Staff Blog
Humba was another one of my most favorite Filipino recipes, so when I had the chance to watch the aunties in Eicher prepare this meal I was so thrilled.
Humba is a variation of pork adobo. It's salty-sweet, with just a little bit of acidity, and the meat is completely tender and full of flavor.
This is going to be a little scary for us non-Filipinos, I know, but in order to really make this good you need to buy pork belly (pictured above). It just doesn't compare when you use a different cut of pork. Even if you don't want to actually eat the fat on the pork belly, you still need it to cook with the lean parts so that it gives off that flavor.
First you fry the meat, and then you let it simmer together for a while with all this good stuff....
Until it becomes this golden, delicious, saucy meat that goes perfectly over a pile of hot rice.
So, so good.
Humba
Recipe from the Eicher house
2 lb. bone-in or boneless pork belly*
1-2 cups oil for frying
1 tablespoon azucena (substitute onion)
1-2 bay leaves
1 onion, chopped
1 tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons soy sauce (more to taste)
¼ cup pineapple tidbits
¼ cup black beans
¼ cup brown sugar
¼ cup vinegar
5 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
1 ¼ cup water
½ cup green onions
1. Separate the fat from the lean meat by cutting the pork belly into medium sized pieces (about 2 inch by 1 inch).
2.
Heat the oil in a large frying pan over medium low heat and cook the
pieces of pork until golden brown, about 15 minutes. Remove from oil and
drain in a bowl lined with paper towels.
3. Transfer the pork to a
large pot and add all the remaining ingredients except the green onions.
Mix well and bring to a low boil over medium heat. Cover and simmer,
stirring occasionally. After 30 minutes, add the green onions and stir
to mix them into the pot.
4. Cover again and simmer for an additional 30 minutes, or until the pork is very tender.
*It
really is best to make this with pork belly, even though it might
require a trip to a special meat market to find it. The CSC aunties use
bone-in pork belly. Since each piece of pork belly has both a lean part
and a fatty part, it makes the meat extremely tender and full of flavor,
even if you choose not to eat the fatty part. I've made this with
pork sirloin as a subsitution, and I was disappointed with how much
tougher the meat was than with the original pork belly.
J-O-Y!
Loving life....and more specifically....hackysacks! :)
Thank you to our visitors for giving every kid their very own hackysack---as you can see, they were eagerly received!
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SRA Day!
Last Friday was SRA Day at school! SRA is our reading curriculum so it includes reading, writing, and spelling! We spent the morning having some fun reviewing things the kids had learned in SRA throughout the year. It started off with one student from each level sharing why they like SRA. Then we had a cheer competition. The children were divided into four groups and each group had 10 minutes to create their own cheer about SRA or reading. It was cool to see what they came up with!
After the cheering competition was the spelling contest! The kids took turns writing letters or words on the white board as a review of things they had learned. They also drew pictures that related to some of the themes our classes had studied. Some of the older kids went up and explained how their pictures related to the theme.
The final part of the program involved several presentations by our kids. The Level A students performed sang "The Alphabet Song". Jaime and Pretchy each did a beautiful job sharing poems about reading! Shiela & Rowena sang a duet of "America the Beautiful", a song they learned in one of their reading units. Then three of our Level C students shared stories they had written during class.
Here are some more pictures from our exciting day!
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Friends
Friendships are an important part of life at CSC. Although most of our children have siblings at CSC (about two thirds), they all seek out friends in their age group and enjoy hanging out, playing, making music and talking about life. Our kids can easily find friends who have similar backgrounds and can understand and accept what they have gone through in life. Some friendships can go on for several years, depending on how long the children stay at CSC. When a child leaves for adoption there are often sad friends left behind who wonder if they'll ever see them again. In some cases, friendships that began at CSC can pick up later on when children are placed in the same geographical area. Check out a few pictures of friends at CSC:
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Movie Night
One of the things we often hear at CSC is laughter, and one of the best places to hear it is during a movie night.
It's hard to organize a trip to the movie theater, so often times staff will gather up a group of kids and setup the projector in the library at the school. The movie night below was a "girl's night out" that Teacher Lindsay organized. However, being the IT guy, I was allowed to attend because I had to setup the screen and projector. :)
The movie was Mr. Popper's Penguins.
It's hard to see much in the video below, but it's really fun to listen to the laughter of the kids.
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The Littlest Waveboarder
Waveboarding is the cool thing to do during playtime here at CSC. Lots of the older kids got waveboards for Christmas, but recently more and more of the little kids want to try the waveboards as well. The other day I noticed this little lady trying out her older sister's waveboard in the driveway and I couldn't stop laughing - it was so cute! And she's so good at it!
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