You can eat me, but I don't have to like it...

Nobody ever said the meat had to be happy about being eaten.

Siopao - Sio Good!

A friend of mine and another former missionary from the Philippines invited me to a Filipino cultural night, to take place this Friday evening. We're going to do what is done at every good Filipino party - eat lots of food and sing karaoke. All the easy Filipino dishes, like rice and Tang, were already taken, so I picked four dishes I'd never made before and asked my wife what she'd like best. Siopao won. (The other options were sinigang, tinola, and kaldereta)

Siopao (pronounced show-pow) is a steamed bun filled with shredded meat cooked in a sweet sauce. It is of Chinese origin, but much beloved by the people of the Philippines, where I was introduced to it. In the Philippines, it is often sold out of hamburger carts parked on busy streets in the center of town. There is an urban myth in the Philippines that siopao is made with cat meat. I can tell you that that is categorically false based on my own experience trying to shred a cat - it ran at the first sight of the fork. Instead, siopao cooks usually resign themselves to chicken or pork.

The most complicated part about cooking siopao is getting your hands on a steamer. If you've got one, or can jury rig one, the rest is really quite easy. I used this recipe from Spice Of Life. The meat filling is fairly simple. Once the meat is shredded, just throw in onions, garlic, hoisin sauce, oyster sauce, Yoshida's sauce, rice vinegar, soy sauce, honey, pepper, or whatever else you want in any quantities and combinations that sound good to you.


The dough is a pretty standard yeast recipe - similar to the one we use for pizza. Once it's good and kneaded and risen, you divide your dough and roll a piece into a ball...


...press it flat...

...and spoon some of the good stuff into the middle. Don't skimp - you don't want dry siopao.

Now, we wrap it up.

I used a kind of tri-fold - like so.

Then sealed it up and pinched it closed.

Tada! Siopao! All lined up on wax paper (so they don't stick to stuff).

Now for the steamer. I don't have one. I do have a deep pressure cooker pot and a metal plate with holes in it. I used a stainless steel sieve to hold the holey plate several inches above the water and presto! A steamer! Arrange the siopao like so and let 'em steam for 15 minutes.

They were way better than I remembered them. It's really hard to describe the texture of the bun - fluffy just doesn't do it justice. You gotta try one, but make sure it's fresh out of the steamer. I promise they're good. I even have witnesses.

What A Great Day For, Um, Flying!

I got an RC airplane for Christmas. As of 8 days ago, it had never been flown. I took it out of the box on Christmas morning to drool over and it hadn't been removed since. It's not that I haven't wanted to fly it, it's just difficult to find time to do so. "Even so," you say, "surely you have had a spare moment in the past 8 months to fly your airplane." I will admit that that is true. The problem during those moments was not my willingness or desire, but the weather. You see, by necessity, RC airplanes are very light, in order to get off the ground. This makes them very succeptible to wind. This means that any plans to fly my airplane must be accompanied by an "if the wind isn't too bad."

Last Saturday, I'd made tentative plans to fly my plane. I checked the wind in the afternoon and it was blowing a bit, but it didn't seem too bad. Then we drove to a park that had plenty of open space to fly my plane in. The problem with open spaces is that there is nothing to block the wind. It was blowing pretty steadily when we got there and would gust more and more frequently as time wore on. I should also explain that the plane needs to be assembled on site. put together, it is much too large to fit in my car.

After 20 minutes of chasing down screw baggies and wings being blown away, I was pretty sure that this wasn't what the manufacturers had in mind when they said "Fly your plane on a calm day." But I was at the park, my plane was put together, and dangit, I wanted to fly!

I put my plane on the park's road to use as a runway. I should have stopped when the plane kept being blown off course while trying to take off, but instead I picked it up to hand launch it. Being launched into a good breeze made it very easy to get up in the air. Having gusts come made the plane very difficult to control. At least I'd read the part of the manual that said to let off the throttle when landing to protect the propeller and motor in case of unintended contact with the ground. Because after a glorious 20 seconds of poorly controlled flight, my plane was not going the right way - where in this case, the 'right' way is anywhere but down. I wasn't trying to land, and I surely wasn't intending contact with the ground, but I let off the throttle in a hurry. It was an inauspicious beginning to my career as an rc pilot, and besides a slight crease to the tail fin, my plane came away suprisingly unscathed.

When the instructions say not to fly your plane in the wind, you should probably listen. Experience is supposedly the best teacher. Sometimes, though, experience is just a jerk.