Your Daily Dose of Useful Stuff

Are you the type of person who feels guilty whenever you see food rotting in the ref and fruits becoming over-riped because you have lost interest in eating them?   You are not alone.  Yours truly feels very guilty whenever I see bread, rice and fruit rotting away.  One of the most common fruit that easily ripens is the banana.  People often refuse eating over-riped bananas in the Philippines because there is an oversupply of bananas.  In some places in the country, bananas are very cheap.  They are almost given away.  But there are also expensive banana varieties.   The lacatan variety is an expensive kind of banana.  This is often the exported quality.  They are exported to countries like Japan and Korea.  Koreans take their fill of these delicious bananas whenever they visit the Philippines because bananas are expensive in Korea.  They always say, it's so unfair that there are so many delicious and cheap fruit...

Biko is one of the most common delicacies Filipinos prepare at any occasion.  We prepare "biko" during birthdays, baptism, Holy Week, fiestas, Noche Buena (that midnight feast on Christmas Eve).   When I was younger, I found making 'biko' really tedious.  So I never really attempted to make "biko"  by myself.  Sometimes, I would just order ready-cooked biko or get them from tiangge or food fairs.  It is less hassle and easy to serve.  There is no need for me to go to the market and buy ingredients like glutinous rice, brown sugar, and coconut.     Biko can be really difficult to prepare if done in the traditional way.  First, you need  to buy coconut and grate it so that you can squeeze the coconut milk .  It can be messy to do.  However, if you are not the lazy type and have time to really prepare it the traditional way, you can do it traditionally.   It will make the experience really very  genuine ...

            P umpkin is one of the underestimated vegetable, but it is one of the abundant ones in the Philippines.   Slowly however, pumpkin is gaining serious recognition as a very versatile vegetable.  I have seen it prepared in different ways.  The Japanese would grill it.  Koreans would make it into croquettes and sometimes healthy kinds of juices.  And there would be more in  the future. All one needs is a little creativity.        I discovered my own recipe when I tried to find a way to utilize a medium-sized pumpkin. What i did was I sliced the pumpkin into smaller slices for easier mashing.   And then I placed them in a kettle with water not more than the amount of pumpkin.  Just enough to soften the pumpkin and be mashed easily. Once it is soft and can be mashed, you can prepare the following: tofu - diced into small pieces ground meat (for the vegetarian, you can skip th...