Red and Green

The Huc Bridge that leads to Ngoc Son Temple

The Huc Bridge giving a nice contrast to the greens of Hoan Kiem Lake.

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Pinakbet

I grew up in a home where every meal includes a vegetable dish. In my hometown, vegetables are cheap and always fresh and you can even harvest some from your backyard, specially sayote! (Now you know where I’m from!) However, where I’m living now for almost seven years, vegetables are not so cheap and fresh like the ones back home. You’re lucky if you get to find decent ones.

Anyway, yesterday after work, I decided to cook pinakbet. Pinakbet is originally an Ilocano vegetable dish that consists of vegetables available in your area/backyard basically like string beans, bitter gourd (ampalaya), okra, eggplant, squash and more and is then seasoned with bagoong (salted anchovies) but you can find different versions of it now where bagoong alamang (shrimp paste) is used.  Pork is usually added for more flavor but I used chicken since pork is not allowed here. 😦

I was thinking about including how to cook pinakbet in this post but decided not to anymore since we cook it differently from the usual way it is cooked. Maybe I’ll do that next time in a more complete and detailed post. But for now, I’ll just leave you with the end product:

My pinakbet 🙂