Recently

• Sweet and sour fish: don’t forget the ginger
• Kani salad
• Chicken and mushrooms burger
• Don’t be a kitchen slave
• Lunch on the beach
• Chicken tinola and liver sauce
• Soba with fish balls and quekiam
• Chicken soup a la picadillo
• A typical lunch in Roxas City
• Molo soup for a hot summer night

In the archive

• Baby back ribs and mushrooms a la teriyaki
• Smoked ham and cheese toasties
• Assorted beans and peppercorn melange
• Pork, okra, squash and eggplants in sour cream
• Fiesta noodles
• Bangus sisig and daing na galunggong
• Chocolate crinkles
• Balut, penoy
• Duck Duck China Gourmet
• A few kitchen tips

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Manna Bakery

We were an hour early for an eight o’clock appointment yesterday and we drove around the Loyola area looking for a good place to have breakfast. Not Starbucks, definitely. Not McDonald’s either. We considered Seattle’s Best but the parking area was bathed in sunlight and getting into the car afterwards would have been like getting into a hot oven. We left Katipunan Road and entered Esteban Abada Street. That was where we found Manna Bakery. We hadn’t been there before, we hadn’t even heard of it, but the place was cozy, clean and inviting.

Beef, ginger and pineapple stew

This is the day when I vow never to pay attention when I see the “Buy 1, Take 1″ signs all over Shopwise. Not that the cooked dish turned out badly. On the contrary, what a salvage operation it was. The problem was the beef. The meat must have come from a hundred-year-old cow. I’ve been buying meat for over two decades and I didn’t notice? The beef was pre-sliced nicely across the grain and packed in styrofoam trays. You can’t see the grain anymore when the meat has been cut that way. Sneaky way to get rid of inferior meat, eh?

Kalabasa (squash) soup

In the Noche Buena blog, there is a recipe for kalabasa (squash) and potato soup which I made using the broth from the bones of a duckling. I added cubes of squash and potatoes, and chopped onions to the strained broth, simmered everything until soft then pureed the mixture in the blender.

I did another version of this wonderful soup a few nights ago but, instead of pureeing the chopped onions along with the rest of the ingredients, I sauteed them in a little butter. Amazing how one little step can change the soup in such a substantial way.

Baked mussels (tahong), the simple way

Soaking the mussels to expel sand takes several hours. Preparing them for cooking takes several minutes. But the actual cooking takes no more than a minute.

There are only four ingredients and the recipe itself is no more than six steps — four, in fact, if we don’t include the preparation. No kidding.

Inside a dried fish market

During the days when refrigeration was unknown, Filipinos guarded against food spoilage by salting and drying their fish and meat. Hence, the “invention” of the tapa (dried beef) and daing (dried fish).

Cebu City is famous for its Tabo-an Market where mounds and mounds of dried fish are sold. Truth is, dried fish is available in all public markets and even in supermarkets. Still, there is nothing like visiting a dried fish market where the variety of dried fish is so many that one can’t decide where to start — and stop — buying.