SINIGANG NA LECHON

Our neighbor gave us a generous amount of lechon left from their New Year celebration. Like any other person, one dish came to my mind when I had to decide the left-over lechon’s fate—you’re right: Paksiw na Lechon.

However, hubby’s not much of a fan of Paksiw na Lechon, thus I have to look for other options. Refrying the lechon ala Lechong Kawali would be great, although not recommended after those high calorie junk we ate from the past holiday season. Then I remembered this dish raved about from KKK restaurant (Kainan sa Kalye Kanluran) called Sinigang na Lechon. I think it’s a better options since we get to have soup plus the lechon and the fact that my daughter is a fan of anything sinigang. Hmmm…enough with thinking of revamping left-overs with experimental dishes just to make our home kitchen customers forget that the main ingredient for today’s lunch was last night’s dinner (Think “daing ala pobre”—left over daing na bangus with sauce J). Sometimes, sticking to the basics is much better.

Your Sinigang na Lechon would be much better when the left over parts contain bones to make the soup tastier. Fortunately, ours contain a big chunk of the pig’s leg bone, yippee!

Ingredients:

Left-over lechon (what we have is almost a half kilo of lechon. I separated the meat, skin from the bony part)

3 tomatoes, halved and seeded

2 onions, sliced into half

1 pack or tali of kangkong

3 green chili peppers (siling haba)

2 small pouches of sinigang mix (I used Knorr Sinigang mix with Gabi 25grams)

Fish sauce (patis) to taste

*You can add string beans (sitaw), gabi or labanos if you want.

Procedure:

1. If your left-over lechon has bones in it, scrape the meat off the bone and set the meaty portions aside.

2. Place the bony parts in a pot, cover it with water—I used 4 mugful’s of water to cover the bone. Let it simmer.

   Remember that the longer you keep the broth boiling, the more flavorful the soup would be. But of course, if it’s already a quarter before 12noon and you have hungry people hovering around the dining table, I don’t think you have the luxury of boiling your broth the whole day.

3. Add the tomatoes, onions and green chili peppers.

4. Keep the soup boiling for another 10-15 minutes.

5. Add the rest of the lechon (I didn’t include the skin—I have other plans for that later J) to the mix.

6. At this point, you can add salt or fish sauce according to your preferred taste.

I want my sinigang really sour and a bit spicy so I used 2 pouches of the sinigang mix. Since I used the mix with gabi variant, the broth was a bit thicker (not so much resembling a sauce) than the usual sinigang. Oh and in case you’re wondering what happened to the lechon skin? I deep-fried it so it became a lechon skin chicharon style side dish. J