The Sassy Lawyer & Pinoy Cook on food, family and home.
… there weren’t too many choices for dinner. It was either a no-meat, no-veggies tofu dish or pasta. Mac and cheese seemed to be the simplest.
If you search the web for “mac and cheese” you will find recipes for so many versions you’ll end up not knowing which one to make. There are versions with milk, cream, ham or bacon. There are versions with spinach and peas. The simplest was a mixture of butter, cooked pasta and shredded cheese. I’m throwing in my version with the rest.
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.
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.
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.
A Jamie Oliver inspired dish. He made meatballs from Italian sausages; I used longganisa — the garlicky kind.
The first time I cooked this spaghetti with sausage meatballs dish, I used longganisa hamonado — the sweet kind. It didn’t work. The sauce was a mongrel of flavors that seemed hell bent on fighting with each other. Salty, garlicky longganisa works best.
Ham bones, especially those from Chinese ham, are wonderful for making soup. You just drop the bones in water, add onions and garlic and let everything simmer for an hour. The flavors from the bone will transfer to the water and you get a broth that is simply bursting with flavor.
But who has ham bones at this time of the year? Well, see, Majestic Ham sells bones by the kilo…
…the ironing woman hasn’t shown up for the second straight day and I’m bracing myself for an afternoon before the ironing board with “The Mummy” on HBO for company. Not exactly a thrilling thought so why not pamper myself with a good pasta and fish lunch before the torture begins, right? Penne with pesto and oven-grilled fillet of sole with a glass of cucumber juice on the side might psyche me up. Maybe.
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.
I admire the Chinese for inventing their unique way of recycling leftovers by turning them into fried rice. Just as I admire the Italians for inventing the pasta which, to me, is second to the Chinese style fried rice in the art of extending small amounts of ingredients to come up with such savory and ... (more)
From reader Elaine of New Jersey: Most Filipino cookbooks specify buntot … »»
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No, I've never been to P.F. Chang's although I read that the U.S. food … »»
The most serious reason I missed my pressure cooker was because I love, … »»
The last time I heard the word batotoy, I was buying longganisa (native … »»
After a quick trip to the market, Speedy checked his Facebook account, … »»
Still experimenting with alternative methods of cooking, after using the … »»
Casa is Spanish for house. CASA is also an acronym for Connie, Antonio, Sam and Alex. We are all surnamed Veneracion. We all love to take photos -- of anything that catches our fancy. It's a family obsession.
This is a journal of how we live, eat, learn, play and have fun. Work? Work is part of playing and having fun. Seriously.
In 2003, a time when I hadn't heard of the term "blog", I started a recipe website at cooking.houseonahill.net using a now defunct content management system that ran on ASP. Ok, never mind the geek talk, I'm sure you're not interested in that. The contents easily multiplied and, in 2004, I moved the food site to pinoycook.net. Always unhappy with the fact that the dot com versions of houseonahill and pinoycook weren't … (click here to read all »)
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Sam likes buying those frozen seafood balls in the grocery -- fish balls, … (more...)
It has a graham cracker crust and it is baked but at a lower temperature … (more...)
If you Google "melon cocktail", you'll find that there are two categories. … (more...)
According to Tastefully Done, age means deep fried and dashi, of course, is … (more...)
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