same ol', same ol' was as dreary a millenium ago as it is today.

Traditonally, most cooking was done by women, and women were responsible for coming up with "inventive dishes" each day (to stave off that afore-stated boredom.) They were forced, at the metaphorical gunpoint, to get creative about it.

Lo and behold, the Japanese discovered the combinatorial game. Have a vast amount of ingredients at hand but assemble a dish with just a few and rotate them daily. In fact, outsource a few so that you only need to assemble the rest (the Ricardo-principle applied to cuisine.)

Needless to say, one can't do this with a hard-core mathematician's approach since that would lead to entirely unappetizing dishes so a few rules are imposed on top of that to maintain visual appeal, textural interest and nutritional completeness.

If you understand this then the rules of the so called washoku become entirely obvious.

The rules of go shiki (five colors), go mi (five tastes), go hou (five methods), go kan (five senses) are nothing more than a rulebook to ensure complexity - visual, textural, and nutritional.

The traditional dish is not made with five ingredients. It's closer to between seven and nine in practice. That would imply that you scale as $$n⁷ where n is the number of starting ingredients (and n is very large to start with.) However, the above rules cut down the number of possibilities.

In any case, you are still left with a vast set to play with. Enough to stave off boredom before the seasons change which will alleviate the boredom anyway, and by the time next year rolls around nobody will remember that you played the same game last year!

Radish Salad with Dried Anchovies (Dilis)

This is an entirely inspired dish that you are unlikely to find in any Filipino cookbook. That's because it's a simple side-dish that is unlikely to make it into cookbooks which tend to feature fancier stuff.

It follows the most primitive principles of food. Use fresh ingredients, and touch them up minimally.

The ingredients are simplicity themselves - white radish (daikon), tomatoes, ginger, patis (fish sauce) and vinegar, along with dried anchovies (dilis.)

Served with warm rice, it's the perfect comfort food, and yet texturally complex and nutritionally complete.


Ingredients

4 tomatoes
1/2 radish
4-6 tbsp vinegar (to taste)
2 tbsp patis
4 green chillies (minced)
2 tbsp minced ginger

1/2 cup dried anchovies
salt to taste

Recipe

Cut the radish into paper-thin slices. A mandoline will help here.

Dice the tomatoes roughly.

Mix all the ingredients together except the anchovies.

Mix in the anchovies right before serving (so that they remain crisp and don't turn soggy.)

The Luck Factor

Well, we've had a late blast of summery weather, and the tomatoes were still super-ripe at the farmers' market. The CC got there early, and they were selling them for very cheap so the CC bought a ton, and made tomato sauce out of it. It was promptly frozen for future use.

When life gives you tomatoes, you must make tomato sauce!