Week 26: Philippines - Chicken Adobo over Rice [Cooking]

Intro from Cooking Challenge: We’re at the halfway point and this week’s theme is Philippines! Filipino cuisine has a lot of interesting flavors and is especially known for combinations of sweet, sour, and salty. There is also a pretty large Spanish influence on some of the dishes, but the traditional Asian ingredients also shine through. To get an idea of the flavors, here are some fairly common Filipino ingredients: Rice; tropical fruits like banana, mango, guava, etc.; coconut/coconut milk; tamarind; seafood (though other meat like chicken and pork are popular also); garlic; and root vegetables like potato, purple yam, cassava, carrot, etc. And some Filipino foods: Pandesal (a bread that is sweet and salty); Champoroda (a sweet chocolate porridge); Adobo (basically a dish of marinated meat, often served with rice); Bistek (thinly sliced fried beef served with onions); Kare-Kare (a peanut-based stew usually made with oxtail, pork hocks, calves feet, pig feet, beef stew meat, and vegetables).  Here are a few more links to get you started this week: various foods and recipes.

Ignore the creepy looking chicken skin - this was delicious!

Recipe adapted from here. I loved this recipe mostly because of how incredibly easy it was and because I already had all the ingredients (save the chicken) around my kitchen. I didn't have any bay leaves on hand so I threw in some thyme instead. I also halved the portions since 5 lbs of chicken seemed like a ton of food - I ended up cooking four chicken thighs, which made four perfect lunch-sized servings. This kept incredibly well and tasted just as good heated up the next day, which is always a big risk with leftovers.