This dish was INCREDIBLY easy and relatively economical to make. If you have homemade (or even bottled) sambal, this should be a breeze. Prepare all your ingredients before you start to cook. Cut some pork (I used one pork chop) into small cubes or if you prefer, peel and prepare say 200 grams of shrimp instead. Slice a medium sized onion. Mince two cloves of garlic. Chop up 2-3 small tomatoes. Ready some peanut oil, sambal, a teaspoon or two of sugar, some patis or fish sauce and some salt and pepper.
You MUST use high, high heat for the best results. I put a large wok over high flames and when it was smoking, added some peanut oil. Saute the pork for a minute or so and season it with a touch of fish sauce to help it caramelize. Add the garlic and toss for a few seconds, then add the onions. Make sure these cook through, release some liquids and smells fragrant. Next add a heaping teaspoonful of sambal (adjust to more or less as you prefer) and the tomatoes. Let this cook down so it isn’t too soupy. Add the sugar and a bit more fish sauce. Do not worry if this seems to dry out a bit…
Add three small bunches of kangkong, already washed and snipped to bite sized pieces. Add some salt and toss quickly until the leaves are just cooked, do not overcook this dish. The stems should still have a bit of crunch when you eat them. Coat the kangkong with the pork, chili and tomato mixture and adjust seasonings as necessary.
Cooking time is just over five minutes total. And it tasted WONDERFUL! Spicy but tempered by a touch of sweetness. The saltiness of the patis also added to the overall appeal. A little crunch and some wilted leaves. A touch of protein, but mostly vegetables. We made two batches for lunch today… one an incendiary version with nearly 3 teaspoons of chili… the second one a more balanced dish. Total cost of one dish? Roughly PHP30 for kangkong, PHP20 for the pork, PHP20 for all other ingredients so it was roughly PHP70 and that could easily have fed 3-4 people; lots of rice on the side, please. :)
23 Responses
Marketman goes Singaporean!
A delicious trip around the world thru your taste buds! what a ride!
i cant wait for MM to go Japanese
may i know what is sambal–any one please, or MM himself. thanks.
by the way, i tried cooking MM’s dish, “baked salmon…..ala marketman”. i went to the supermarket to buy the ingredients, but salmon was not available so i tried large sheri fish (bitilya fish as we call it in pinas), had it filleted and keep the head for sinigang later….there was also no dill available so i got fresh parsley instead. back at home, i prepared everything as per MM’s recipe. but i tweaked the dish a little bit by sprinkling garlic powder to the prawns; fried the potatoes instead of baking it. well, it turned out great. my kids enjoyed it and even posted the finished product in FB hahaha….will try MM’s original recipe next time when i find salmon and dill at the same time…thanks MM, love your recipes and this site.
Will definitely be cooking this dish soon. I love kangkong and is always in search of new recipes.
Enjoyed all your recent fresh vegetable posts!
This is great and easy to make. Now to hunt down a bottle of sambal on my next grocery shopping trip.
This looks delicious! Must try this one of these days. :)
Looks very good!
Thanks for sharing! :)
I hope you feature sumptuous noodle dishes like char kway teow or hookien mee…I’ve been to Singapore already and loved their dishes!
MM – thanks for the recipe. and those pictures are amazing! such clarity!!! i feel that i could eat them off the page.
will try this soon, thanks MM! i’m thinking of pouring coco-cream before serving.
this is definitely a simple but superb dish . . . yummm kangkong and sambal :D
I’m not a big fan of pork. I could try this dish with something else.
Joel, it’s good with shrimps, or no added protein at all…
…with tofu puffs or fried tokwa…
Hi MM, you just made our Friday group very happy… we were gifted with bunches of kangkong by our suki and thought of making adobong kangkong. Seeing your pictures changed our minds – can’t go wrong with pork + shrimps + sambal! Perfect timing as we just bought pork liempo and we have sambal, too.
Bettyq, thanks for the bread sticks tip. I have a few ml of lobster oil left and bought some bread sticks yesterday (immediately got them after reading your comments hahaha) so I will experiment and will let the Friday ladies try them! I now regret sharing the lobster oil I made!
