Did some Filipino cooking here in Louisville

March 23, 2005

I’ve done very little cooking since I moved here. I didn’t do much when I was living in the Bay Area either, but back then I had an excuse. My tiny condo had an equally tiny kitchen, and of course there was the smoke detectors. My neighbors had tripped it a couple times with smoke from cooking, so I wasn’t gonna take the risk.

But here in Louisville I got a house, decent sized kitchen, and nice double doors so I can vent straight to the outdoors if I do burn anything. Besides, today we were having a pot luck to raise some money for a couple families in need that the company has kinda adopted.

So last night I cooked up a batch of pancit, a Filipino dish made of rice sticks (very thin noodles) stir-fried with chicken and carrots and cabbage and whatever else you want. I have such fond memories of pancit, because of all the chopping and soaking and stir-frying it was a special-occasion kind of meal whenever Mom would whip up a batch.

The stuff I cooked wasn’t near as good as Mom’s, but people seemed to enjoy it. Certainly there was none left, so either it was okay or there wasn’t enough other food so people were forced to eat the pancit. Either way, I won’t have to worry about taking any extra home. Just my now-empty electric wok.

The one weird thing is that because I went in search of rice sticks yesterday on Google, I found out there was a Filipino grocery store not two miles from my house. I’ve even been in that shopping center many times (mostly to buy take-out at the little Chinese restaurant) but never noticed the little Lanceta’s grocery store. If I hadn’t known from Google to go looking there I’d have never found it.

I’m gonna have to go back soon, to see if they have the fixings for halo halo. That’s the one thing I definitely miss about living in the Bay Area–no restaurants out here serve halo halo.