Boodle Fight - Sydney

Filipino food and culture is amazing, so many influences and so many flavors melding together....you never really know what to expect. That's why when offered the opportunity to participate in a traditional kamayan feast, I couldn't refuse! It wasn't my first time having a kamayan feast (apparently, also referred to as a boodle fight) but nonetheless, I was still heaps excited. There's just something about eating great food with your friends, getting into it and making a mess with your hands....and I get to cook!

I decided this time to make chicken yakitori, but as I had learned, the whole point of the feast was to come and have all the food ready to eat. This posed a problem as to do yakitori well, you need to grill it over charcoal. Luckily, I had a work around! I had the skewers prepared and marinaded ahead of time. Now normally, yakitori isn't marinaded but instead relies on the basting to give it flavor. I didn't have that luxury so instead I left it overnight in the marinade so the flavor would penetrate the meat. and when it came to prepare it, I put all the skewers into a pressure cooker and steamed it for roughly 10 minutes.

So now that the chicken was fully cooked, I took it over for the last step. To finish the chicken yakitori, I brushed on the yakitori sauce onto the skewers and then torched them all using my kitchen blowtorch. As I didn't have a charcoal grill (or a Searzall...for that matter) I used the torch to impart a smokey, grilled flavor to the chicken. It's not the best way but it worked! the chicken was nice and tender and had a faux-charcoal flavor.

Aside from my chicken, there were an abundance of other filipino delights! menudo, prawns, mussels, grilled squid, torta talong (eggplant omelette), grilled fish and so much rice! To say that there was way too much food would be an understatement. But what's a filipino party without excessive amounts of food right?

For dessert, one of our friends made knafeh. This was my first time having this dessert and I have to say that I'm extremely impressed! It was a little saddening that the sugar syrup was left out but the end product was still amazing: creamy and cheesy in all the right ways.

I'm so glad I got the chance to live life and eat good food with our mates. It's the little moments like these that we live for.

Shout out to our resident photographer Orville! Thanks for the amazing photos!