At Romantic Steakhouse in Monterey Park, CA I would often order the special dinner set. The first course was always a cup of light and tasty ruddy soup, served with toasted baguette slices infused with melted butter and crispy garlic. A small iceberg salad with creamy dressing came next, followed by a sizzling steak platter, a substantial and perfectly medium rare tenderloin wrapped in bacon and topped with a mushroom or pepper sauce flavored with wine and lightly thickened with cornstarch. On the side, you could have rice, but I always had the "spaghetti", Chinese egg noodles with a translucently sticky, sweet tomato sauce ladled on top. For dessert, there was a scoop of vanilla ice cream with coffee or tea. The entire meal, at once humble and fancy, cost less than 13 dollars, in an age when a lonely steak at a chain might run you 25 dollars and up, so I often had a virgin Mai Tai on the side.

While such a meal is singular (Romantic has been defunct for many years) the soup is a mainstay at any number of Hong Kong style western-cafes, where it's often part of a cheap lunch meal that includes tea or coffee, a savory appetizer (like a fried chicken wing), and a small main course (often Chinese noodles, baked pork chop, or whatever the house special is). This humble vegetable beef or tomato borscht is often replaced  in newer establishments by the trendier cream soup covered by a baked puff pastry hat.

4 quarts of water
3 bay leaves
10 peppercorns
scant 1 lb of beef chuck roast 
1/2 lb of beef bones
1 carrot, small dice
1/2 very large red onion, small dice
3 stalks celery, sliced
1 large garlic clove, minced
4 ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded, diced. I find it easy to score them and poach them directly in the poaching liquid as the beef is cooking.
1 1/2 cup crushed tomato, juice drained off very briefly. Tomato paste is more common, but I find the crushed tomato makes this dish fresher
5 small waxy yellow potatoes, small dice, skin on
1/4 cabbage
1 tbsp sugar, to taste
1/4 tsp ground white pepper, to taste
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice. optional.
salt to taste

Boil water in a 5 quart pot. Trim obvious fat off the chuck roast simmer in the pot uncovered with spices. Keep the water to just a tiny roll, lifting off scum on occasion. Turn the meat every 20 minutes so it doesn't dry out. Cook 90 minutes or until the beef is tender ie easily pierced with a fork and the connective tissue gelatinous and soft. Set aside to cool. Can be made the day before but do not remove oil as it makes the soup richer.

Sweat carrots, then onions and celery together in a large soup pot. Add garlic after several minutes and stir till fragrant but not brown. Turn the heat to high and scoot vegetables into a pile on one side. Add fresh tomato on the bare part of the pan till broken down and slightly reduced. Then, add crushed tomatoes and do the same. 

Include remaining poaching liquid, resting juices, and waxed potatoes After the liquid boils for a minute, bring down to a simmer for 10-15 minutes, about halfway through. Cut the chuck roast into bite size dice. Add meat and cabbage to the soup pot and continue simmering until the potatoes are tender but not falling apart. Add sugar, white pepper and lemon juice. Adjust salt to taste.

This dish keeps well in the fridge. I find 1 lb of chuck to be much more than enough, as I enjoy the soup and vegetables most, but used 1 1/5 lbs in my maiden trial which gives a nice flavor to the poaching water.

You may have to adjust the amount of tomato and beef broth liquid to get the right consistency. The soup should be like a thin tomato soup flavor, acidic but leaning towards the sweet side.  Not very salty, the flavor of vegetables should shine through rather than beef. If fresh tomatoes are readily available, a good amount can substitute for the crushed tomato and paste. Making this a truly healthy soup.

For a thicker soup, use russet potatoes that break down with cooking. For deeper color, add a little tomato paste at the end.
Serve with garlic baguette rounds.


update:  Romantic is now Hot Stuff Cafe, a location that I'm sure to try the next time I'm in the area. Bacon wrapped filet mignon?  Still 13 dollars. Hell yeah!

2 chinese eggplants, halved, cut into two inch sections, quartered. If some of the pieces are still to big, I halve them again.

Without a food processor or a hefty mortar and pestle its hard for me to make my own galapong for this dish. Instead, I used an equal amount of rice flour and added several tablespoons of water because the batter was a bit stiff. To my taste, the bibingka seemed more cake-like and dry, rather than slightly sticky inside. I like to eat this as I used to with my friends, with the sugar and coconut sprinkled on top after the butter was slathered. From pictures, the batter is supposed to be fairly thin and spreads like a custard by itself after being poured in the mold.

