Mom's "Ewan Ko" Meals

i've always loved my mom's cooking.

its like mom's cooking is the foundation of my food preferences, what i've grown up liking and disliking outside of the house, always has its roots in what i had eaten (or not eaten) from mom's kitchen.

but don't get me wrong. i'm adventurous when it comes to food. i like tasting a sample of anything that's new - if not to the place i'm in then, something new to my taste bud's entirely. then again, that's also something i got from my parents, who are both adventurous people - not only limited to food.

back to the kitchen. i had always said that when i grew up enough to cook myself, i wanted to be just like mom. i wanted to be like the good cook she is and be able to whip up some of my favorite meals from her menu of my childhood favorites to classic meals: fried chicken, spaghetti, christmas ham, pizza, pork or shrimp sinigang sa sampaloc, bulalo, macaroni soup, even fried fish, to of course our family's traditional recipe of pork and/or chicken adobo sa atsuete just to name a few.

now that i do know how to cook, and have a few specialties on a list of my own, i guess i'm pretty much on the way to be the cook that i had dreamed to be as the little girl who admired her mom's cooking and hopefully a little more. there's much much more (redundancy intended) i have to learn though, aside from baked tahong, spaghetti ala putanesca, pork katsudon, fruit cocktail graham ref-cake, and ref-cake blueberry cheesecake.

my basic idea of cooking is simply that once you have all your ingredients together, all it takes is a stock of knowledge on the basics, a good gauge for taste, and of course a little presentation. oh, and let me add a bit of inspiration from the Food Network, and a dose of health consciousness from time to time.

exactly the reason why you don't always need a recipe. but then again... not everything that comes out of mom's kitchen has a name either.

i'd like to call them collectively Mom's "Ewan Ko" Meals. they are basically the dishes that my mom serves us that have no name. its either she doesn't know the dish's name, or the name anyone else has given for it, or she hasn't given it a name herself yet. why the collective name? here's the all too familiar scenario:

dish is served on platter during dinner time.
me: ma, ano yan?
mom: ulam
me: ano nga?
mom: chicken, hindi mo ba nakikita?
me: ano nga' tawag?
mom: ewan ko...

and the meal happens to be one of my favorites. its basically simmered chicken and vegetables in recipe tomato sauce microwave baked with cream and cheese on top. she sometimes puts in green peas and ham. yummy, especially when the cream mixes with the sauce. it has no name though.

then there's this sliced beef in some sauce which i'm sure is not oyster, with some vegetables on the side.
add to that her recipe of citrus-marinated fish slices fried in butter.

just to describe a few. i'll probably be adding more, the more i encounter them. its just plain amusing that these meals have no name. and the thing is, i'm not going to try at all to name them. i guess part of the excitement comes from the mystery - even in the name. "Ewan Ko"

and i guess this just doesn't go for my mom. i know that mom's everywhere make magic in their kitchens even without putting a name to the dish that comes out for supper.

but then again, how do they name dishes?

from what i've observed, naming dishes is based pretty much on:

1. the ingredients, or how the meal was cooked, or simply what the dish is, such as fish n' chips which is exactly what it is fish and chips,
2. the naming person/restaurant/body, such as something like the 19th hole special, or Crazy Bonito's Spicy Wings which is a combination of a name and our element in number one.
3. a cultural name or a recipe that's associated with a particular culture or country, such as siomai from the Chinese, or maki from the Japanese, afritada, caldereta, menudo from the Spanish - i think - which also includes adobo, sinigang, and nilaga from our own Pinoy culture, es cargo from the French, and hmm... where do French fries come from again?

yes, simply put the name isn't all as important as the meal itself :) a rose is still a rose by any other name. but then again in making a menu takes that creativity and spice to attract consumers to buying meals. the thing that i'm amazed at are the brand names that have seeped into the the colloquial naming of a food, much like brand names for verbs like Kodak or Xerox. try Spam for canned meatloaf and you'll pretty much get the same reaction from most people.

like i said, i'll keep calling them Mom's "Ewan Ko" Meals. i just find it amusing to call them that. siya nga naman, ewan ko naman kung ano ba talaga yan. Its still magic when it comes out of mom's kitchen.