I signed up for the Mama Sita Foundation’s Mga Kwentong Pagkain Cook-Along hosted by Nastasha Alli.

The first episode was held last July 24 on Rice and Filipino foodways, with champorado as the festured dish to prepare.

After that, the attendees’ assignment was to make their jazzed up version of the adobo rice.

I myself have not made adobo ever, and thought this was the perfect reason to try!

So, before the adobo rice was of course the adobo. I followed Joshua Weissmann’s recipe. Though a foreigner, his adobo recipe was pretty straight forward and easy to follow, I thought!

Here is the link to his website and the YouTube tutorial, for reference, so I don’t have to repeat it here.

What I did differently was to use three types of vinegar. First is I wanted to use what I had at home, and I had my own homemade pineapple vinegar which I fermented myself. I thought it would be good to use. But since I didn’t have enough of it, I mixed it with two more vinegars, apple cider and Heinz white. 100g of each type for a total of 300g.

For the soy sauce, I used 120g of Kikkoman light soy sauce (生抽) and 60g of dark soy sauce from Singapore (老抽).

I reserved the adobo sauce to make the jazzed-up adobo rice.

In my head, what could I do to fancify an adobo rice? And then I thought of making a lo mai gai, but instead of flavoring it with plain soy sauce, I will use the adobo sauce instead.

I am a Filipino of half Cantonese and half Filipino descent after all, and lo mai gai and adobo would represent my mixed heritage very well.

So here is the video of how I made the adobo lo mai gai.

Lo Mai Gai is a Cantonese glutinous rice dish steamed in lotus leaf wraps. It is made with chicken, dried mushroom, lapcchiang or Chinese sausage, and sometimes water chestnuts too.

My method follows a simplified recipe using a rice cooker, however, ever since I discovered how to cook rice using the Samsung Smart Oven, I’ve tried to incorporate this cooking method in every rice-related cooking experiment I do.

Just cook any type of rice for 18 minutes in the microwave at 700W. The water to grain ratio differs depending on the dish. For this particular recipe, it’s 1:1, or equal weight of rice and liquid.

The verdict: it’s a good cross between the adobo and the lo mai gai, and it’s quite easy to put together, almost just requires dumping the ingredients together in one bowl.

It can be more adobo forward by increasing the adobo sauce marinade and replacing the Chinese sausages with Filipino sausages or just increasing the chicken instead, so that the flavors are kept simple.