Bijon-Canton

What else is new with pancit? It is so pinoy. Not a lot of people know that Filipinos have their own version of noodles. Noodles is usually associated with Chinese people just as pasta is to Italians. I am sure I do not need to write the recipe as we all know how to cook this except that we vary in what we put in our pancit. Here’s what I put in mine.

½ lb pork (yes, we’ve had a lot of meat lately), sliced thinly
1 onion, sliced
2 carrots, julienne sliced
¼ medium cabbage, sliced
¼ lb green beans, sliced
1 pack of Mama Sita’s pancit canton mix (yes, I cheated)
½ lb of bijon
1 pack of 227 gms canton

I boiled the pork in about 1 cup of water before slicing it. I saved the stock for cooking the noodles.

While boiling the pork, I boiled about 1 1/2 cups of water in a large sauce pan for the noodles while preparing the vegetables.

When everything was ready, I sautéed the pork in a heated pan. I did not need to add oil as the pork rendered it’s own oil in the process. I don’t toast my pork like some other people toast theirs. After about 1 minute, I added the onion stirring it constantly to avoid the pork from sticking to the pan. I added the carrots and the cabbage and cooked them for about a minute. Cabbage I find has the same cooking time as the carrots, that’s why I cook them together. I added the canton mix.. I only half cooked the vegetables and set them aside until the noodles were ready.

While cooking the vegetables, I put the noodles in the large sauce pan including the stock I set aside when I boiled the pork. I liked cooking my noodles separately to avoid them from becoming mushy. The vegetables needed constant stirring for even cooking. Cooking was about 2 minutes.

Once the noodles were cooked, I combined the half cooked vegetables, the nooldes and the green beans and cooked it for another 1 to 2 minutes. No calamansi this time. I had to come home early because my daughter was not feeling well. My daughter thought this pancit was “anemic”, totally different from what she sees from what other Filipinos serve but then there was too much sodium already in the mix. (Forget about the MSG)