The Sassy Lawyer & Pinoy Cook on food, family and home.
The day I cooked the chicken and baby portobello mushrooms in tomato and basil sauce, I also cooked this fish and mushrooms dish. Why? Wasn’t the chicken dish enough to feed everyone? Well, half of the chicken dish went into freezer containers — part of the girls’ weekly stockpile of cooked food in the condo ... (more)
Some people cringe at mayo; I don’t. I love mayo. And there’s so much more that you can do with it other than spreading it on bread to make a sandwich. The salsa that went with my fried tilapia, for instance. It was made with mayo, grated cucumber, lemon juice, cilantro and chili flakes. It ... (more)
Make a paste by grinding together fresh ginger, garlic, chili, and cilantro roots and stems. Cook the tilapia fillets gently in the mixture, pour in coconut cream, season and you have a fabulous meal in less than 15 minutes. You want to cut down the cooking time to less than 10 minutes? Make the paste ... (more)
If you like lemon chicken, chances are you will like this too. Thin, thin slices of tilapia fillets are seasoned, dredged in tapioca starch, deep fried until crisp and served with spicy lemon sauce. For an interesting twist, just before serving the dish is sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds. Including preparation time, this dish cooks ... (more)
The dish that launched this blog. Literally. More than seven years ago, I was contributing articles to a business news website and starting my own blog. I posted a photo and recipe of a simple steamed tilapia dish, the business website editor saw it and said I had a gold mine in there. Well, “gold ... (more)
For vegetarians and vegans, this sauteed spinach and mushrooms dish can be a main entree. For those who like their meat or seafood, it is a wonderful side dish. But what’s in it? Just spinach and mushrooms, basically. But to really give the dish a unique flavor, I added two things: lemon juice and toasted ... (more)
A new twist to an old favorite. We like sweet and sour whole fish and we like lemon chicken too. Combine the two, add chilis and voila! Why tilapia? It’s inexpensive, it’s tasty and it’s one of my family’s favorite fish. Fry it, steam it, grill it — tilapia is simply delicious. Ingredients 1 large ... (more)
If you think you’ve eaten too much meat during the Christmas weekend and you want something lighter and healthier for the New Year weekend, fish is a good alternative. This tilapia and asparagus with spicy Japanese mayo dish was inspired by the asparagus with spicy mayo that we enjoyed at Miyabi Japanese Restaurant a couple ... (more)
In England where it originated, the takeaway (takeout) fish and chips dish is considered a working class meal. Cheap, fast and widely available. Some versions simply require the fish strips to be dredged in flour while others say it should be dipped in batter before frying. I sort of combine the two techniques. I do not pat the fish dry, then I add flour and mix them together so that the effect is not lightly dusted fish but fillets covered in a pasty coating. It’s almost like dipping the fish in batter except that you do away with the risk of having parts of the batter separate from the fish during frying. The coating turns crispier that way and it is more substantial too. The drawback, of course, is that you get more oil in the fried fish as well.
Fish ‘n’ chips, a British tradition. Mine was made with tilapia fillets. But this isn’t about how to make fish ‘n’ chips. I was going to use the photo for a recipe entry but, right now, it is more relevant to use it in this entry. In a very recent entry in the Well Fed ... (more)
To braise means to cook in a little sauce that gets absorbed by the seafood or meat turning it highly flavorful. In Asia, the sauce in which fish, chicken or meat is braised is always supplemented with herbs, spices and aromatics. So, basically, you put some sauce in the pan, you add the herbs, spices and aromatics, you add the fish, chicken or meat, you cover the pan and leave everything to simmer.
It’s so simple, one wonders why not many people take advantage of the braising method of cooking.
One of the dishes we really enjoy at President Restaurant in Chinatown is the fish fillets with corn sauce. I’ve done a chowder version of that dish in the past and I called it talakitok belly and corn chowder. It was good, no doubt, but I discovered that if the flour and butter based sauce is replaced with coconut cream, it’s even better. More than that, if you use shredded fresh corn instead of canned corn kernels, the sauce becomes even thicker and richer because of the starch. If the yellows and whites make the dish look too boring, add some greens and you not only make the dish more nutritious, it becomes more visually appealing as well.
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 … »»
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