Season of left-overs

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

Let me guess. Many of you today had fried rice with ham bits for breakfast and for lunch and dinner, maybe white beans with ham bone. Or fried lechon, or maybe lechon paksiw flakes. For dessert, I think most of you will have fresh fruit salad, yes, chopped and diced fresh fruits lashed with  just plain condensed milk, or even just the plain juice of freshly-squeezed orange. I bet some of you might even have red wine lechon adobo.

This after all is now  the season of left-overs, when we reinvent the banquet food we had during the holidays and transform them into something a little closer to everyday fare.

It’s that time of year when we finally realize fat and dairy, the signature flavors of our feasts  are boring. It’s that time of year when we return to the foods we were wired to like since birth – the guinamos, fermented fish or seafood, the  uga or dried fish, the paksiw, meats boiled in extra-sour vinegar.  It’s that time of year, indeed, when we realize that after all is said and done, the basic flavors the Pinoy tongue really likes is the salty, the sweet and the sour. Anything is between is adventure.

So, I’m pretty sure among the fried lechon and ham soup on your table today is a plate of pinakas, fried, and ready for dipping in the sinamak, or spicy vinegar.

Our ways with left-overs used to be simple. We used to do the lechon as paksiw, adding the liver sauce to it for a mult-level experience in textures.  Or we deep-fried  or sometimes bake or turbo it to crispiness.

While we do not exactly consider left-overs a premium considering that these are the foods that were left after everybody had his fill already, they can in fact be irreplaceable ingredients for dishes that we can have only on special times – like now.

In the hands of a creative cook, left-overs, or to be more derogatory about it, salin as we call them in the dialect, can be reinvented into brilliant dishes you cannot have a second serving of. Think: left-overs are already packed with flavors themselves, and using them as ingredients in new dishes simply adds more tastes and textures to your plate and you cannot replicate that even if you put it down as a recipe.

Take for example the case of lechon sinigang, which is really uneaten lechon used as meat in the Pinoy sour soup. The lechon meat definitely adds something more to the dish than just plain pork.

So successful  are some our of dishes made from left-overs that there are  people who don’t wait for post-party left overs to have them. I know of a family where half of the lechon is already set aside when they open it,  to be cooked as sinigang which is served shortly before the guests leave the party.

You have twice-cooked adobo and adobo flakes, which can all be traced to one cook’s problem of what to do with the excess adobo that was already overstaying in the freezer.  In some serendipitous moment, that inspired cook thought of boiling the adobo to flakes  and so a new dish was born. Someone else must have thought of further bringing these flakes to another level and fried them to crispiness and yet another dish came to life.

Now you have restaurants and hotels serving these adobo delights and it is an interesting study on how a cooking process – making adobo – became simply a step in a longer process of preparing those even more flavorful flakes and twice-cooked dish.*

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