It’s the default, I know. Boil meat in water with seasonings, the water turns into a flavorful broth, add vegetables and serve everything as a soup dish. But much as we love nilaga (the generic name for boiled meat and vegetable soup dishes in the Philippines) here at home, it’s not exactly exciting to have it more than once or twice in a month.
The allure of easy cooking is impossible to ignore though. And what’s easier than boiling meat and vegetables? The trick is how to utilize the easy cooking and serve a less clichéd dish. And I came up with this. Nilaga all the way but served without broth.
It began with my daughter’s craving for sinigang and a 900-gram slab of pork shoulder. Yes, a slab. Uncut. Instead of cooking sinigang the usual way — saute aromatics and pieces of pork before simmering them in water flavored with fish sauce — I modified the procedure. I cooked the pork separately.
I dropped the slab of pork into a pot of heavily salted water and simmered the meat until it was tender. I left it in the cooking liquid until cool to allow it to soak up the saltiness of the broth. Then, I divided the pork into two portions. One portion went into the fridge.
The second portion became sinigang. I cut the meat into cubes, dropped them back into the broth, added water to dilute the saltiness and reheated the meat. In a small pan, I sauteed garlic, onion and tomatoes then added them to the simmering pork. Once the vegetables started to turn soggy, I added the usual vegetables for sinigang — kangkong (water / swamp spinach), eggplants, okra… And, towards the end, tamarind juice.
With the sinigang demolished, I cooked a non-soup dish the following day using the cooked pork that had been chilling in the fridge.
Cold meat is firm and easier to slice than hot meat. I placed the pork on a chopping board and cut it into slices about a quarter of an inch thick.
In a small pot, I boiled water with a bit of salt and dropped in bok choy and sliced fresh shiitake.
While the bok choy and shiitake simmered in the salted water, I mixed a simple sauce with staples in most Asian kitchens. Sweet chili sauce, plum sauce (you can get this in the grocery), oyster sauce (you can get this in the grocery too), soy sauce and sesame seed oil. Then, I toasted sesame seeds and sliced some scallions.
The pork slices were arranged on one side of a plate, cold rice was placed at the center of the plate, the plate was covered with a bowl and went into the microwave for two minutes.
When the pork and rice were steaming, I scooped out the bok choy and shiitake and arranged them on the other side of the plate opposite the pork. Sauce was drizzled very generously over the meat, sesame seeds were sprinkled on top and the scallion slices were scattered over everything. It’s a meal of boiled meat and vegetables but it’s not a soup dish. Oh, yes, it was delicious.
P. S. About my delinquency in sending newsletters. Almost a year after moving to a rented house to prep our house for selling, we still haven’t emptied our house mostly because our stuff won’t fit into the rental. So, we rented a bigger house, still smaller than our house-for-sale, but I think we’ll be able to finally move the rest of our stuff. If not, what we don’t use on a daily basis will have to go into storage. The next newsletter will be sent after we move before the end of the month.
