When my spouse, Grace, and I moved from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley nearly a decade ago, we welcomed so many new day-to-day things into our lives. Fresh air, mountains, more deer than people, all the quiet and space. We mourned little from our city life — except for takeout.
Then Harana Market arrived. The original location, in Woodstock, N.Y., opened in 2021, in a space that previously housed an old general store. Grace and I would drive to the Asian market and Filipino restaurant not only to get the kind of food we had previously loved in the city (soulful food that doesn’t cater exclusively to White people), but to also feel the warm hospitality from the queer couple who run Harana: Eva Tringali and Chris Mauricio.
Then, just a couple of months ago, a remarkable thing happened: Harana Market changed locations and moved 25 miles south, to Accord, where we live. Now we get to enjoy Harana not merely as customers, but also as neighbors.
Get the recipe: Mushroom Pancit
Chris and Eva describe their business as a “safe third place for local queer, trans, AAPI and BIPOC communities” to connect. They offer a pay-it-forward gift wall that invites visitors to give or take prepaid meal vouchers, and every Sunday, LGBTQIA+ people have the option to eat for free. This is all to say: There’s so much heart in Harana. It would be a culturally meaningful and compassionate business worth supporting even if its food wasn’t great. But, no surprise here, it is great.
A few weeks ago, Chris invited me into their kitchen to show me how to make mushroom pancit, what they refer to as “an offering for my vegetarian and vegan friends.” Chris’s grandmother taught Chris how to make the stir-fried noodle dish, which she would often bring to church potlucks and family birthday parties.
It starts with the best two-for-one recipe I know: fried, crispy garlic, which leaves you not just with the irresistible crunchy garlic pieces, but also with fragrant garlic oil. This combo is the backbone of so many of Chris’s dishes. They normally make it in a gigantic kawali (a.k.a. a Filipino wok) that once belonged to their grandmother, enough at one time to make dozens of portions of garlic fried rice, pancit and more.
Once the garlic is crisped and set aside to cool, Chris adds even more fresh minced garlic to the oil along with ginger and onions. When those have softened, in go mushrooms to get browned. Chris adds vegetable broth (Chris, like me, is a fan of Better Than Bouillon to speed things along), soy sauce and a shiitake stir-fry sauce in place of the oyster sauce typically used in pancit. (“This is the secret ingredient,” Chris tells me when I ask whether it’s okay to share the secret. I’m the first person they’ve ever shared this with publicly, they tell me. I feel very honored by this, and I hope you do, too.) Then, the star of the show, the pancit noodles, get placed in the simmering mixture to cook, absorbing all of that flavor as they soften. Finally, more fresh vegetables join the wok party: snap peas, shredded cabbage and carrots.
Chris serves the noodles sprinkled not only with the crispy garlic, but also with thinly sliced scallions, lots of freshly cracked black pepper and big lemon wedges for squeezing on top. While the noodles are wonderfully versatile (you could incorporate different vegetables or start the process with cubed boneless chicken thighs or thinly sliced Chinese sausage), it’s the topping quadfecta — savory fried garlic, herbaceous scallions, spicy black pepper and tart lemon — that is key. Together, the toppings bring a deep-yet-bright harmony to the whole dish.
Thank you to Chris for sharing this lovely recipe with us and to both them and Eva for running such a kind, thoughtful business that helps me feel even more at home in the place I am so happy to call home.
Get the recipe: Mushroom Pancit
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2024/03/28/filipino-mushroom-pancit/