It’s been raining for more than a week now and it’s always remind me of my favorite comfort food, lugaw or porridge. I just so love the flavor of sauteed ginger in that thick warm broth in porridge. I love the nice flavorful broth of lugaw specially if its made of beef shanks and marrow bones slowly boiled until the richness of the meat and bones flavor the broth. I love to scoop out the soft gelatinized bone marrow out of its cage and hearthfuly welcome it with my mouth. The flavor is divine and yes, sinful. That was during my younger days when I don’t have to think of my cholesterol level and my blood pressure.
There are different variations of lugaw. When you add chicken meat, it’s called arroz caldo. When you add pork or beef meat like, beef tripe or tuwalya, pork intestine or isaw, or even ground beef it’s called goto.
Every pinoy in us knows that lugaw is not complete without tokwa or tofu or tokwa’t baboy or tofu and pork. They are like Romeo and Juliet.
You can buy them anywhere and they comes really cheap. A bowl of lugaw will only cost you Php10.00 from a lugaw sa kariton to as much as Php40.00 to Php60.00 from hole-in-a-wall type of restaurant with other lots of toppings. You can even find lugaw topped with chicharon.
This version of lugaw is plain simple. Feel free to add meat if you desire and you have extra budget. Oh, yes. Did I forgot to mention that I used rolled oats instead of sticky rice? Well, I had a sudden craving for lugaw this afternoon and we run out of sticky rice and found some rolled oats in our pantry. This is really a heavy meal. A bowl of this will surely fill your stomach.
Ingredients
1 Thumb-sized Ginger, crushed and chopped
Half-head Garlic, chopped
1 head Onion, chopped
2 cups Rolled Oats
1 piece Chicken Bouillon Cube
10 cups Water
Black Pepper and Fish Sauce to taste
Garnish
Boiled Eggs
Fried Garlic
Chopped Spring Onion
Fried Cubed Tofu
Tofu Sauce
1/2 Tablespoon Balsamic Vinegar
1/2 cup White Vinegar
3 Tablespoons Soy Sauce
1 teaspoon Sugar
1/2 head Onion, chopped
1 piece Green Chili
Procedure
Saute ginger, garlic and onion. Add rolled oats and saute for another 3 minutes. Add bouillon cube and water. Boil and simmer for 20 minutes. Season with pepper and fish sauce. Garnish with egg, fried garlic and tofu.
For the tofu sauce, simply combine all the ingredients.
