These days, weekends are anything but slow and lazy. The girls’ schedules have gone insane with the projects they need to finish and, most times, weekends are spent driving back and forth between our suburban house and the rented condo near the university where the girls stay on weekdays. Yesterday was particularly crazy. Speedy and I dropped off Sam at her friend’s house, shopped for additional Christmas decor, went to the supermarket then bought Alex’s art supplies. We got home a little after noon and I started cooking four different dishes that had to be packed so Alex could bring them all when Speedy drove her to the condo in the evening.
Yeah, during schooldays, they reheat cooked meals that I prepare for them. And one of the dishes that I prepared yesterday was the Lechon Macau cross between a sweet-sour stew and a stir fry, depending on how long you cook the roasted pork in the sauce. Most times, it is made with leftover roast pork. But yesterday’s Lechon Macau was not made from leftover lechon kawali. I cooked the pork in the turbo broiler first then chopped the pork belly slices to make a stew. Heat the oil in a wok. Saute the ginger, garlic, and onion just until fragrant. Don’t wait for them to soften. Add the chopped roast pork. Cook, stirring, until the meat is thoroughly reheated.
Pour in the sauce. Stir. If the sauce appears too thick (it normally does, at this stage), add meat broth, little by little, stirring as you pour. Stop adding broth when you have reached the desired consistency. The sauce shouldn’t be soupy but it should be too thick either. Boil for another 30 seconds. Some like to cover and simmer for as long as 20 minutes at this point but that was not an option yesterday given the time constraints.
Next, to Lechon (roasted whole pig), lechon kawali is probably the most popular–and sinful–way to cook pork in the Philippines. Pork belly boiled in water with spices and plenty of salt, drained then deep fried until crisp and golden and the rind puffed like cracklings. A wonderful dish. But lechon kawali is only good when newly cooked. The fat congeals once it cools. It does not reheat well–re-fry it and the meat becomes too dry.
If there is paksiw na lechon for leftover lechon, well, what do we do with leftover lechon kawali? I never really wondered about it since it’s rare indeed to have leftover lechon kawali. But it happened yesterday. Too little time between a heavy mid-afternoon snack (we had lumpiang togue) and dinner, and presto! We had leftover lechon kawali. What to do… well, I dreamed up a stew dish that did the trick quite nicely. It was the kids’ packed school lunch today with white rice, of course.
This dish is quite similar to paksiw na lechon. The difference is that while lechon is always accompanied by a liver sauce, the traditional dunking sauce for lechon kawali is a mixture of soy sauce, vinegar, onions, sugar, garlic, and chili pepper. What I did was start with the recipe for the dunking sauce and then transformed it into a sauce with the consistency of a stew. The following proportions for the ingredients are good for about 2 cups of cooked leftover lechon kawali.