Today, I decided to cook it myself.

Kulawo has been generally cooked using either of the two main ingredients: Puso ng Saging (banana heart) or Eggplant. I decided to go with eggplant. If you would like to try to cook it yourself, these are the ingredients that you will need:

4-6 large eggplants
coconut gratings from 2 coconuts
coconut shell charcoal
1 cup vinegar
4 medium sized onions
1 tsp salt
dash of pepper

First, I grilled four large eggplants in a charcoal grill. You can also grill it over a stove if you like:

Yes I grilled some Bangus as well. Don’t mind it. hehe. Recipe later.

When they’re all done grilling, they would look like this:

Set them aside for a while to let them cool. In the meantime, place the coconut gratings in a metal pan.

Place live coconut shell coals right on top of the coconut gratings. Keep fanning to keep the coal alive. Occasionally move the coal and sift the coconut to cook as much of it as you can. It’s inevitable that you will burn parts of it, but that’s all right. That’s what we want.

After the charcoal has died out, carefully remove the burnt charcoal with tongs. If they had completely gone out, you can do this by hand. Make sure you sift the gratings to evenly distribute the cooked and burnt areas.

Pour the vinegar on top of the gratings and set aside for a while.

Chop the onions:

By this time the eggplants have cooled enough for you to handle them with your hands. Carefully remove the blackened skin, slice, then lay them over a pan like this:

Go back to your gratings and then squeeze the milk out of them. Add the onions to the milk, then place it all in a cooking pan. Add the salt.

Slowly cook the coconut milk on medium heat. It is generally a rule to not stir any stew with vinegar in it to allow it to cook, but to prevent the milk from curdling, you do need to stir once in a while. Let it boil for around 5 minutes until the milk and onions are cooked. Remove from heat, then pour the mixture over the eggplants.

You can eat this already if you’re really hungry, but we generally refrigerate it for a while, probably an hour just to let everything settle and blend together. And here it is with the grilled bangus:

How to do the grilled Bangus? Here’s a quick recipe.

Get a large Bangus from your local market. You can usually request that they clean it and cut it for you, “daing” style.

In a medium sized bowl, mix 1 large chopped onion (or 2 medium sized ones), 1 large chopped tomato (or 2 medium sized ones), 1/3 cup oyster sauce, thumb sized ginger: grated, dash of pepper. Mix well. Place inside the fish cavity and then close it. Wrap fish inside aluminum foil and then grill, arond 12-18 minutes each side, depending on the size of the fish.

All right! there you have it! You have your San Pablo City style lunch, wherever you may be. Serve with hot rice!

That’s what it is today. Dark, cold and rainy. I like days like these because I personally find it very conducive to creating art. I don’t like it when I have to go out. And today I had to go out to the palengke to buy stuff to eat for the next few days. It can get pretty miserable, specially since our particular street is so prone to flooding.

At any rate, I’m back home and for the rest of the day I can appreciate this rain from the relative comfort and dryness of my house. This is perfect comic book reading weather for me. I would love to take a few comics, lie down in bed and just read. I’m thinking whether I can afford to because I have this Timawa deadline to deal with. But yeah, I guess I can take a break for an hour or so from my working time. I want to savor times like this. It reinvigorates my love for comics. What to read? I’m not sure. I just might break out Hulk #185, or The Secret of the Unicorn, or Uncanny X-Men 99 or something relatively new, like Elektra Lives Again.

Later I’ll be cooking Ginataang Manok. Not Adobong Manok sa Gata, not Chicken Curry. Just plain ginataang manok. No frills. I’m glad I can cook stuff like this now because I can just cook them if I have the craving and not have to bother my mom or my wife’s mom for it.

I’m still slightly concerned about the swine flu. I do find reassurance in knowing that regular flu is still more deadly and more prevalent than swine flu (so far). I had the flu last October and it was horrible. I lost 10 pounds back then. You can see how much weight I lost in the Komikon 2008 photos held last November. I also find reassurance in the fact that the number of people getting sick from swine flu is actually decreasing in Mexico. And that the virus is not mutating and thus can much more easily be stopped by a vaccine, at least once they develop it. Although it’s spreading to more and more countries, the cases outside of Mexico are actually milder and less deadly (so far).

I just hope I don’t develop a cough and cold by this weekend, or else it would be REALLY uncomfortable on Free Comic Book Day. If I do develop a cold, I would probably choose not to go and say sorry to Sandy and everyone in advance. I think that would be better than drive people paranoid. But everything is OK so far, and barring catastrophe, I’ll be there on Saturday.

After reading recipe books and watching cooking shows over the years, I learned to cook more elaborate pastas and other tasty things. Favorites of mine include my special “Giant Taco”, simple “White Spaghetti”, “Eric’s Last Stand”, “Super Chicken Curry”, “Super Beef Caldereta”, etc. Some of these recipes I even made video demonstrations of.

I don’t consider myself a great cook. I still have a lot of things to learn. But I think I have reached the point where I understand how cooking works, which allows me to play with recipes and come up with my own. And yesterday I came up with a pasta recipe that I’m particularly happy with that I just had to write about it.

“Three’s Company“, an American sitcom which aired from 1977-1984, is one of my favorite shows. When I’m feeling down and need some cheering up, I watch the show repeatedly. It was one of the very first shows I remember almost watching when I was a kid. It was on very late, and my parents had me sleep at 8:00pm. I stayed awake though, and I’d hear my brother laughing downstairs as he watched it. I was able to catch episodes here and there during reruns years later.

I’m older now and I earn my own money so naturally, it’s revenge time. I have all 8 seasons on DVD, and the show is on when I draw and it keeps me entertained and going on even when I get too tired.

Why am I digressing? Well, in the show, the main character Jack Tripper, played by John Ritter, also loves to cook. In the entire 8 seasons, Jack evolves from a cooking student to a chef who owns his own restaurant. And many times during the show, recipes would be mentioned, recipes with French and Italian names that tantalized your taste buds.

Well in one episode, Jack found himself owing some money to a mobster. Jack didn’t have money to pay for it, but the mobster said he will forgive Jack if he will teach his Italian wife how to cook “Scampi Ala Calabrese“. That must be SOME recipe because it’s enough for a mobster to forgive Jack his $75 dollar debt which in 1979 must have been really big money. What does it taste like, I wondered?

And I’ve been wondering about that for many many years. A couple of years ago Ilyn asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and since this episode was on, I said well, I’d be happy if you could cook me “Scampi Ala Calabrese”! Well, two years later it looks like it’s never going to happen. In fairness, it’s near impossible to find recipes for it anywhere, even online. Even the show doesn’t say what the ingredients are except at some point it looks like shrimp when they eat it.

I finally broke down the other day after seeing the episode again and said, well shit! I just have to learn how to do this now. This is crazy. I gotta stop wondering about this damned thing and just cook it once and for all.

I didn’t find a recipe online, but I did find a list of ingredients. It’s not exactly a recipe since it doesn’t give quantities and a procedure to cook it. All I know from that list is that it has shrimp, garlic, capers, tomatoes, peppers, fresh herbs, tossed with spaghetti and a bit of red sauce. I had no idea how to cook that properly, but after years of cooking pasta I had an idea of how to cook a version of it.

I tried it, and it worked! Ilyn loved it, and Zara really liked it, and we gave the rest to my parents who also liked it. It’s the very first pasta I cooked where nothing was left after the first serving.

I can’t very well call it “Scampi Ala Calabrese” because it’s not. What I did was simply a guess of what it could possibly be. So I’ll just call it something else.

And it’s all because of Jack.