This spicy, creamy dish made it to number one in terms of search popularity – it reached a whopping 81 searches in May 2020 at the height of last year’s lockdown.

Which dishes made it to the top five? Here’s what the numbers have to say! Bicol express Coming from the knowledge that Bicolano cuisine is a popular choice among diners and home cooks around the country, data company Nerve did a scan on the most popular Bicolano recipes people around Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao searched for online from January 2020 to August 2021. We wanted to know what kind of recipes people were cooking up from their homes in the past year in lockdown. Despite the convenience of food deliveries and take-out, nothing really beats the taste and comfort of home-cooked food, especially if it’s a recipe from childhood or inspired by a favorite regional delicacy. Things may not always go smoothly in our collective human kitchen but that’s no reason to fret.With most of the country in lockdown since March 2020, home cooks – both new and experienced – saw themselves spending more time in the kitchen.

I will add the veggies later rather than sooner.Īnyhoo, let’s not sweat the small things.I will cook it al dente and not turn part of it into noodle-mush.

I will use the specified amount of liquid.I am definitely doing a number of things differently if I come by these special noodles again: The noodles were too soft though and the shrimp too hard… ack! Had I failed K‘s noodles? Oh dear. Our building’s whole staff had it for lunch and dinner too – it was a big batch! I could taste the slightly smoky flavor from toasted noodles, I really liked that it had a lot of sahog (that means the meat and veggies that you add in), and I rediscovered my love for kikiam. The dish as a whole was tasty…definitely not inedible ( thank goodness!). Perhaps the amount of my improvisation confused my poor noggin into forgetting some basic rules: Do not over-cook noodles. So I just tossed everything in – bits of pork belly, slices of chicken fillet, shrimp, and kikiam – along with some garlic and onion, and thinly sliced carrots and cabbage. K said the one she ate had bits of pork and kikiam ( the Chinese que-kiam – made of ground meat and vegetables and wrapped in thin bean curd sheets). The instructions called for cooking them in water and Knorr Meaty Seasoning, then adding veggies and maybe some kind of meat or seafood. K dropped them off at my place with instructions and tips, and I got to them right away. So after their journey back with K, I was all excited to use them! The fresh noodles will only last 7 days at room temp – as K was advised not to place them in the fridge. After the noodles are prepared, they are baked for a bit in a pugon (wood-burning oven) giving it its special toasty flavor. These aren’t noodles of stone tough…they are named after the town of Bato in Bicol, where they are made. Bato in Tagalog (the Filipino dialect where I live) means stone (or rock). In between whipping around the cable park attached to a board, and exploring the gorgeous islands of Caramoan, she managed to get me some fresh Pancit Bato noodles. After our first trip to Bicol, the magazine sent her back to do a more in-depth feature on the water sports complex at Camarines Sur. My best friend K brought me back a hefty bag of Pancit Bato from her trip to Camarines Sur. Here’s a less-than-stellar moment ( one of many I tell you!), from my kitchen to yours… You who would love to buy organic and free-range everything, but sometimes has to make do with pre-packed flim-flam and parmesan cheese in that bright green container. You that sometimes produces moments of culinary brilliance, and sometimes just needs to get dinner on the table in 20 minutes after a stressful day at work. Why? Because the thing I like best about blog dishes is human on the other end – yup, that’s you! Yes, you without the test kitchen nor legions of assistants. Once in a while I don’t mind reading about how this didn’t turn out quite the way it was expected to or how that just seemed to go wrong at every turn. I love tap-tapping on my laptop late into the night, or early in the morning when I have my coffee and all is still, surfing the ever-changing But I wonder how many of the not-so-perfect ones make it out here? Should we even bother putting out our less-than-stellar attempts? I think so. Exploring other food blogs is always a source of inspiration for me.

Pancit bato in bicol