Very colorful dish indeed. It’s too bad that we don’t have kangkong readily availabale here in Canada. On rare occasions, I find the “chinese” variety, but it’s not the same as our local ones. I will definitely try this dish one of these days, even with the limitations I have here :( Thanks for all the good food ideas!
Tastes good I can tell. My wife and I used to like kangkong cooked this way. We still do, but we no longer eat undercooked kangkong.
“Used to”, ’cause we read somewhere that some parasites (flukes or worms) lay their eggs inside the kangkong’s tubular stem. Which can cause some serious health problems.
Please research this. Just my 2-cents. Might help some people.
Nice blog by the way. Thanks for the nice posts and recipes! :)
Tony
Tony, you may want to read my paragraph two in this old post re: kangkong. You remind me of my dad in the 1970’s… :) While I agree all vegetables could be filthy and carriers of cooties, I think one has to balance the dire warnings with some intelligent, logical scepticism… If your kangkong is grown in a dirty swamp, I would be worried, just as I would be worried about leafy greens fertilized with nightsoil, or on farms where chickens or livestock run wild or whose manure is used to fertilize. But as you can see in that previous post, a LOT of kangkong (particularly upland varieties) are grown on farms, like all our other produce, so I would have to guess is just as safe or dirty as the other stuff we are eating. I would be MORE worried about food handling related issues. Since more than 50% of the Philippine population probably still have intestinal parasites, then your chances of getting fecal matter and cooties with it from food handled in a restaurant, farmstand, fastfood place OR EVEN JUST SHAKING HANDS with someone who has come out of a bathroom without washing their hands (roughly 40-60% of all folks in public bathrooms I suspect) is probably a statistically GREATER risk than eating say kangkong… or at least that is what I would like to believe. In our own home and when hiring staff for restaurants, we required that folks have to undergo a parasite test and a tuberculosis test to try and minimize health issues. So if you are avoiding kangkong but eating out with others serving you or if haven’t your own household staff checked, you may want to reconsider the potential sources of risk… Finally, all vegetables need to be carefully washed before use. I eat a LOT of raw vegetables, and while I don’t discount the fact that I may get seriously ill from a bad batch, I accept the risks rather than avoiding all uncooked vegetables…
Thank you.
I decided to try the dish myself, after seeing some bottled sambal at a Chinese grocery at Suki market In QC … made some mistakes – too much pork (should have followed your advice of one pork chop rather than one whole slice of liempo :-); too little kangkong (2 bunches, not three); rough chopped the onions and tomatoes and decided to go for 2 tsps of sambal rather than one as a test run which meant I had to keep adding patis and sugar to try to ‘balance’ it out …
And finally, somewhat overcooked the kangkong – came out darkish, not as green as your photos have it.
But it still tasted (in your words) … SUPERB!
Gave some to my aunt who’s living next door to me … she was feeling under the weather with a cold – and she comes back after dinner, thanking me for getting her sinuses cleared! (He He)
Thank you once again … and will be exploring more dishes from your wonderful site.
First time visitor to your blog and I am liking it very much, thanks! By the way, love this kangkong recipe and so as the others… thanks for sharing!
Thanks for sharing this recipe. I have a 22 yr old son born in Texas who for some reason had taken a great liking to Kangkong and cannot get enough of this in sinigang and adobo. He will request for sinigang with 3 bundles of kangkong and just a few pieces of meat and soupbones for flavoring. The whole time he was in college I had to pack cooked Kamgkong for his dorm meals. At $2.99/lb of this vegetable, I told him he should move to the Phil. where he can get all the kangkong he could handle at a greatly reduced cost. I am thinking of serving this dish for his graduation party this Saturday.
Cooked this for supper tonite. Went easy on the sambal because I don’t know if Hubby can handle the heat. The verdict-Yummy!!!.This is now my new favorite Kangkong dish. Definitely a keeper. Thanks a lot for sharing.