My Own Version of Cooking Palapa "A Maranao Appetizer"

Hello Foodies Bee Hive Community! It's my first time posting here and today I will share a recipe of the Maranao appetizer that I love to eat.

Living in Marawi City for five years, one of the thing that I discovered about them is the presence of Palapa in most dishes that they cooked. This is what I loved most in their foods because palapa makes the food more savoury. If you're curious what's the main ingredient in palapa here's the sakurab or in other places it's called sibujing (native shallots).

It's somewhat like the spring onions when I look from afar but as I watch it closer, it's actually different from the spring onions.

Palapa is the appetizer that I love to have everytime I eat my breakfast, lunch or dinner. Before we bought a ready to eat palapa in our neighbor's store which cost ten pesos each but we realized that we can't save if we always do that so we plan to make a palapa on our own. Since then, whenever I go to the market I will never forget buying some sakurabs. My way of cooking a palapa is so simple. Here are the ingredients that I used.

1. Thinly chopped and crushed sakurabs
2. Chili peppers
3. Ginger
4. Oil
5. Salt
6. Namnam (all in one seasoning granules)

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Preparing and Cooking the Palapa

The first thing to do is prepare the sakurabs and a knife. Then cut the roots of the sakurabs. Also cut off those dried leaves or those rotten ones since some of those sold sakurabs in market had already few dried and rotten leaves. If it's newly harvested, only the roots will be removed and wash those parts with soil stick to it to remove those. Then wash those sakurabs after removing the roots and cutting and peeling the rotten parts.

Next is chopped the cleaned sakurabs into smaller pieces so that it would be easier to crush it. Some would cut it half inch or an inch long but with me I prefer it way shorter than those since I'm just using wooden mortar and pestle to crush it while others use the manual hand pull crusher to crush it so the result is actually better than what I'm using.

When done chopping the sakurabs, I then crush it using the wooden mortar and pestle (in bisaya we call this almires or lusong). We don't have "almires" here at home so we borrowed from our neighbor and this is what I used in crushing those chopped sakurabs.

After crushing the sakurabs, I chopped three pieces of chili and grated a small piece of ginger. Only three pieces of chili since the kids don't like to eat it spicy and I am not allowed to eat spicy foods since I have an ulcer.

Here are the crushed sakurabs, chopped chilis and the grated ginger.

Now what's next? It's cooking time.

In a pan with medium low heat, pour a little amount of oil to saute the three ingredients that is shown above.

When the oil is already hot, pour the three ingredients.

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Then stir it inorder for the three ingredients to be fully mixed.

After a minute or two of stirring, add a pinch of salt and little amount of Namnam (All in one seasoning granules) to balance the taste.

Then continue stirring until the palapa is cooked (some want it half cooked, others may prefer it to be golden brown while us, we prefer both because it's all delicious). After seasoning, it takes three to five minutes for it to be fully cooked. Within those time I just continued stirring the palapa so it won't stick to the pan.

Now here's the cooked palapa. It's ready to serve. It can be paired with any viand or we can just simply made this as our only viand. It can already made our hungry tummy full and satisfied.

Before I want ketchup as a sauce for the boiled egg but now I prefer boiled egg with palapa. It's more satisfying to eat when it's the dish that I pair.

That's all for today's blog! Thanks for reading!

🪷 AEZIELOVE 🪷