Aside from inasal, another popular and (almost) famous chicken dish from Western Visayas is chicken binakol. It's basically like tinola but what makes it unique is the addition of coconut water and meat. Thus it gives a more refreshing, lighter and sweeter flavour to the dish. Now most restaurants serve binakol and claims being authentic but in fact what they do is throw in some chicken and vegetables and put generous amount of coconut meat and water for their "binakol". Like this one I had last week, the essence of the native dish was literally lost as it "bastardized" the recipe by adding bell peppers among others. I love bell peppers but NOT with my binakol! The broth was literally coconut water for I never tasted even hints of salt and other seasoning. But it was a well presented chicken "binakol" and is very photogenic but NOT the real thing.
It was only today that I remembered buying a pack of ready-to-cook pancit Molo. Locals are fortunate to buy them at groceries here saving them time, money and effort in the tedious preparation of pancit Molo. Anyway every pack of the RTC pancit Molo has the balls and the lang-lang . Its the balls that entice the buyers and the lang lang that "dictates" the price and weight. For this blog entry, I opted for the AR brand (150 grams for PhP 21) since they had the more photogenic combination at that time though I'm more partial to the Cares brand. Separating the contents makes you realize that what you actually bought but for that price, it's already a bargain, can be cooked in many ways and can serve 2-3 people. It is then up to you what you can make out from a pack or more. For this preparation, I used 2 chicken broth cubes and just estimated the amount of water. Upon taste test I added a pinch of salt, a dash of pepper and few drops of soy sauce. I boiled the lang