5-minute tomatoes and pesto salad

March 25, 2006
Filed under Asia & beyond, Healthy veggies

I may not have been able to post so many food and cooking entries during the past week but I have two reasons–okay, two excuses. The first is that I moved my Sassy Lawyer’s Journal to a new domain. Houseonahill.net is now an aggregator with excerpts of the latest entries in all my blogs. Actually, that was how it started except that, three years ago, the main blog led to subdomains within Houseonahill.net. Today, the aggregated feeds lead to different domains. I suppose I should consider that as some sort of technological progress on my part. Hehehe

The second reason is the heat. It’s summer in the Philippines and the kitchen is the least attractive part of the house when you perspire even when you’re just sitting and doing nothing. And we live on a elevated area at that. It’s worse in the city.

tomatoes and pesto salad

So, we’ve been eating easy-to-cook everything. You know, dishes that need minimal preparation and watching over. I didn’t think I cooked anything interesting the past week, well… unless you consider frying longganisa as interesting. However, I did manage to do something interesting enough to take a photo of and write an entry about. That’s the tomatoes and pesto salad that I served with longganisa.

I know it’s a rather common combination in Italian cooking. But with Filipinos, you say tomato salad and it means chopped tomatoes and itlog na maalat (salted eggs), sometimes with green mangoes. Or, chopped tomatoes, onions, green mangoes and the pungent bagoong which, if the Philippines had an official national salad, would be it.

I would have served the usual tomatoes and salted eggs salad (with basil leaves) but we had no salted eggs. I did have some pesto, however. Ever since I made my first batch of Pinoy Pesto, I have never been without it.

So what did I do with the tomatoes? I sliced them, placed them in a bowl and tossed them with a tablespoonful of Pinoy Pesto. Was it good with longganisa? It was great with sweet longganisa. I was thinking it might be a little too strong with Vigan or Lucban longganisa. But, on the other hand, why would it be? The tomatoes-green mango-oinion-bagoong combination has even stronger flavors and aroma and Filipinos love it with the equally strong flavored and smelling daing (salted fish) and tinapa (smoked fish).

The combination of longganisa with the tomatoes and pesto salad was enough to jolt me out of my lethargy. I started cooking seriously again. I have recipes for three dishes that I will post, uhmmm… probably on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Still need to resize the photos and write down the recipes.