Buffalo Wings are considered American staple food, together with our favorite burgers and fries. They’re the kind of food people don’t ever mind getting down and dirty in eating because it’s best savored using your bare hands, licking all the crevices of your fingers clean of the delicious buffalo sauce and blue cheese dip.

Friday’s Buffalo Wings
(photo from here)

I had my first taste of the hot wings when some of my friends and I once dined at TGI Friday’s in Greenbelt. They ordered their usual nachos, burgers, and fries. One friend suggested we get the Buffalo wings, but another friend was quick to negate, saying that it’s too spicy for her taste. But since I love my food hot and spicy, 10 minutes later, we had two servings of Buffalo wings on our table, and they all agreed that I ate 2/3 of it.

After that dinner, the Buffalo wings flew straight up my all-time favorite food list, but it’s not everyday that I have the luxury to buy wings at Friday’s. So I decided to make some myself at home, and it’s a good thing that I have a very generous sister like Mhel, who shouldered the expenses for the ingredients.

My first attempt to make Buffalo Wings at home – all gone in about 15 minutes!

The Homestyle Buffalo Wings recipe I’m sharing with you are bits and pieces of different stuff I found on the internet. Not one recipe matched what I wanted to do because there is one requiring me to broil then bake the chicken wings, instead of simply frying them; another has a lousy breading mix recipe, but their instructions for doing the buffalo sauce was by far the simplest among all I’ve seen. And almost all sites had a recipe for blue cheese dip to accompany the chicken wings, but blue cheese is out of the question too expensive for me. But, we’ll try that, too, soon.

Since my family have been trying (take note of my choice of words ) to eat healthier, two of the proteins you’d usually see in our refrigerator are chicken meat and eggs. And I love making all kinds of dishes with them. So, when I was craving for McDonald’s McChicken sandwich, instead of spending almost Php 200 to have one delivered, I decided to make my own Chicken Fillet sandwich.

I’m on a low-carb diet, so I usually just enjoy a sandwich for lunch or dinner. My mother also loves sandwiches so we always come up with our own different sandwich spreads. And this one, I’ll keep on making. I know, there’s flour and all. But, c’mon. I’m on a LOW carb diet, not giving it up completely. Give me a break! Hahaha

Though this recipe is so easy, I still want to share it here for those who haven’t tried making chicken fillet or nuggets yet.

Chicken Fillet Sandwich and Chicken Nuggets
with Honey Mustard Sauce Recipe

INGREDIENTS:

• 3-4 chicken breasts, deboned and cut into cubes
  You will need a food processor or blender for this recipe. If you don’t have it, then, just skip the blending/grinding part of the procedure and just cut the chicken breasts into nugget-sized or sandwich fillet-sized pieces. But, you can also opt to chop them into really tiny pieces, if you’ve got the strength and time to do so.
• 1 tbsp. garlic powder
• 1 to 1 1/2 cup bread crumbs (click here to find out how to make your own bread crumbs, see step #1)
• 1 cup flour
• salt and pepper
• Optional: You can add your own spices or herbs for your chicken breasts. For mine, I added rosemary. But, you can add parsley and/or basil.
• Optional: 1-2 medium-sized eggs
  Half of the batch I made, I didn’t dip in the beaten eggs. But, if you prefer to include eggs, you can go ahead with this.
• 1 cup vegetable oil for semi-deep frying
• Lettuce for the sandwiches

Sandwich dressing: This is the mix that I used for our chicken sandwich.

• 1/4 cup mayonnaise
• 1/4 tbsp. lemon juice
• salt and pepper

Honey Mustard sauce: I don’t have any ingredients available to make barbecue sauce so I decided to make honey mustard instead. But, you can find ready-to-use barbecue sauce at the grocery.

• 1 tbsp. Dijon mustard
• 1 1/2 tsp. honey

When we went to Pagudpud last December and dined at Emohruo Beach Restobar, I really wanted to recreate their Mango Honey Chicken that we all loved. So, for our Noche Buena in 2010, I decided to cook it for us.

I’m so glad I was able to recreate the dish and it really tasted close to Emohruo’s, except theirs was grilled. It’s very simple to do and I know you’d love this! Recipe, after the jump!

Every weekend, my nanay is usually just at home and let me tell you, she gets easily bored. I guess I got that from her. So, what does she love doing? Well, fattening us up! Hahahaha.

She loves cooking and preparing different dishes, mostly for merienda or snacks. It’s one of the things she does to pass the time. Trust me, if you stay at our home for even a week, you’re surely gain weight and would need something like the safest diet pills for women. She’s got this way of convincing you to eat what she prepared no matter how dedicated you are with your diet. Plus, everything she prepares is delicious. None of my friends were ever successful in saying no to her ’cause she’s an awesome cook!

Here are some of my favorite merienda or snacks that my mother loves preparing or buying every weekend:

Palitaw! My favorite merienda! My mother got sick of cooking this for me.

I’ll post her recipe next time.

My brother Kien considers himself a microwave chef. He can bake pastries with just the use of our trusty microwave and can do it in minutes! That’s why I so miss him being around. He’s currently in Singapore, trying his luck there. I miss his out-of-the-blue cooking or baking trips.

Everyone in my family loves to cook, even my dad, who usually cooks with wine, rhum or brandy . We’re not experts, but we do make really tasty dishes. That’s why anyone who lives with us for even just a month needs the best way to lose belly fat.

Anyway, we’ve got mangoes at home right now and I wanted to try making my own Mango Brown Betty. It’s a very simple recipe that my brother shared with me years ago. Trust me, you’re going to enjoy making this. And, probably you can even make this now because the ingredients are readily or usually available in most kitchens.

Pardon the poor quality of photos. These were taken back in 2009, when I didn’t know better. I shared some of the things I learned about food photography on my geek blog.

Mango Brown Betty Recipe

INGREDIENTS:

• 3 cups of mango slices (long cuts)
• 4 cups of bread crumbs (read step #1 to make your own)
• 1/2 cup of butter or margarine
• 1 cup of brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 teaspoon of cinnamon powder

Ever since I wrote about Strawberry Sinigang after hearing about it from fellow bloggers, I’ve wanted to try it myself. So, it was actually part of our itinerary when we went on vacation to 5 destinations, including Baguio, last December. However, due to our very "tight" schedule, we scrapped visiting the restaurant that serves it. Thus, my mother swore to try to make her own version of it at home.

Before I go ahead with the Strawberry Pork Sinigang recipe, let me share with you how active my mother has been lately with this blog. Ever since the last quarter of 2010, my mother has been fully supportive of our food blog. In fact, she’s been really eager to share her recipes and have tried making her own homemade versions of dishes we tried from our trip and dining out. She now prefers to eat at a new restaurant when we go out. Also, she’s into designing or setting up the plates of food she prepares so they’ll look good on a photo. She would even make sure I get photos of food we order before eating. She’s now more patient. Amazing, huh? A stage mom, eh?

So, it’s just fitting that I include her in the official contributors of this food blog. She’s got a ton of recipes to share. She’s an AWESOME cook. And I’m not saying that ’cause she’s my mother, but because she really is. That’s why it’s really hard to lose weight over here. My friends and everyone who have tried her dishes would agree with me 1,000%!

Okay, enough intro. When we went to the Strawberry Farm in La Trinidad, Baguio, we decided to pick strawberries ’cause my mother was determined to cook Strawberry Sinigang at home. So, most of the strawberries she picked were a li’l green.

Now, on to the recipe.