Hazel Cooks Pancit --Inspired by Readathon 2012

As I mentioned yesterday this week's theme for the Readathon at Memetales is Global Culture. One of the books that is free this week is Cora Cooks Pancit by Dorina Lazo Gilmore. Well, after reading it we were inspired to try to make pancit.

Back to our post. Cora is a young child with three older sisters and an older brother. Since she is the youngest she does not get to help with the cooking, but cannot wait to get her chance. One day all of her siblings go out and she asks her mother to teach her how to cook. She gets to do the jobs her older siblings usually each do when they make pancit--one of her favorite Filipino meals. In the story Cora gets to soak the rice noodles, test the noodles for softness, shred the chicken and stir in the noodles.

The other day I cooked some chicken so we could make pancit and we went to the store to buy the ingredients. I googled pancit recipes and discovered there are many different recipes out there and none of them called for the same ingredients as the book. I printed out these recipes from Allrecipes, Filipino Recipes, and Spark Recipes and combined them with the ingredients mentioned in the book and came up with what we did.

The store we went to only had one type of rice noodles and the bag did not say anything about pancit or Canton on them like the recipes suggested, but I went for them since they at least were rice noodles. Hazel helped soak them since that was one of the jobs Cora had.

Next she helped shred the chicken, but had some difficulty with it so I helped her. She also chopped the carrot but then she wanted a carrot for a snack so I got her another one to eat. I chopped 3/4 cups or so of diced celery, half a head of cabbage (we went for small instead of medium since we are not big cabbage fans), 1/3 cup of scallions, 3 cloves of garlic, about an inch of fresh ginger, and one large onion. I forgot to buy baby corn (as it was not on any of my printed recipes but was in the book), so we used some frozen corn.

While I stir fried the onions, garlic and ginger, Hazel tested the noodles. Then we drained them and she had a lot of fun playing with the soft noodles.

I added the other vegetables (carrots, celery, cabbage, corn and scallions) and cooked them a bit and then added the chicken. I kept everything cooking a bit longer and added some soy sauce. I did not measure it but poured it in until it looked good.

Once the vegetables seemed cooked enough I helped Hazel add the noodles and let her stir a bit. She got tired of this very quickly and went off to play.

Then Hazel and I sat down to a lovely dinner. Steve will get to try it tomorrow since he has to work tonight due to the storm warnings. Hazel and I however really liked it.

What are some of your favorite cultural meals to make/eat?

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