Pasta primavera… with fresh tuna!
There are no hard and fast rules as to what vegetables can be used for making pasta primavera. Personally, I prefer a combination of tomatoes, eggplants, bell peppers and carrots. I also like to add fresh basil because it goes so well with garlic and olive oil. In the past, I often added sardines in jars or canned tuna to what traditionally is a vegetable dish, but never fresh seafood. I never realized the difference it makes. The cubes of fresh tuna retained their shape, added flavor to the dish that did not have that overpowering fishy taste one gets from fish in cans and jars.
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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.
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Talakitok (trevally) steaks with homemade pesto
Instead of cooking the fish separately and tossing them with the pesto afterwards, I cooked the fish steaks in the pesto over low heat. The result? Fish meat that absorbed the saltiness and garlicky flavor of the pesto. And, despite the amount of oil in the sauce, I didn’t have to worry about cholesterol because I used extra virgin olive oil to make the pesto. We were pouring the sauce over the rice and mixing it in. Darn, it was good. 
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Pasta with clams in red wine sauce
The first time I cooked pasta with clams, I used white wine. I didn’t know the proper name for the dish but some readers supplied that information generously. Spaghetti alla Vongole. This pasta with clams dish was cooked with red wine. I don’t know if it still falls within the Alla Vongole definition but I have to say it was good. It was the second pasta dish that I cooked a couple of days ago when I made the pasta with prawns in creamy garlic sauce for my husband and kids.
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Pasta with prawns in creamy garlic sauce
Just because I’m allergic to crustaceans doesn’t mean the rest of my family can’t enjoy them, right? My daughter Sam was making faces and saying, “Pasta again?” when she saw me cooking this pasta dish with prawns in creamy garlic sauce. But the moment she started eating, she forgot that she had been complaining just a few minutes earlier…how simple the recipe for this prawn and pasta dish is. Even a kitchen greenhorn can’t manage to mess this up.
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Salmon salad with mango-lemon dressing
Have I ever mentioned that salmon is my favorite fish in the whole world? It is, actually. Not tuna, not tilapia, not bangus, but salmon — smoked, preferably, but quite alright just fresh. My daughters are very much aware of my preference that they decided to give me Nick Nairn’s Top 100 Salmon Recipes cookbook for Christmas. This salad has been adapted from a recipe in Mr. Nairn’s book.
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Pizza topping on my pasta
If the noodles look picture pretty, I have my daughter Sam to thank for. Or, perhaps, blame would be a better word. We were at Clark Field over the weekend, had a blast with the Sale! Sale! Sale! at the duty-free shops and among the loot we brought home was pasta in shapes that I don’t normally find in local supermarkets.
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Rainy day grilled chicken and pasta Alfredo
It’s not so much how many ingredients you put in your chicken marinade but, more often, it is how much time you allowed the chicken to absorb the flavors.
In the same manner, it’s not so much how fancy or how colorful a pasta dish is but, rather, what you serve it with.
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