Oriental noodles with peanut sauce
If you’re a fan of Vietnamese food, then you should be familiar with the peanut sauce that goes with the spring rolls. It’s a mixture of tamarind paste, peanut butter and hoisin sauce, thinned down a bit with hot water. I love that peanut sauce. I can dip steamed dimsum and lumpiang togue (fried bean sprout spring rolls) in it and not think about how weird it is. I love the Vietnamese peanut sauce so much that I decided to find out if it would work as the sauce base for show mein. The result became yesterday’s lunch.
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Fresh herbs in my lamb curry
We had lamb curry for lunch yesterday and I used only the freshest herbs to go with it. By fresh I mean herbs I picked from my garden. I can’t claim that this is Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian or Indian lamb curry but it is most definitely my lamb curry.
I am posting this entry as a photo gallery to expedite the explanations about the herbs I used. A picture is worth a thousand words as they say and I took the time to photograph the ingredients for my lamb curry.
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When tofu met pesto
It was a whim. A last-minute whim and a decision that took all of a split-second to make. What I really intended was to saute the spinach leaves with a little Kacep Manis then use them as a bed for the fried tofu and fish fillets. I was already taking out the bottle of Kecap Manis from the fridge when my eyes went past the small jar of pesto that I made a couple of days ago. I said, “Why not?” And because pesto is much milder than Kacap Manis, I decided that a little more kick was in order — two pieces of chili picante. That was how I discovered that pesto is not an enemy of tofu.
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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?
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Sweet and sour fish: don’t forget the ginger
Deep in the archive of Pinoy Cook is a recipe for sweet and sour fish. I used whole tilapia and took photos with my first digital camera — a point-and-shoot 1.3 megapixel Olympus. That entry was posted in April 2003, one of the first entries in my food blog. I look at that entry now and realized that cooks do get better with practice. The same thing is true with photography buffs. While the recipe itself has stayed pretty much the same, I have picked up a few techniques here and there that makes this version of sweet and sour fish just a little bit better.
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Kani salad
For dinner last night, I fried a 1.32-kilogram pompano, made a pot of miso soup while my husband prepared a bowl of Japanese kani salad.
What is kani salad? It is a mixture of cucumber, carrot, crab sticks and sweet ripe mango. Most recipes say just toss them with Japanese mayo but there was something missing. You really want to add a drizzle of sesame seed oil to give kani salad that unique Oriental flavor.
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Soba with fish balls and quekiam
For all you noodle lovers out there, here’s something we enjoyed recently per the request of my daughter Sam who said she missed terribly stir fried oriental noodles with store-bought fishballs and quekiam. This is commercial quekiam, mind you, the kind you buy frozen from the supermarket, not the kind wrapped in tawpe (bean curd skin) that is served as an appetizer in Chinese restaurants. Commercial quekiam is so called only because it is shaped and colored like the real quekiam. In truth, it’s mostly flour. So are the fish balls, actually.
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Molo soup for a hot summer night
… just as we decided to stick to a fish, chicken and vegetables diet, there was a sale at the fresh meat section of the supermarket two days ago — ground pork mix for making lumpiang shanghai. Buy one kilo, get another kilo for free. I couldn’t resist. So much savings. Besides, it’s not like we’re reverting to the meaty diet we have been used to in the past. And although the package said shanghai mix, I didn’t use the ground pork mix for lumpiang shanghai. On Tuesday, dinner was fried hito (catfish) and molo soup or pancit molo…
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