It’s a dog’s world

“I’m not paying for bones,” Eva says when buying chicken. “But breast is the blandest cut!” I remind her. “That’s why KFC and Sunburst refer to it as ‘keel’ — because no one would deliberately order it otherwise.” No one but the penny-pinching likes of her, that is. If she weren’t such a good cook, I would pity her family.

That’s not chicken in the photo up top, BTW. Still, I don’t see Eva going for pork ribs for the same reason. Even my mother complained that the ratio of meat to bone left much to be desired, which meant she wanted more of the dish — a backhanded compliment, if you will. I took it anyway.

I was in Cebu recently and ordered Harbour City’s garlic pork for the first time. It was okay — which is to say it was nothing special. As a garlic fiend, I wanted more of the spice. The morning after I got home, I went straight to the butcher’s. Alas, fish was scarce that day and Manang Rosa, my suki, ran out of belly early. I bought a kilo of ribs instead.

For the dogs, actually, chopped into inch-long portions (Inday has but few teeth left, poor girl). I made a round of the seafood section before leaving, but none of the fish on display were on my father’s approved list. That was how those ribs made an intermediate trip through our plates before they made it to our dogs’s bowls.

Before we proceed, I might as well raise the query: Is garlic safe for dogs? From what I’ve read online, it is — in moderate amounts. That said, I don’t go out of my way to include it in my pets’ diet. The little garlic (or onion) they manage to ingest is from eating table scraps. We are fans of anything allium, using up to a kilo and a half each of garlic and onion a week, roughly a pound for each of us. It’s inevitable some of those would end up with our dogs — and here I note that Inday has been with us 12 years.

Now we cook. The recipe is from Serious Eats, where the author calls it “crispy Filipino fried spareribs” — and it looks the part, too. Crispy, I mean. As usual, I couldn’t resist fiddling with the recipe, adding kecap manis, lime juice, and Chinese rice wine (plus more garlic), while subbing potato starch for cornstarch. If I were you, stick to the original ingredients, because even though my version turned out tender and tasty, it was not at all crispy. As for our dogs, bones were bones. If you ask Eva, they got the better deal.