Kare-kare

There must be tons of recipes out there for this dish, but I will still post it here, as usual, for my children's sake (looking far into the future).

One of our favorite Filipino dishes is this uniquely Filipino (?) beef stewed in peanut butter sauce.

Salamat ke Mama Sita, it is very easy to cook this dish! Just get some packets from your nearest Filipino store (mine happened to be one hour away from my house).

Boil the beef prior to when you want to prepare the kare-kare, preferably using a slow cooker, so that you can let the fat cool down and solidify, which makes it easy to remove, and therefore, making your kare-kare less laden with calories.

Ingredients:
Mama Sita's Kare-kare mix 1 packet
3-4 pounds of beef (pre-slowcooked in 8 hours with water to cover, plus 2 bay leaves, 10 peppercorns, and 3 garlic cloves)
1 cup (or more, depending on desired consistency) beef broth (from above)
3/4 cup peanut butter
veggies

sauteed shrimp paste (to be served with the kare-kare) -- This is optional. Salt may be substituted.

Suggested veggies:
Banana blossom (cut into chunks) - This may be hard to find. Can anyone recommend a good substitute? This is "Puso ng saging" in Tagalog.
sitaw (the really long string beans), cut into 3-inch pieces
eggplant, cut into wedges
pechay, aka bokchoy, or Swiss chard (I prefer Swiss chard now).

Since it is hard to find banana blossoms here (once I did, but it was awful-looking), I just content myself withat least eggplant and pechay (or bokchoy, although during our get-together, we could not find bokchoy, and I considered using Swiss chard due to strikingly similar appearance and smell. I was not disappointed. On the contrary, I liked it so well that I no longer buy bokchoy for pechay dishes). Sitaw is hard to come by here.

After the initial slowcooking, everything is very simple. Just remove the solidified fat, boil 1 cup of broth, add the meat and cook the veggies minus the pechay. Meanwhile, combine the peanut butter and the mix with 1 cup of broth, then add to the simmering mixture, slowly stirring. Add more broth if you need to thin out the soup more. Do not add salt. During the last two minutes of cooking the harder veggies, add the pechay and bring back to boiling, then immediately turn off the heat. Serve with plain rice and shrimp paste.

(Note: I have been trying to post this and other recipes using Qumana blog editor tool, which lets bloggers advertise and earn through that, but it always hangs, that I end up having wasted my time because once it hangs, I cannot recover whatever I have typed. I do not recommend it. I am switching over to another advertising scheme, apart from Google's Adsense. Maybe that will be more effective. Will let you know as soon as my blog is approved.)