Recipe adapted from Memories of a Phillipine Kitchen 

1/2 cup 2 tbsp all purpose flour
1/8 cup white sugar
1/2 tbsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 cup 2 tbsp rice flour (not glutinous)

2 eggs separated
2 tbsp water
2 tbsp whole milk
1/4 cup 2 tbsp coconut milk
salted duck egg, cut into 1/4 inch slices
4 tbsp crumbled feta, gouda, or goat cheese

garnish:
grated fresh coconut
2 tbsp unsalted butter, melted
2 tbsp sugar

Notes: Needs to be more sweet, more sticky and moist, cheese slightly funkier and saltier. Possibly add more sugar, coconut milk, and bit of glutinous rice.

This dish is pure comfort food, but when I was young I had terrible experiences of it. The pork was usually pressed into a dense hard cake and the egg on top was often puffed like a fried egg and overcooked till green.

The below version is mostly reconstructed through trial and memory, and I'm surprised I didn't post before because after perfecting the steps, the result is delicious. I like my eggs smooth with lots of clear tasty broth from the pork. Sometimes, the eggs near the bottom don't get set through, which means your heat was likely too high and the cooking time too short. The runny egg, however, makes the sauce a bit richer and is great poured over very hot rice where it firms up a little.

1/4 lb ground pork
1 clove finely minced garlic 
dash of rice wine
white pepper
dash of sesame oil
dash of soy sauce
4 large eggs  
tepid, room temp water same volume as egg
salt to taste
2 scallions, white parts minced, green parts sliced longways and 1.5" length.
2 tbsp cooking oil, peanut is nice but I have also used canola
oyster sauce

In a small bowl, lightly mash together meat with garlic and shite parts of the scallion. Season with wine, pepper, sesame oil, and soy sauce so the meat looks glistening moist, but not drippy. In a separate bowl that will be used for steaming, very gently beat eggs and water with several pinches of salt and a dash of white pepper to taste. Drop the marinated meat into the egg in loose chunks.

To use as a steamer, I usually put my old school perforated rice steamer insert into a 6 quart pot, and add water till level with the insert, about a cm. Set on low heat till a bare simmer. Place bowl carefully in steaming pot. Cover and adjust to a bare simmer till the top is set, about 15-20 min. To avoid unsightly pockmarks on the surface, wrap a thin kitchen towel around the cover - I don't usually do this - or pour eggs into the water and stir lightly till mixed. Avoid making bubbles.

Right before serving, heat the cooking oil in a small pan till it starts to smoke. Drizzle the egg custard with oyster sauce and green parts of the scallions, then pour the hot oil over the surface. You should hear a big exciting sizzle. Serve immediately with hot rice. 

My mom used to order this for my at the Cantonese eateries, where the soft egg would appear in a bath of sweet tomato broth, slightly thick. I always thought it was ketchup in there, but this dish is actually very simple and fresh. The texture should be barely firm tomato with pillowy eggs, less cooked through than a perfect French omelet.

6 large eggs
salt to taste
3 tomato, slice into 8 wedges
2 scallions sliced thin lengthwise and 1" long
1 tbsp of sugar
2 tbsp chicken stock
2 tbsp white rice wine
scant dash soy sauce, very light

Heat up the a large pan or seasoned wok to a rather high temperature and then coat with a generous amount of oil. Flash fry green onions. Scramble eggs with salt quickly and then pour evenly into hot pan. The edges should immediately bubble up. Let the eggs set into a layer but don't brown them. Scrape into ridges and set again. This should take less than 30 seconds. There may be some excess runny egg, but that's ok. Scrape the egg into a bowl. 

Return the same pan to a high heat. Add tomato with pinch of salt. Stir fry until tomato skins just begin to blister. Add sugar, rice wine, chicken stock, soy sauce and cook until tomato releases juices but some sauce remains. Return the eggs to the pan and toss gently until they are desired texture - just barely brown with lots of slip. Try not to break the eggs by stirring vigorously.

Pork Belly in all permutations is something I return to again and again.

In Chinese parlance, Siew Yoke is deli food, the stuff you get in the case with lovely brown, hanging ducks. This recipe from Saveur is easy and works fairly well. With roasting, you dont get the slippery, melting fat as you would with braising, but what you have in the end is juicy, tender meat layered with slightly more resilient fat and a crispy skin with puffy crackling on top. Thusly, the leftovers are great for adding to congee or sauteed vegetables and soup if you like. Just trim off the cracklings and save them for a good use, or as as a kitchen snack.

Some tips:

The flavoring is malleable so change the marinade up, but use this technique to get an easy crisp crust.

