Nothing Beats Nana's Cooking!

Passport & Plate - Kare-Kare

Philippines | Friday, March 14, 2014 | 5 photos

Ingredients
Beef cut into cubes
Peanut butter
Ground toasted rice
Garlic
Onion
Annato seeds
String beans
Eggplant
Bok choy
Salt and pepper

 

How to prepare this recipe
To make the dish, boil the beef cubes first until they are tender. On a separate pan, sauté your garlic and onion. Add the beef, along with the stock, to your sautéed garlic and onion. Add the peanut butter to the pan depending on the amount of beef and stock you have. I'd say add at least half a cup to really get the peanut flavour for your sauce.

On a separate pan, roast a quarter of a cup of white uncooked rice. Once it turns brown, put it in a coffee grinder or a blender and ground for about a minute or until almost in powder form. Add your ground toasted rice to your pot and stir. The ground toasted rice serves as the thickening agent for your sauce.

On a bowl, soak your annato seeds in water until the water turns into a deep orange colour. Separate the seeds from the water using a sieve and add the water to your pot. This will give that orangey-brown colour to your sauce. Make sure that no annato seed goes into your pot because the seed is really bitter when you bite into it.

Stir the stew until it slightly thickens. Add salt and pepper to taste. The sauce should be nutty, sweet, and savoury. You can add more peanut butter to increase the nuttiness or the sweetness of your sauce. After adjusting the flavour of your sauce, you will now add the vegetables.

The first vegetable to go in would be the eggplant. Remember to cut your eggplant first as shown in the picture. Allow the eggplant to cook until it turns soft, then you can add the string beans. Once your eggplant and string beans are cooked, add the bok choy. After adding the bok choy, let the stew simmer for 5 to 10 minutes.

Kare-Kare is best enjoyed with rice and a little bit of shrimp paste. You have to eat it with rice because it's blasphemous not to. I guess you should know that we Filipinos eat everything with rice. You can buy your shrimp paste at an Asian grocery or perhaps a Filipino store.

 

The story behind this recipe
They say that nothing beats home-cooked meals, but it's even better with my grandma's Filipino cooking. My all-time favourite, and I believe my grandma's best Filipino dish, is her Kare-Kare. Kare-Kare is a thick, savoury beef stew made with sweet and nutty sauce. The first time I tried this delectable, coma-inducing gem of a dish, I knew it would be an all-time favourite for me.

When I was a kid, every time my grandma asks me what I want for our weekly dinners, I always request her Kare-Kare. It was really the only dish I asked for. I don't even know why she asked me the other times; she should have figured out that I would only want peanut sauce on my rice. So for some few months, we had Kare-Kare for dinner once a week, and I never got tired of it! But I guess my family eventually did because my grandma suddenly stopped asking me what I wanted for dinner.

I knew I had to learn how to cook Kare-Kare, so I asked my mom to pass on my grandma's recipe to me. When my mom was describing to me how to prepare Kare-Kare, I'm not going to lie, it seemed tedious. I had to ground toasted rice and nuts using a mortar and pestle. I was not willing to do any arm workout so for my version, I thought I would just use peanut butter for my sauce. I had no substitute for toasted rice, so I thought of just ditching it. The peanut butter worked out great because it added to the sweet taste of the sauce and it still gave that peanut-y taste to it. However, not adding the ground toasted rice wasn't going to work at all because the sauce was just too thin without it. Good thing I'm all about cooking shows because I once saw Rachel Ray use a coffee grinder to pulverize nuts before. That woman lives for quick cooking and I definitely do too, so I tried her coffee grinder method on my toasted rice, and viola, I had instant ground toasted rice. And because I don't want to burden you with the olden ways of Filipino cooking, I applied my substitutes for the recipe that I'm submitting.