Hapunan

HAPUNAN

If you’ve been following our last few posts, you know where this is going. Our menu’s concept is A Day in Our Life and we are now heading into dinner, ‘hapunan’ in Tagalog. In a day where we’ve had a substantial merienda, this tends to be a little later than what we are used to in the States.

Determining what dish to feature was a subject of debate. Should we do an adobo course – pork, chicken or squid? Hubad? With coconut milk? – we can go deep. So much so that it seems like that is a supper club topic all by itself. Adobo has typically been most people’s introduction to Filipino food so instead, we wanted to highlight another one of our favorites. It is certainly popular but not often the star in the Filipino American repertoire and that is Kare Kare. This dish is probably not as celebrated in the US because it is eaten with Bagoong, an umami heavy and very pungent shrimp paste. In our humble opinion, you can’t eat Kare Kare without it. It’s so good together because it cuts through the richness of the dish.

KARE KARE is typically an oxtail and tripe stew, thickened with toasted rice and peanuts crushed in a mortar and pestle. It’s got a bit of an orange color due the the addition of atsuete or annatto seeds. Our version uses a collagen heavy oxtail broth, supercharged by beef shank with marrow. We also use both cashews and peanuts. We love this dish with tons of veggies too. Our favorites are long beans, eggplant 🍆 and bok choy 🥬. We are serving this with Bagoong and steamed rice 🍚.

If you are one of the few that snagged tickets to TIKIM’s upcoming dinner on Sunday @mestizo.pdx, you will get to taste this dish. Stay tuned as we highlight some of the other dishes we are making.

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