Sinigang (pork in sour soup) is one of my favorite viands. The more sour the soup, the better! And you can have a variety of souring agents: tomatoes, sampaloc, miso.It is rather work-intensive as you have to submerge the sampaloc in boiling water and mash it up and squeeze it to get the sourness into the water. But thanks to the instant sampaloc mixes, we can have the goodness of sinigang at less time. Still, nothing beats the real thing! But it's good enough to suit the busy lifestyle.
Pinakbet according to Gilda Cordero-Fernando in Philippine Food and Life is a vegetable dish known all over the Philippines, but which no one cooks as deliciously as the Ilokanos. The Ilokanos say they can tell if a pinakbet was prepared by an Ilokano or not. Pampangos and Tagalogs cut ampalaya (bitter gourd), the main ingredient of pinakbet, into quarters and this, Ilokanos feel, allows too much water and salt in, which shrinks and toughens the vegetable. Ilokanos cut the ampalaya of their pinakbet lengthwise, and only on one side, leaving the opposite side uncut, like a hotdog bun, so that it opens like a hinge. In addition, Ilokanos include a bit of the stem in the last slice of the eggplant which is cut in four halfway through so it opens like a flower.
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