It’s Chinese New year tomorrow which is why it’s a holiday for us also. I guess the Chinese went up in arms when P-Noy declared two Muslim holidays last year and so to appease them (I guess???) P-Noy decided to declare their New year celebration also a holiday. Well, that’s good for us since we’d be having more days off! Anyway we’re not really Chinese and we don’t really believe in all that feng shui but hey it doesn’t hurt to follow some of their beliefs eh? Like yesterday, my daughter and I figured it was about time for a haircut and so we went off and got a haircut on the eve of their new year because they say cutting off the hair also removes some of the bad luck we may have accumulated the past year. And then, we didn’t really have a sort of feast prepared for the night but I decided to just cook good food for our dinner tonight.
In the afternoon, the kids and I had fun doing pastillas from a recipe I have had a long time ago which is why I can’t remember where I got it??? All I know is that it needed a cup of condensed milk for every cup of powdered milk. But we didn’t have a cup of powdered milk and so we had to just make do with half of everything. We followed the no-cook version and just mixed everything slowly and during the last stages of mixing, it became quite difficult to stir the mixture. We left it inside the ref for a while and watched TV to let the mix harden a bit more. But, of course, kids being kids they couldn’t wait for very long and so Kaye took it out and began to form it into logs even if it was still quite a bit soft( I am not sure if it was because we needed to refrigerate it longer or maybe add a little more powdered milk but since we didn’t have the latter and my daughter lacked any more patience to wait, we decided to just do as she wishes.
As it is, the pastillas did not look so good even after my daughter dredged it in sugar but boy oh boy did it taste oh so good, almost like the pastillas that we are so fond of eating but find difficulty buying not just because it is difficult to find but because of its steep price. Now that we have discovered this, we now can easily do it at home…hurrah!
Then, for dinner I decided to cook turbo chicken using the Bounty Fresh Honey Lemon marinated chicken. But since the turbo is quite big and just cooking the single chicken would be quite extravagant/expensive I decided to also cook at the same time a bit of crispy pata to which I just added some salt and pepper a few minutes before it is placed inside the turbo broiler. I cooked both the chicken and the pata for a little more than an hour and we all had a hearty dinner at around 8. They said the chicken was a bit bland. I guess the sweet and spicy is truly their best seller for a reason eh? So now I know I won’t be getting any of their brands anymore. From now on I’d just stick to marinating my own. Then the crispy pata was a bit of a revelation - true the pata skin was quite crispy outside but they say the meat inside was a bit overcooked and dry. I guess, I’ll just turn it into paksiw na pata tomorrow to make it a bit juicier.
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