Pancit Canton {Vegetarian}

Just as Thai cuisine has pad thai… and Chinese cuisine has lo mein… Filipino cuisine has pancit. Pancit is a popular stir fried noodle dish that has many variations based on the type of noodle used and the base sauce involved. For the recent Filipino Fiesta party I hosted last weekend, I had to include a pancit dish on our menu. No Filipino party is complete without it! This Pancit Canton takes a melange of colorful vegetables that’s stir fried with egg and flour noodles with soy sauce to make a quintessential Filipino dish…

A highlight to the Filipino Fiesta party was having my parents there. Being retired caterers that focused on Filipino and Chinese cuisine, this was an event they had years of experience doing on a much larger scale. Here, my mom shows folks some of her secrets to Filipino cooking… such as how to evenly distribute soy sauce in this dish. The trick? Use the back of a large wooden spoon. Pour the soy sauce over the spoon above the noodles in a clockwise motion over the wok. Why does it matter? Doing so helps to distribute the soy sauce more evenly so that the noodles get a nice touch of soy all around. It also helps to keep the color of the noodles even throughout and prevents some parts of the dish to absorb more soy and color than others. {Notice how no measuring cup are anywhere near Mom. If you ask her, just as my students did, she can’t even communicate how much soy sauce to use. “You just know…” she says. Lol…}