Kare-Kare

Kare-Kare is pork with vegetables cooked in peanut butter sauce. I guess this is Thai influence to filipino food, since Thai food uses peanut sauce or cooks meat in peanut sauce. Kare-Kare is the only filipino dish I know that uses peanut sauce. Kare-Kare is also always accompanied by bagoong aka shrimp paste. The vegetables used is usually sitaw, pechay and talong (eggplant). Some people also adds puso ng saging ( ahm direct translation is heart of banana! hehe). The puso ng saging is usually used to thicken the sauce but its not always available here in California. Anyways I wouldn't know how to cook it if I have it. Without it is just fine also. Kare-Kare is somewhat tedious to make but I have found my own procedure. I boiled the pork, usually spare ribs, until tender. Make sure to season the pork while boiling. Then, I make the sauce by mixing peanut butter with water until smooth. In a seperate pot, I am steaming or boiling vegetables til tender. Then when pork, vegetables and sauce are ready, put them all in the same pot and simmer so the flavors would marry. You dont really put a lot of seasoning on Kare-Kare. The taste all depends on the peanut butter sauce. Be careful on adding salt because you dont want it to be salty at all. When the peanut butter is mixed with the pork and simmered, the peanut sauce would change in taste. Its not going to be the same taste as what you put on your sandwich.