Christmas 2015

For the last few years, us siblings always try to plan our Christmas and New Year's Day menus, and when my brother still lives with us, my sister and I would take care of Christmas Day menu, while brother takes care of our New Year's Day menu. Now that brother has relocated himself south of the country, it's just my sister and I taking care of what food to be served. This year, it was difficult to choose what to serve because our food preferences changed and that personally, I am not much into food as I was years ago, and with no expected visitors, not only was it hard to think what dish to serve, it was also hard to gauge the amount of food to be cooked.


For the Noche Buena, I suggested sister we just prepare some sort of finger food, as it would be midnight and we would be sleeping after two hours or so. With the help of YouTube (my go to site for all things foodish it seems), I was able to see a simple take on making Garlic Parmesan Wings, which immediately made it on our list as it wasn't spicy, a good alternative to Buffalo Chicken Wings, that might upset our tummies given that time of the day. Recipe for this dish will be shared in the days to come.

Sister prepared Nachos, her favorite finger food / appetizer. We did buy a bottled salsa because it was more convenient to go for instead of mixing different spices. The cheese sauce, she personally cooked, based on my suggestion. A bottle of cheese sauce I found expensive, and the powdered kind sold at a popular nachos snack cart I didn't find appetizing, and even if I was ready to make the cheese sauce using my own muscle power, my sister took over for me as she has made this for school project in college. A simple food to share with the family, but my gosh, we loved it so much!

The Fruity Macaroni Salad was given by our next door neighbor (and very awesome friend), and we were very thankful for it because our mom loves macaroni salad, but we were skeptic to prepare one as it would be tricky to gauge the amount of ingredients needed for a small serving.

For the cake, we first thought about baking Crema de Fruta, but my sister's friend gave us this Choco-Chip Pound Cake from S&R, so this cake saved us energy and time. The Crema de Fruta we will just prepare for New Year's Day.


For Christmas Day lunch, it became a minced meat themed one, something I never really planned initially. I did want to cook Cabbage Rolls as I wanted to try if I can recreate the dish served to us by dad's aunt one Christmas season long ago. I was happy to have created something I was happy about. The sauce I found a wee bit sour, but my mom and my sister both loved it, so I guess I did good with it.  Recipe for this, like the one for the Garlic-Parm Wings will be shared in the next days.

The pasta. We knew we wanted to serve pasta, but the thing was, we forgot to set a decision! Come Christmas morning, sister just asked me to cook the typical Pinoy Spaghetti, but while cooking the Cabbage Rolls, I realized both would use minced meat and tomato sauce, so I decided to just go for carbonara-ish like sauce, but like I said, we never had a concrete decision for this, so we didn't have bacon or ham, only minced meat! Well, in the end, we did enjoy the lunch, and adding the leftover cheese sauce from last night's Nachos, it made our Creamy Cheesy Spaghetti a lot more satisfying.

For our dessert / pastry, we just served a box of brownies given to mom by one of her friends.



Happy holidays from us!

Chowking Chunky Asado Siopao - #BuksanParaMalaman!

A little throwback pictures...


I am not sure how old I am here, but I am holding the bun of a siopao (the bola-bola filling we ate first), which is one of my favorites back then - I usually asked my late father to bring me home this as a pasalubong, and for a long time, I really did think I took pleasure in eating this, even when my father retired from work, he usually bought all of us a siopao each coming home from his weekly grocery shopping trips.

However, there came a time when we lost interest in eating siopao because of these few reasons -

• There was more bun than filling
• The asado filling was more sauce than meat
• The bola-bola filling was more extenders than meat
• The price no longer justifies the size of the siopao and the amount of filling.

taken using a very crappy cell phone camera, sorry for the picture quality

When my mom retired from work and started loving the benefits of being a senior citizen, especially the free movie every Mondays and Tuesdays, she also started loving the Chowking wanton noodles + siopao combination, and soon we also rekindled our love for siopao, particularly that of Chowking's. Imagine our happiness when the Chinese food chain introduced their Chunkier siopao asado!

having a Chowking Chunky Asado Siopao break after hours of painting

Not only does the bun of Chowking Chunky Asado Siopao so soft and so white... it had more filling than it used to! It has a lot of meat inside, and the sauce's flavor has elevated. It was already delicious then, but it was so much better now. So chunky and saucy and soooo good, there is actually no need for the asado sauce! The regular sized siopao is an awesome partner for soups and hot noodles, but as is, it delivers the satisfaction we all want in our asado siopao. It also now comes in a three-piece carry box, a perfect pasalubong for kids and adults alike.

If you think all affordable asado siopaos are all bun and less filling, I suggest you move and give Chowking Chunky Asado Siopao a try. I promise you, it's chunky, it's saucy, and delicious! Gaano ka-chunky? Buksan para malaman.