06.30.08
Aaron’s Pancit
For my sister’s birthday, she asked my youngest son, Aaron, if he would cook something for her as a birthday present. She knows that Aaron likes to cook, so this was one way of encouraging him to share his cooking abilities. (I noticed his eyes perk up when he was asked to do this, hee, hee). What to cook was left entirely up to him. The dish he chose was pancit, a Filipino dish made up of glass noodles, veggies, and meat. He had never cooked it before, so I suggested that he make a practice run of it and taste it first. I helped him in that first run since making pancit has several steps involved, and I tend to be an eyeball cook more than a measuring one. The results were very good. So, I figured he was ready enough to fly solo and prepare it for someone else. I had taken a picture of his first run, but never got around to posting it up here. However, last Friday was the day he actually cooked pancit for my sister, so I took another picture of his second go at it. I am rather tickled at how well he manages in the kitchen, so I’m sharing a pic of his creation here. This time he prepared everything himself, although he did consult me along the way. But hands on was all him. He was too shy to be in the pic cuz he had an inkling that I was going to put it on my blog. So here’s his pancit.
Not bad for a 14-year-old. All the ingredients are organic except the glass noodles. It’s a bit difficult to find organic glass noodles, and the only place that I know of that carries it charges an arm and a leg for a tiny package of it (about $7 for a small fraction of what is shown in the dish above). So we compromised and bought the regular glass noodles from a Thai market. The price was much more reasonable. The above dish used up 1/2 the package which cost about $3. The ingredients to the pancit are glass noodles, 1/2 chicken breast, about 5 jumbo shrimp, about 1/4 pound pork, a stick of carrot, a stick of celery, about 1/4 of a cabbage head, a few cloves of garlic (part for frying the meats and part for frying the veggies), green onion, 2 hard boiled eggs, a couple lemons from our tree, pepper, paprika, salt, and the chicken broth from the 1/2 chicken breast. I like to cook onions in my broth. And I use the pork fat to stir fry the veggies before the noodles are added in. For anyone interested in cooking this, know that the glass noodles should be soaked in water first before frying. They tend to come very long, so it helps to cut it up for easier eating.
Great job, Aaron! Keep it up.
Marlakins
