Every Holy Week especially on Good Friday, it has been kind of a cultural thing for Filipinos especially in the Cebu to prepare binignit for the whole family to eat. "BINIGNIT" is a kind of soup or maybe rice gruel dish. On Good Fridays, we have it as our meal... however, in usual or normal days, some people have it as a heavy snack or some sort.
There are various styles of making this dish. The most popular or common one is cooked with some palm flour called "LANDANG" in our language, but my family and I doesn't really like its taste, so we use glutinous rice instead. In other families, they use both ingredients as base. :)
Here's what we used for our family's style binignit.
From the top-left, we have banana saba, sweet potato and yam, sago (similar to tapioca pearls but from a palm), coconut, glutinous rice and cheese (which is not common, but my family likes it!). In addition, we also use some brown sugar. :)
Preparation requires a lot of peeling and slicing, so let's try to be patient. :)
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I usually start with the hardest ones first, so I peeled the yam and sweet potatoes and sliced them into cubes. I personally don't like cooking, but you can really on me when it comes to slicing or in preparing the stuff you need for the actual cooking. ;)
Next up would be the banana. Just slice it in cubes or into similar size as the sweet potatoes and yam earlier.
We also have to prepare the coconut because we'd only use the milk part for the soup.
And for our unique ingredient which is the cheese, I grated some of it so we could mix with the soup later on and also sliced some into cubes, so we could eat it together with the other ingredients. Cheese is optional, but I recommend it because it blends in with the flavors pretty well. <3
After I made the preparation, it's my mama's time to take over. As I've said, I don't like cooking... mostly because I'm scared to get burned. lol I know it's lame! hahah
Also, I'd like to say that my family don't usually use exact measurements when cooking something, we just adjust to our taste most of the time, so it's quite difficult to tell you the exact measurement of things. :)
First, heat the glutinous rice and water. We used four cups of rice and four cups of water. We just wait for it for the rice to grow a bit.
Once the rice looks like this, we're now ready to mix in all the other ingredients.
We put the coconut milk first. We don't know the exact measurement, but it's around 6 cups of coconut milk.
The, we placed the hardest ingredient which is the yam...
Followed by the sweet potatoes. Mix them for a bit until the ingredients are a bit softer.
We then added brown sugar. Just adjust it to your taste. If you want it sweer, you can add more, if not, just add enough. :P
Next on the list would be sago. There's no specific measurement for this, but we used 6 servings of sago. It's sold by plastic, so we used all 6 of them.
Once the other ingredients are soft to eat, you can now add the banana. The yam took quite a while to soften, but we like it a bit crunchy... so it's still according to your preference. :)
We mixed in the grated cheese to blend in the flavor. :)
Lastly, we topped it with cubed cheese and then, we're good to go! <3
It's very funny because when we finished cooking, everyone attacked that I didn't get to take a proper picture of the dish. I'm so sorry! Well, I was able to take a picture of the leftover the next day. hahaha
Sorry about this. lol
If you search some pictures online, common binignit looks like this.
