Karinderia sa Bahay – My Home-cooking Culinary Journey

Cooking is fun, and with the right ingredients - could be healthier for you. Fun experiment with paella and bell pepper rice. Buying this paella pan made me cook so many paella and jambalaya dishes! 

I advocate active lifestyle and fitness.  But we know that true fitness requires superb health.  And no matter how fit one seems to be, health could be invisibly suffering.  I’ve seen colleagues and heard athletes who all seemed to be in their top shape, suddenly died due to undetected or hidden sickness.

At high altitudes, I’ve seen healthy people suddenly becoming unhealthy and unfit – the lack of oxygen exposing their true health.  And I’ve concluded a long way back that without solid good body, one wouldn't have true, long-lasting endurance and fitness...  

And the capacity to climb big mountains!  Literally and figuratively.

And as cancer seems to run in my family blood – I also became more 'conscious' of my personal health and specifically on what I eat.

Now food is the primary ‘input’ we give to our body.  (For this post, let’s not talk about emotional/social, mental or spiritual health as it will lengthen and complicate my food topic).  And we all know that bad food or wrong nutrition causes bad performance in the short-term, and bad health in the long run.  And debate of what is good and what is bad will be long and endless – so I’ll stick with the basic ‘known’.

My culinary journey is a continual experimentation of cooking to discover new things that better comply with my own requirement on nutrition or health, sustainability, or quality of life (i.e. in terms of what is ‘good-tasting’ and reducing preparation time and cooking effort).

Eco-Living: Baking Soda for Home and Personal Care

Initially experimented adding stevia (for flavor) and sea salt, but later just use VCO mix.

Yes, sodium bicarbonate.   Food-grade, but also useful in many other things.   

I happen to watch this CNN episode on green living and saw this home-made toothpaste – which made me intrigued.  I’ve heard the same stuff before, but never tried it.  Yes, even after reading that fluoride is a known neurotoxin – an indispensable ingredient in every toothpaste that we buy.

Now NaHC03 (the baking soda, dude) – is simply natural with no harmful effects on human.  Food-grade! Used for baking!  But a very good cleaner and acid neutralizer.   It’s been around for centuries (actually ancient Egypt used the same substance for mummification)  – but distracting advertisement easily lured us all in buying bad brands and products.  So start the better alternative – DIY!

How I make my toothpaste

Get a small re-purposed glass or plastic container.  I used a very small candy jar, (and another small pickle-bottle to store my ‘deodorant’).

Home-cooking for a Better Health

related article: Food and Eating tips

 Crispy Goat Leg, with sauteed veggies and pita bread.  A change of carbs (bread vs. white rice) is a good once-in-a-while habit.

By now, we probably all know that the major factor that makes us unhealthy (or healthy) is the food that we eat...  In terms of quality (nutrients), volume, and yes timing (i.e. small portions distributed through-out the day is always better than big batches).

So in my own world of home-cooking, I've continually explored (and exploring still) and inject both health and environmental principles (or at least as much as applicable) into my cooking experiments. I obviously couldn't capture and document the majority, but once in a while - if in the mood, I would take a photo of my experiment (or a repeated, better version) to remember at least how it looked like; (taste is better stored in my memory).  :)

Survival Steamed Chicken Recipe

Spiced then Steamed free-range chicken

I never intended to cook this chicken this way (and never steamed one before, not even researched about it) -  but I liked the result that it fits to be stored in my ‘blog memory’.  Feel free to try and give it some twist even…

So... post New Year, I did the usual grocery and chopped this free-range chicken (or at least how it was labelled).  I soon realized that I didn’t have enough space in the freezer for the half part.  Unsure what to do (and feeling lazy to pre-cook it), I immediately marinated it thinking that what I’ll put should somehow preserve it from spoiling.  I didn’t have a cook’s kitchen and lack the usual spices – but I did find a few.  I showered the half chicken with a bit of apple cider, rubbed it with chopped garlic, throw in some strong-smelling cloves (unused for years), sprinkled with curry powder, rained it with chopped basil, showered more ground and powdered pepper and seasoned with salt.  Both sides.  The sequence was more or less based on what I was able to grab. 

Goat Meat – A Healthier Meat Alternative




Street goat meat market in Tingri, Tibet.
on the way to Cho Oyu

I’ve consumed kambing (goat in Malay) many times during my trips, especially when I temporarily worked in Jakarta. But I never considered it to be part of my mainstream diet…


Until recently when I started re-assessing my food intake (something that was triggered by a sickness in a family member).

Pork, and commercialized beef and chicken – and sickness associated with eating meat (in general) or non-“organic” meat will make one rethink what to consume.

Obviously, a good trend is to switch to vegetables – I eat a lot of these but I doubt will consider a 100% vegi diet just yet. So an attempt to switch to better meat alternatives is the order of the year.

Survival Soups





Soup-ing and Tea-ing with Jonjon V. (Pinoy)
at Island Peak highcamp.
I was sick but smiling.

 Couple of weeks ago, I had this sudden bad cough and felt an impending flu (we get sick many times, we should know). Arriving home, I cook my usual medicine-soup meal: Tinola (ginger-based chicken soup). While it may sound cultural (i.e. Pinoy style), I find the simple concoction effective – and as expected my cough soon went away.


In the mountains, I’ve experimented on a few types of medicine soups, sometimes prepared as if in ‘survival’ mode – i.e. not much ideal ingredients and aesthetics. There’s that heavy-garlic based soup that the Sherpas recommend to fight high-altitude sickness (which somehow didn’t work for me), and the simpler black pepper-spiced protein-rich egg-drop soup which I thought tasted better.

Food and Eating Tips





Cho Oyu (6th highest) - cooking
instant noodles in Camp1

Here’s to offer some tips on outdoor (and maybe indoor) cooking and eating...


1. In the mountains – EASY ON RICE and explore OTHER CARBS. Boiled Potato or sweet potato perhaps. For me, in the Philippine setting – rice is the most ‘inefficient’ food item that we bring in the mountains. Bringing a couple of kilograms of rice, and water to cook them (assuming limited water source) adds up to the pack weight, and what’s more – cooking time is long. Add a bad scenario mix of steel or titanium cook set and you may end-up with a not-so-tasty (and sometimes yellow-crunchy) half-cooked rice. Still add a rainy weather and a worthless tent without a vestibule (i.e. an ‘extension’ for storage but also used for semi in-tent cooking) to complete the picture and you’ll curse hell and its inhabitants on why dinner is taking so long to prepare! And white rice – although in our ‘culture and tradition’ – is not the best source of carbs out there. It also GREATLY contributes to global warming (methane release). Bringing cooked rice may be an option (for the first day) but obviously it has a short shelf life. Boiled potato lasts longer and is not bad for dishes like Adobo, fried meal, or generally non-soup dish. Of course, tinola or sinigang (soup meals) may force you to have rice on the side, unless you want to add large quantities of papaya and potatoes in those dishes to avoid rice.