Since I have no work to submit today, I have so much of my time to bake, cook, and go to the mall last weekend. For last Saturday’s dinner, I baked Mango Cake and cooked Java Rice and Baked Pork Spare Ribs with Lemon.

I’ve been thinking of what to bake that would be different for the regular cakes I bake. I usually bake chocolate cakes, mocha cakes, and brownies. Since I wanted to try a white-based cake, I tried this new recipe, which I got from the internet. I chose this recipe because mango is one of my favorite fruits and all the ingredients are easy to find and readily available in my kitchen. So here’s the outcome…

For the Baked Pork Spare Ribs with Lemon, I marinated the pork with the juice from 1 lemon, soy sauce, some sugar, tomato sauce, salt, and a few dashes of dried thyme and dried basil leaves. I marinated it for about 6 hours inside the refrigerator and baked it for 2 hours afterwards. I like baking because it makes my life easier. You can do other things while waiting for the dish to be cooked. You just have to leave everything inside the oven and voilà your dish is ready.

While baking, I cooked the Java Rice. We love Java Rice as well as green rice and Paotsin’s rice! That’s why I kept trying cooking various rice dishes. Here in the Philippines, I usually see it in restaurants who serve sizzling dishes. But, not all of them tasted good. So I decided to try my own Java Rice and found it so easy.

So here’s how. Set aside 6 cups of cooked rice. Heat ¼ cup of cooking oil then sauté 1 medium-sized onion and 3 cloves chopped garlic, and then add 2 chopped red chili. Add 1/3 cup of soy sauce with 2 tsp of sugar, 4 tbsp tomato catsup and finally, the cooked rice. Stir it very well until the rice is all well-coated.

Oh before I forget, I also made a sauce for the Spare Ribs by pouring out the sauce and drippings from the spare ribs’ marinade. I simmered it for a few minutes and added some cornstarch dissolved in cold water to thicken it. Here’s the outcome….

Our friend Chito dropped by our house and joined us for dinner. He’s so lucky to taste the dishes I prepared for the night. Hehe. They enjoy the dinner. My husband just loved the Java rice. Pinakamasarap na Java rice daw. Hehehe. It goes well with the Baked spare ribs. They also loved the Mango Cake for dessert. The cake was soft and the icing was sweet enough. My husband praised me for the cake design, it’s almost perfect. According to him, my icing skills are almost perfect and encouraged me to enroll to a cake decorating class to enhance my “icing skills”. I will surely enroll one of these days.