Cooking a Meal with Sardines, Chayote and Eggs

Yes, we have tried online grocery shopping but it didn’t go so well. To start with, only two groceries deliver to our area. The first one, Landers, delivered my orders last night but minus the beef, pork and chicken (sold out) but at least there were some veggies. Two pieces of chayote, a pack of green beans, four eggplants… They will have to do for a few days until the second grocery, Robinson’s via Metromart makes its delivery.

Why are we still cooking? A follower on Facebook asked me that yesterday. I guess she was curious though thankful too because I am still able to share recipes that are more in tune with today’s realities.

I told her that we cook because we have to. We don’t live in Metro Manila where restaurants still deliver cooked meals. We live in the suburbs. The boondocks, in fact. There are very few restaurants that deliver and delivery hours are limited. Worse, the minimum order is often too high — the equivalent of food we’ll have to eat for two days or longer. Cooking requires a little more work on our part but newly cooked food is really more palatable than reheating the same dishes for days.

And that’s the reason why I changed the banner-logo and the title of this sub-blog. “House on a hill”, a domain that I used for years, somehow gives the impression that we live in a mansion on top of a hill. That’s not a correct picture. We live in a hilly portion of the Sierra Madre mountain range, and so do a lot of people many of whom commute to Metro Manila to work. I hope that “Life in the Sierra Madre” will give readers a better idea of just how far we are from many amenities that city folk take for granted.

(The last paragraph no longer applies. This isn’t a sub-blog anymore, I have given it a different name which is echoed by the domain name.)

The second reason we don’t order cooked food has to do with hygiene. We just don’t feel comfortable eating food handled by strangers. The intense heat of cooking might kill bacteria but less than hygienic packing makes us cringe. It might sound like an extreme case of germophobia but, you know, I have this impression that it is the germophobes who will survive this crisis.

But, anyway… About this meal with sardines, chayote and eggs.

The jar of sardines wasn’t full. There were three pieces of fish in it and enough flavorful oil to saute the chayote in.

I drained the fish, heated the oil in a pan and sauteed the julienned chayote and some sliced shallots in it. When the chayote was cooked through, I added the crumbled sardines. I stirred everything gently, adjusted the seasonings then poured in two beaten eggs. And that’s it. I divided the contents of the pan between two bowls of rice, and we ate.

If you’re a long time reader and you know that there are four of us in the house, you might be wondering why I cooked a dish for two. We had leftovers from last night’s dinner. The sardines, chayote and eggs meal was a secondary dish so that there would be newly-cooked food AND enough food for everyone.