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Last Updated on December 16, 2023
If you’ve never had Filipino food before like vegetable lumpia, you’re missing a treat. It’s like a decadent mixture of east Asian flavors with profound Spanish and US influence. There are traditional elements – things passed down through the generations. But there’s also a modern food culture that we all might recognize today. The flavors are exotic. But at the same time, they’re easy to assimilate for a western palate.
One of the best (and healthiest) Filipino dishes is monggo with taro leaves. This dish is a bit like an Indian spiced dal but absolutely packed with flavor. Plus, it’s super simple to make. If you know how to make soup, monggo shouldn’t be a problem for you at all.
This dish is actually very popular in families where one of the parents is Filipino. Once a person from the Philippines meets various spouse visa financial requirements and stays long-term, it’s one of the first recipes to make an appearance at dinner parties. That’s because everyone loves it and nobody can get offended by it. It’s just simple and elegant.
In terms of paleo living, monggo isn’t perfect, but it’s still darn good. The main source of carbohydrates is mung beans. But because they have such a low glycemic index, they actually spike blood sugar less than most regular fruits and vegetables. And they push insulin levels even lower, thanks to special chemicals found in their skins.
For those of you who don’t know, mung beans are small green beans with a white flail, about the same size as adzuki beans. Monggo helps bring out their flavor and is totally delicious. And they’re super affordable.
So how do you make this recipe?
Easy.
Ingredients
- 1 cup mung beans
- 6 cloves of garlic, crushed
- 1 onion
- 1.5 liters of stock (to taste)
- 1 tbsp liquid aminos
- 2 handfuls taro leaves (use spinach if you can’t find taro)
Method
- Being by soaking the mung beans. You can do this overnight or leave them in a bowl of hot water for a couple of hours before you start cooking. This will provide enough time for the lectins in the beans to break down.
- Bring a pan of water to the boil and add the stock cube to 1.5 liters.
- Next, add the pre-soaked mung beans to the mix.
- While they cook, chop the onion and crush the garlic, frying in a pan with plenty of oil on medium to low heat. Make sure that you do not burn the garlic as this can cause it to taste a little bitter
- If you want to make the recipe more authentic, you can add diced or sliced fresh pork to the pot and let it cook alongside the mung beans.
- Once the onion and garlic finish cooking, add them to the mung bean mix and then allow to simmer for around forty minutes.
- Just before you take the pan off the heat, add the taro leaves and stir into the broth.
Now all that’s left to do is enjoy this delicious, high-protein dish. Bon appetit!
