Cu4tro Cantos

One of the easy-to-cook Batangueño delicacies is the ‘Bulanglang’. Bulalang is a mixed vegetable recipe that tastes very naturally and very nutritious. This has been an everyday cooking in Batangas specially on places where there is abundance of native vegetables.

[Bulanglang Recipe after the break.]

Last Sunday, I picked up some ingredients from the grocery and promised my wife to cook Bulalang for her. My wife is not very familiar about this recipe and she actually heard it first from me. The first time she tasted that specialty was last year when we went to Batangas. And she liked it.

My wife knows me as a veg-’hate’rian as she can rarely see me eat vegetables. Most of the times, when she cook viands with vegetables, she will see me removing every strand of greens from my plate. I don’t eat vegetable salads as well. But little did she know that Bulalang is one of my favorites. And last night I cooked it and it’s my breakfast this morning and my today’s lunch.

Here’s the list of the primary ingredients of Bulalang:

1. 1 Papaya fruit
2. ¼ regular-sized squash (kalabasa)
3. 5 Okra
4. 5 tomatoes (kamatis)
5. ¼ Garlic bulb (bawang)
6. 2 tsp. salt
7. patani (i don’t know the en. it belongs to beans family)
8. sigarilyas (in Batangas, it is called as kalamismis I don’t know the en.)
9. string beans
10. malunggay leaves
11. squash flower and leaves

I lacked 7 - 11 but it still tasted fairly good.

How to cook Bulanglang

Preparing ingredients

1. Peel off the papaya fruit. Divide it into several cuts. *Tip: before peeling a papaya, slightly cut it first on its vertical lines so you have the marks where to cut it when you already peeled it. Make french-fries-like cuts from each part.
2. Peel off the squash. Slice it into thin chunks.
3. Slice the Okra diagonally into 3 parts.
4. Slice the tomatoes into 4.
5. Press the garlics.
6. Separate the patani beans from its skin.
7. Chop the sigarilyas into several chunks.
8. Chop the string beans about 2 inches each.
9. Separate the malunggay leaves from its stem

How I cook Bulalang

1. Boil tomato cuts and garlic on a pot of 1.5L water until tomatoes become saggy.
2. Add 2 tsp of salt. Adding salts, btw, depends on your taste.
3. Put other vegetables in the cooking pot. Normally, those that are easily get cooked should be put first. But it depends on you. You can put them all at once as well. Vegetables normally get cooked for about 10-15 mins only depending on the amount of heat.
4. Wait until all vegetables are cooked. Serve hot.
5. That’s it.

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