Vegetarian Mushroom Batchoy and Puto Pao

During the rainy days a few days back, I had the strongest urge to make Vegetarian Batchoy again. The batchoy was actually my entry in the semi-finals of the Electrolux Wok-A-Holic Kitchen Star. I was the only vegetarian in the cooking contest so I'm super proud that I got in the top 6 finalists. :)

Anyway, this time I wanted to add some puto pao. But the funny thing was, I did not have the complete ingredients and so I had to make do with what I had which was mushrooms. The mushrooms were cooked asado style and then I topped it on my noodles and veggie-based broth. And although mushroom asado was the main ingredient here and I was not able to really stick to my original recipe, it turned out pretty good.

Vegetarian Mushroom Asado Batchoy

I have this very bad habit of getting the wrong ingredients for a dish and my puto pao proves to be another one of my classic examples. LOL. Instead of using rice flour, I used glutinous rice flour. So you can just imagine my horrified reaction when I did not see my putos rising and instead had this kutsinta consistency. took me about 10 seconds to realize this mistake.

Oh well, sometimes you get it right and sometimes you just fail. :)

my failed attempt in making puto pao

By the way, this was my first time to make puto and instead I ended up making my first kutsinta. My Papa says I could have made this a sapin-sapin if only I added color to it. LOL

The brown stuff in the middle of each "puto/kutsinta" is my mushroom asado. Allen liked it and had about 3 servings. He said it was as if he was eating bilo-bilo. hahaha! I'm glad he's not a picky eater or else he would not touch this at all. And as for me, I was not brave enough to even try to taste it. :P

I'll post the original recipe and photos of my real Vegetarian Batchoy in the coming days so don't forget to check back soon!