Foodalogue’s Culinary Tour to stamp out hunger for bloggeraide has arrived in the Philippines. The last few stops were interesting because they were at places where I have never had the counties food before but now we are at a place whose cuisine that I am familiar with.
Filipino migrants came to Hawaii to work on the sugar cane plantations in the early 1900’s. They quickly came part of Hawaii’s melting pot which included Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, Okinawan, and Puerto Rican immigrants. It is this melting pot which makes me love Hawaii so much.
Joan did a lot of great research on the history and culture of the Philippines but, one thing she did not mention was the people. The Filipino people are very hard workers, very nice and fun loving. Filipinos definitely take to the work hard, play hard motto and man can they throw a party. We have several Filipino cooks who work for us and they are excellent. It was hard to choose what to make but I decided on one of my favorite dishes, fresh lumpia. It is basically a crepe filled with chicken and shrimp. It is not fried like the traditional lumpia. I also made a fried banana lumpia. Other excellent foods of note are the lechon, spit roasted pig, pancit and adobo.
I used this recipe for the lumpia. I did not follow it entirely, for the crepe I used 1 cup of flour instead of ½ a flour cup and ½ cornstarch. Instead of oyster sauce (which is full of MSG) I used a vegetarian stir fry sauce.
Banana Lumpia
2 bananas cut in half
4 large spring roll wrappers
4 Cups oil
Place banana on the bottom half of the wrapper, fold ends in and roll. Fry in oil.
