I’m back to cooking. So this past Friday when I arrived, it was already past dinner and I just reheated what was in the fridge. Yesterday was thankfully a day I didn’t have to bother with cooking because my mom’s cook was there. But today, I’m back to feeding my brood.

I had two-day old rice in the fridge that is almost frozen and a plastic container of kimchi—only the juice was left and one cabbage leaf. So I made a “sort-of” kimchi fried rice because all I had was the juice. I raided my fridge for leftovers and reworked them to serve my kids.

Speaking of cooking, I was alerted by Twin I about this video of Uncle Roger (comedian Nigel Ng) reacting to a botched adobo cooked on Food Network. I was shaking my head during the entire video because it was so wrong.

There are so many versions of adobo as it varies from one family and region to another. But the basic building blocks of it are: vinegar, soy sauce, lots and lots of garlic, peppercorn, and dried bay leaf. That’s it. You can add potatoes (my version from Batangas) and cook until the liquid had reduced and the meat has become so tender. They call it “dry” adobo. In Cebu, they add boiled eggs and let it marinate in the sauce together with the meat. In Samar-Leyte, they add a bit of onion and a bit of brown sugar to neutralize the sourness of vinegar. It’s a popular dish to preserve meat, just like rendang in Malaysia-Indonesia, but instead of vinegar, they use a lot of bird’s eye chilis to preserve meat.

But this abomination of an adobo made by this guy on Food Network is beyond comprehension. Uncle Roger is right, Filipino food is not spicy so it is just so wrong to put habanero peppers there. Lemon for acidity is 🤦🏻‍♀️ just noooooo. The essence of adobo is the vinegar. There is also a version of “white adobo” in which soy sauce is really scant (can’t remember which region this came from, I think from the North) which is cooked to preserve the meat while traveling on foot over mountains. Again, Uncle Roger is right in saying Filipinos love vinegar that’s why it was so stupid to use lemon in it. The taste is very, very different and it’s no longer adobo. We cook paksiw (vinegared meat/fish) to recycle leftover roasted pig and to cook fish that easily goes bad if not fried or cooked in vinegar. That’s why we love our vinegar (from sugar cane or coconut), food easily goes bad in this tropical heat. That’s why we have claypots for paksiw; metal cooking pots react to vinegar and it makes the dish taste differently. Claypots are best for everything with vinegar, or tamarind (sinigang), and for rice.

And once again, Uncle Roger is right in complaining about parsley. Who the heck puts parsley in it??? It will taste like grass.

So there, I got it off my chest. I’m not a chef; I’m just a home cook but I take food very seriously. I watch how the old cooks on Youtube or hawkers stalls in Asia (wherever I am visiting) cook stir fried veggies or fried rice on woks. The shape of the wok helps differentiate the temperature of the cooking surface and that keeps food from getting burned even though they’re being cooked on high heat. That’s why I bought the traditional wok for my Asian cooking because the magic lies in it its structure, how it is made.

For a non-chef food critic, Uncle Roger has my respect. A Malaysian-Chinese who knows his Asian food.

That said, I should learn how to make nasi lemak, which is also served in Muslim Mindanao, and order sambal again because I can’t make it from scratch.

Meanwhile, I saw this at WHSmith at Changi T2 when I was browsing through reading materials that I could buy for my 4-hr plane ride.

I ended up not buying anything because I remembered I was supposed to watch Everything Everywhere All At Once. Which was a good decision because a magazine costs SGD 12.50. For that price I could buy several books from Big Bad Wolf (which I completely missed last month because I was sick) or from Booksale.