discovering new talents: not exactly masterchef material

It's been almost a week and I haven't won any bid at all on my attempts at freelancing. I even got desperate enough to enter a contest on shoe design. Shoe design! (my fashion style doesn't exactly invite accolades).

So in the pursuit of expanding my choices of business ideas as a future WAHM (ehem), this week I have started to expand my culinary expertise. Hey, don't knock the carenderia idea down ok. It simply is location, location , location. I've seen the simple carenderias near USC Boys High in Cebu City become airconditioned eateries last time I went there. Pfft.(enter my daydream about owning restaurant one day, never mind that I'm not really a kitchen person).

So anyway, my first try was to do a pork embutido. I got it from my favorite site for Pinoy dishes: http://panlasangpinoy.com/2009/06/18/embutido/. Hubby and I bought this anodine fryer with steamer a year ago. The fryer, as you can imagine, has been abused extensively. This is the first time I will be using the steamer though. I'm never a good fan of following instructions, but as this is my first time, I followed the recipe to the letter. (if to the letter you mean without 3 important ingredients including the relish. haha).

I was able to make around 10 decent looking cylindrical rolls. The first five got into the steamer successfully. I even had it go for almost 2 hours just to make sure the meat is cooked (wouldn't want to die of salmonella).  I was feeling pumped up.  I even had time to put baby to sleep while the first batch got cooking (or steaming har har har). The first batch turned out fine and delicious. UNFORTUNATELY, the gas decided at just that moment to turn itself off. We were out of gas! In the middle of my steaming! Murphy's law nga naman.

(not my embutido but from the website link I gave below)

I found this site where you can oven bake the embutido. I was rather doubtful but faced with having meat that I can't cook rolling in my freezer overnight (the bacteria! shudder), I had no choice. So the rest of the embutido batches are baking as I distract myself from my cooking woes and write this blog entry.

*sigh. Hopefully they would turn out fine. I spent so much effort mincing those darn carrots and onions. Argh. The way my luck is going these days, they would probably burn.

UPDATE: my embutido is a success! at least the restaurant option isn't closing. And they liked the baked ones even better.