garlic

Lumpia {Filipino Food Month}

I really should not be writing this post right now. I’m neck-deep in Easter prep since I’m hosting this year, but there was no way that I could have a Filipino Food Month on this blog and not share my favorite Filipino dish.

Lumpia is a Filipino egg roll. Unlike Chinese egg rolls, lumpia are made with spring roll wrappers and have more vegetables in the interior. These are “regular” lumpia, if you will, but there’s another type you’ll also find often in the Philippines– Lumpia Shanghai– which are a bit more similar to Chinese egg rolls.

I certainly don’t want to alienate any of my readers, but I personally think that Filipino lumpia is the best kind of egg roll that ever was. Period.

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Pork Adobo {Filipino Food Month}

It’s the last week of Filipino Food Month and I haven’t made nearly as many things as I was hoping to. I guess that means I’ll just have to stick in some random Filipino Food posts here and there. There are so many things I want to try my hand at.

Today’s dish is Filipino Pork Adobo. It’s really nothing like Spanish or Latin American Adobo, although Wikipedia tells me that the name comes from Spain. Apparently sometime during Spain’s 300+ year occupation of the Philippines, the Spanish started referring to this dish as adobo due to its vinegar content, which is really the only similarity between the dishes.

This is really simple to make, and the pork can easily be switched out for chicken, if you prefer. Both pork and chicken versions of this dish are common in the Philippines. In this house, Hubs makes pork adobo. Easy for me– I only had to take pictures this time. 🙂

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Wild Rice Burgers

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. My life is kind of hectic sometimes. Or most of the time. So whenever you see a post of food I’ve made, it’s food I’ve made for my family. I don’t have time to make meals just for this blog, so most of the stuff you see is what I’ve made for dinner on a particular night.

While this works for me most of the time, winter in Minnesota is not the ideal time for taking dinner photos. Why is that? Oh, right, because it gets dark about 4:30 pm these days. And we don’t eat that early. So it makes for challenging photo sessions, to say the least. It’s sort of comical, actually.

Anyhow. Tonight I made totally amazing burgers. I’m not a huge burger girl, really, but at the Minnesota State Fair every year I have a wild rice burger. To be clear, it’s not like a vegetarian burger that’s just made from rice. It’s a beef burger with wild rice in it. It’s pretty darn tasty. And since I ended up with some extra wild rice after Christmas, I thought I’d try my hand at burger making. (more…)

Garlic Bread To Die For!

Oh my gosh, this garlic bread.  Seriously.

I’ve always been a big fan of garlic bread.  I used to buy the frozen kind you can take home and bake, until one day I looked at the ingredient list and got completely creeped out by the sheer number of (mostly unidentifiable) ingredients.

This one is simple.  Only 4 or 5 ingredients (depending on whether you like herbs in your garlic bread) and it tastes soooo much better than the stuff you buy in the store.

So here’s what you’ll need: garlic.  bread.  olive oil.  butter.  and rosemary if you want.

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