Kardis, or the pigeon pea, is very special food for Ilocos. It is Ilocano food that can be one of the favorites in our dulang or table.
The dried or fresh can be the best in every recipe it may have. Fresh beans are good for dinengdeng with the local vegetables like parda, squash blossoms, utong, among others.
Dried are kept for rainy season during the early times. Especially in upland villages when season of typhoons and floods isolated these places and people can't go to market or in other places, kardis is the solution for every meal.
So you can see in these places the kardis plants growing in every areas. This is how they prepare for lean season.
Back to recipes, there are two kardis cook that Ilocano really love, the dried kardis with meat and the fresh karding in dinengdeng.
In dried kardis with meat, the beans are intensely cook until it soften. It will took hours because dried iis hard to boil. Then you have also to tender the meat. It take hours for them to tender. When the beans are already soft that was already in boiling water, add the meat and other ingredients like ginger and vegetable leaves like kalunay or marungay and the salt and seasoning. This will give a big burp.
Then the fresh kardis beans in dinengdeng. Dinengdeng as you know it is synonymous to Ilocos cuisine. Dinengdeng cannot be dinengdeng without the bagguong or fish sauce. And when kardis beans are in this recipe, its magic. Meal can only have two food for us, rice and this dinengdeng kardis.
Of course this comes also with other ingredients like the vegetables I've stated above.
This is why pigeon pea is very special food for us.
