Took out the canned jackfruit(langka) an hour ago. It would be nice to cook KBL, an Ilonggo dish of Kadyos(a type of bean), Baboy(pork), and langka (jackfruit). But here I go again….procastinating on the computer.

I don’t feel too confident about cooking this dish, I guess. Months ago, fueled by a picture on a food blog, I went out to buy some black beans (substitute for kadyos), bulalo beef cuts(substitute for pork), and canned jackfruit. I began to lose interest in my work while it was boiling away on the stove. I couldn’t understand where my dish was headed. Was it supposed to taste like bulalo or linaga?Because I was sure as hell it didn’t taste like KBL.

My husband, who (much to my irritation) always asks about the name of a dish (as if dishes were books with titles), gave me his usual “What’s that called?” question. I apologetically said “I can’t really understand what it’s supposed to be. Basta. May sabor. It’s edible.”  He smiled and answered that he’s used to my cooking by now, that nothing really surprises him anymore.

Sigh. To a lesser degree, I think I’m like my mother. And maybe this latest realization about myself is my punishment for all the times I teased her when she’d put a queer-looking dish on the table. She has the tendancy to experiment. She turns a recipe upside down by putting ingredients that are not supposed to be there. Just last weekend she served miswa for dinner. It had cabbage and ginger in it! That’s culinary innovation at its best. I kept my mouth shut this time, but in the past I would usually say, in my best announcer voice, “Welcome to the  Cooking Adventures of Dax”. She’d just laugh and counter that  cooking doesn’t always have to follow a cookbook.

If I were to grade my KBL attempt, I would give myself an NI for Needs Improvement. The meat and the beans were not tender enough. The jackfruit had somehow disintegrated. My only consolation was that  my husband ate a lot. He disappeared after the meal. When I saw him again he informed me, with a smug smile on his face, that his BM was as effortless as flowing water. Coming from him, that’s really something. Best compliment of all was when my 3 yr. old told me that she liked it and finished the contents of the bowl I gave her.

That’s not too bad for a dish I had quietly named: Identity Crisis Beef.