Kare Kare by Jen Palmares Meadows

An Annotated Recipe¹

This traditional Pilipino dish is a peanut butter oxtail stew served with eggplant, bok choy and string beans. Recipe yields one family-sized portion.

Ingredients

2 ½ pounds oxtail²
¾ cup Jiff peanut butter
5 Asian eggplant, sliced
1 fistful sitaw³, green beans, cut into 2 inch slices
3 pieces pechay, bok choy
1 packet kare kare seasoning
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
Achuete oil
Salt and pepper
6 cups jasmine rice⁴, cooked
Bagoong⁵ shrimp paste

Directions

1. Season oxtail with salt⁶ and pepper, and add to 6 cups boiling water. Slow cook meat at least 2 hours or until tender. Skim off fat and set meat aside, saving broth in pot.
2. In separate pan, sauté onion and garlic. Combine with 1 cup oxtail broth, kare kare seasoning packet⁷, and peanut butter.
3. In large pot, cook eggplant and sitaw in remaining broth. Add oxtail and peanut butter stew base. Simmer until stew thickens.
4. Stir in achuete until desired coloring is achieved. Add pechay and cover. Serve with jasmine rice and bagoong.

¹ The ‘uncle’ my parents hired to serve food at Lola’s funeral reception was an old family friend who once owed my grandmother money. I understood by the way he hurried to refill chafing dishes that he felt both sorry for our loss and thankful for the work. His heavy voice and distended belly, so at odds with Lola’s lyrical breath and stooped figure, filled me with distaste, and eventual resignation. This uncle’s sweaty forehead, and the purple cloths draping the tables in our backyard, were for years, the two most indelible images I recalled from her interment.

² The kare kare appeared more brown than orange, tasted flavorless and thin like most everything I ate following her passing. The oxtail had settled to the bottom of the pot, congealing with the stew, as if left too long in a pressure cooker. This kare kare was at best a poor imitation, failing to celebrate my grandmother, the matriarch who had brought such flavor to our family. Afterwards, I longed to stir my fingers into peanut butter and shrimp paste, into purple-gray flavor like back home.

³ In the Spring, she sat at our kitchen table, preparing kare kare, whirls of steam rising from the pot of oxtail cooking at the stove. The eggplant cut, and the bok choy washed, she split the ends of sitaw, rivulets of water slipping down her arms, charting the course of her wrinkles. I joined her with a kiss. The long green beans snapped beneath our fingers, the sound not unlike the pop Lola’s knees made when she stood. Later, we would play cards at this same table, the smell of meat and starchy rice drifting between aces and eights, hearts and spades.

⁴ Cook rice, Lola ordered. I worked at the sink, over the quick but necessary ritual, careful to stifle my huffs into sighs—as the youngest daughter it was my responsibility to make rice, never my brothers. My cupped palm worked as a sieve against the lip of the bowl, catching the grains and draining rice water. I rinsed the rice again and again, but not so many times that I washed away the flavor. Cup upon cup of rice, I have measured my life in rice cups.

⁵ We ladled the kare kare over rice, pulling meat from the bone with a spoon and fork. I refused to eat it with the bagoong Lola offered. I could think of nothing less appetizing than purple-gray shrimp paste in a jar, except, of course, for dinuguan, the pig’s blood dish we tried to feed our white friends, under the misnomer ‘chocolate soup.’ You don’t know how to eat, Lola smiled around a spoonful. It was true, I ate more like an American than a Filipino, was more partial to cheeseburgers and pizza than to adobo and pancit.

⁶ After the reception, we grandchildren sat in the living room, the fists on our knees still salty with grief. My mother divided the jewelry amongst us—rings, necklaces, charms—I watched these pieces of my grandmother disappear into siblings’ hands, all the time dreaming of one more card game, one more kiss, one more spoonful, maybe this time, with bagoong.

⁷ All those peculiar somethings, absent from the international aisle of my local grocery store, I found at the Ranch 99 Asian market. There, at last, were the foodstuffs of my childhood pantry: chicharon pork rinds, bottles of Mang Tomas and Jufran, longanisa sausage, cellophane-wrapped fish with crumbling tails, the crispy sesame sticks we dipped in chocolate, and blood red oxtail that begged to be slow cooked until scum floated to the surface of the water. There were the pink and yellow plastic bags of take-out containers with steam misshapen lids, purchased from Lola’s mahjong winnings. The smell was one of many Saturdays. I stood in the seasonings aisle, hoping to find my grandmother in a packet of spices and dust. She, who could make kare kare from scratch, used achuete seeds to color the stew a more delicious red orange—any attempts to recreate her cooking would doubtless fail. I could not reincarnate her kare kare, could not boil orange heart into a pot.

Jen Palmares Meadows is a Pinay American essayist living in the Sacramento, California area. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Brevity, Fourth Genre, Denver Quarterly, The Nervous Breakdown, Quarter After Eight, Essay Daily, and elsewhere.