Since 2007, I made it a point to travel back home annually. But I have been grounded for 26 months; thanks to the pandemic. As expected, I have started to crave for a taste of home. The oily, greasy and sweet dishes that the Philippines is known (or sometimes disliked) for.
From the moment we bought an air fryer from Costco, there was only one dish that would make this purchase worth it... a #lechonporkbelly!!! For those who are not familiar, #lechon is a Spanish word referring to a roasted pig. But in the Philippines, we have "lechon kawali". It is also known as lechon de carajay. It consists of deep-fried pork belly slabs. Since I loathe frying, air frying is the answer.
The next problem is that the Japanese supermarkets in our area didn't sell pork belly with skin. We've scoured all supermarkets and Costco for this, but we always went home empty-handed. Take note that we acquired the air fryer back in April this year and that I'm only writing this now. So our hunt for pork belly with skin took almost 5 months. Finally, a new supermarket opened near the station and lo and behold, they sold a few pork belly with skin on portions (not every week though)! I had to make sure that it was indeed skin (made the mistake of buying a pork belly thinking it had skin on, but it didn't). So, I asked one of the staff. Our convo was something like this:
Me: Sumimasen (Excuse me.)
Staff: Hai (Yes)
Me: Korewabutanikudesuka (Is this pork meat?)
Staff: Hai (Yes)
Me: (pointing to the skin part) Butakawawaarimasuka (Does it have skin?)
Staff: Hai (Yes)
Me: (grabbing the pork) Wakarimashita. Arigatougozaimasu. (I understand. Thank you.)
We bought immediately, of course.
So, here's a piece of our little project. I combined different recipes for this from brining to how long I cooked in the air fryer.
For dessert, we had No Bake Mango #Cheesecake. If finding pork belly with skin took that longs, finding a #PhilippineMango right now would be close to impossible. So, I had to improvise. 😉 I also had to adjust the recipe because my #mango was a bit different (message me if you would like to know what I used).
Cravings satisfied! This should get me through a couple of months, right?
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