To get the right texture and consistency, search out a clearly striated piece of pork: meat, thin layer of fat, meat, thin layer of fat, meat, thin layer blubber, skin. Preferably even thickness throughout the slab. This is not superfluous, since the quicker cooking time means the fat doesn't get a chance to render out as nicely as some other preparations.

If your slab of belly comes with nubbins, nommables tells you how to trim them. Remember to scrape off any remaining bristles.

I found I didn't need the skewers in the article, but that poker implement will come in handy. I couldn't get carving fork or utensils through the skin, so I stabbed my meat repeatedly with a small knife. This is not the most efficient or elegant way of going about it.

Beware the broiler. Watch the oven so the crackling doesn't burn. I have a small oven so I should have moved my meat down a notch. After only 3 minutes, I was in trouble.

Always serve and eat this Hot!, before the fat congeals and becomes unpalatable.

Asian preparations always have extra steps in the cooking process:
1. To render off fat and impurities.
2. To minimize the porky smell of the meat.
3. To treat the skin.


Other favorite famous pork belly dishes:
1. Nagasaki style - three step slow-braised pork that falls apart by itself if you look at it the right way and with most fat rendered off, but whats left is creamy. Flavored simply with soy sauce and ginger. The least rich of the preparations. A case where a meatier piece of belly with less striations an minimal fat is better.
2. Lechon Kawali  - Filipino style, twice cooked with a final deep fry resulting in pork belly floating inside a cloud of crackling. Made with the thicker cut short rib portion of the belly.
3. Red Braised Pork - two or three step braised pork resulting in a ruddy caramelized sauce having a sweet, herbal taste and syrupy texture. Usually the meat is less flake tender than the Japanese style, but in this dish meat is besides the point. Instead, the fat is alternately creamy and gelatinous with a soft skin like warm chewy mochi. Sometimes served as a whole shoulder or large hunk rather than a bite size portion. 
4. Twice Cooked Pork - poached or boiled and then stir fried with scallions in a light coating of spicy sauce. A Sichuan recipe.

Mine are not the sharpest in the drawer.
Here is how to get yours to slice through a hair long-ways.

Several classics appear in this cookbook, such as a detailed recipe for trice cooked lechon kawali and bibingka, as well as some harder to find staples such as pancit malabon. Be aware that some liberties exist. The adobo recipe includes coconut milk. By the authors admission, the puto recipe is omitted entirely for being too difficult. While there are a lot of "stories" and glossy pictures, there are some familiar dishes missing such as the more ubiquitous pancit palabok. With such heft, this book falls short of being a bible and is organized somewhat erratically in terms of recipes. Perhaps there's a more authentic or comprehensive, in the lax terms of Philippine cuisine, book out there, but I have yet to come across it. Until such a tome appears, this one will do more than fine.

Update: The New York Times published this article in which one of the authors admits that given a choice she wouldn't add coconut milk or soy sauce to her adobo. Why they include both ingredients in a published recipe is beyond me. Perhaps they are catering to a Western clientele? My marinated adobo, with coconut milk, is on the stove later today, so I will have to see how I feel about it.

The few exceptions are Everyone Else and the top two films, True Grit and How to Train your dragon. Next to these, Black Swan and The Social Network, while relevant (or socially relevant) are probably not shows I'd want to screen again. 

Aranofsky doing his familiar formula but with were-ballerina, body horror, jealousy and madness. Ostensibly about sexual awakening, aging, women angst, and so on, the director cleverly wrenched his angles by equating letting loose, getting wild, or being bad as just another form of control and letting the tragedy ensue. There is indeed a method to Nina's madness, and the director wants the audience, sometimes overly didactically, to sympathize with her logic even when it breaks. Maybe she's the endpoint of a collective drive for perfection? Or maybe, she's just plain crazy? Aranofsky reads both, and with no small amount of admiration and condemnation.

Who cares about fidelity really? The Social Network was a solid film, exciting like a trainwreck, on trend with its message, and only faltering with minor moralizing missteps at the end. The rest of the show is filled with enough hubris and caustic nerd antics to satisfy the most bitter among us. Timberlake steals the show with his charmingly cokified portrayal of Napster founder Sean Parker. Eisenberg plays Zuckerberg as the quintessential loner, a sneak peek at the internal workings of technocultural royalty, but one whose motives can only be conjectured. In the Social Network, the audience ultimately is on the outside. After you've googled, facebook'd, myspace'd all your immediate peeps, the question remains... How well can you know anyone anyway?