I’ve always been fond of Tilapia. It’s not exactly the poor man’s fish but it is a versatile fish for dishes.

You can fry it crisp, grill it, cook it in coconut milk, and in this case, steam it.

Steaming tilapia was something we do in case we get tired of eating our fish fried. It is a healthier alternative and the flavor of the fish is heightened by the ingredients in it. I for one love cooking it like this because it’s nice to suck the juices out of the tilapia head. And the beans add a bit of biting saltiness that matches quite well with the rice. More to that, prep time and cooking time takes less than 20 minutes. Beat that Rachel Ray! >w<)v

Anyway, on to the recipe!

Strangely, I enjoy this with some nice cold beer.

Hee hee hee!! I think the curiosity for cooking Korean Beef Stew at home was when a friend and I were driving home on a hungry night and I found myself drooling over the thought of eating a nice warm broth of Korean Beef Stew.

Now, I got one of these cookbooks compiled by Good Housekeeping and saw a recipe for Korean Beef Stew. I’m never a beef buyer because I can never seem to cook it right. I go as far as ground beef and sirloin or breakfast strips. More than that… nu. But today, the flavor of spicy broth on a sweltering afternoon compelled to get some beef shanks and cook at a nice slow pace while I read some Kundera.

My experience with Korean Beef sadly started from a fast food stall in a mall. But damn that food stall really made great Korean Beef that it’s stuck in my poetic memory. Yes, Kundera-ing like whoa. That beef stew starts with a nice sweet broth that had that strange balance of soy sauce and sugar. It wasn’t saccharine but you strangely appreciate the sweetness’ contrast with the savory flavor of the beef and the broth. Then there was the spice which was honestly too hot for me when I was younger but I love the feeling of burning my lips just to taste that sweet and salty broth.

Many bowls and burnt lips later, it’s still an amazing taste and now, I’m happy to have cooked it in my home. \o/

Damn… I really love the broth of this recipe! >w<)v And although I was already drooling by the second hour, the wait was worth it. The beef just melts in your mouth and it’s glorious!!

When I was a kid, I used to hate our local clam, halaan, WITH A PASSION. I can never understand its taste. It’s slightly tart, gingery, salty, sometimes grainy (especially if it wasn’t cleaned well) and gummy. My folks always prepared it the same way, boiling it in hot water with some ginger. UGH! It was such a dreadful fare that I often excused myself from the table and went back to bed. No bland clams please, kthx.

It wasn’t until, again, one of my aunts who worked in Italy came home and showed me how to enjoy these clams with pasta. Known to them as Pasta con Vongole, this sweet yet briny dish completely changed my opinion of halaan/vongole forever.

Last weekend’s trip to the market brought me back to my aunt’s pasta. A little inspired by the freshness of clams, I thought I’d give it a shot in cooking one of my favorite pasta dishes. This is a very simple and easy dish, stripping the flavors to its barest essentials.

What I love about Pasta con Vongole is it’s a dish that doesn’t overcook the seafood nor do the other flavors compete with the taste of the clams. In fact, if your seafood is fresh, this is one of the best dishes to taste the freshness of the clams. If you can get your clams fresh, then this is the perfect dish for it!

Happy New Year, folks! I hope you guys had a great new year. Mine was relatively quiet, matched with a glass of champagne.

Anyway, I’m here to share with you one of the things that I love about the year that has passed, Emerald Garden’s Sesame crabs. The crabs was introduced to me by a friend a couple of years back and I’ve been longing to eat it ever since.

The crab is cooked simply, seasoned only with some salt and sesame oil. What I love about it is how the shell has this lingering saltiness that permeates to the flesh inside. I love how even my fingers taste like the crab when I give it a lick. My favorite part is the crab fat under the shell. It’s fried to a crisp and it’s strangely light to taste buds. So far, I haven’t felt my heart wrenching after eating the crab.

It’s such an amazing crab that I long to eat it every time I’m in Emerald Garden. It’s a little costly, costing around 800/crab, but the crab is big enough to feed a group of 4.

Next time you pop by Emerald Garden along Roxas Boulevard, make sure to order some Sesame Crabs!

This season’s a great time to experiment with different kinds of cuisine, but a recent experience in Bistro Filipino taught me that if you have 7100 islands to get different flavors to get from, wouldn’t it be best to experiment with our local cuisine? 

At Bistro Filipino, chefs Rolando Laudico, Myrna Segismundo, and Jill Sandique showed us the 7100 different flavors that we can taste.

It was my first time to attend an event where a full menu was laid out before me. Spicy Sisig Basket in Mini Crispy Rice Baskets with Quail’s Egg and Crispy Pork Rind. A trio of soups to represent Beef Nilaga, Adobo, and Pinakbet. A salad using local ingredients such as mangoes, kesong puti, and kasoy. A granita of tamarind. Lapu-lapu and Prawns in Coco-Lambanog Sauce, Coriender, Asparagus, and Fennel Cherry Tomato Sofrito Brown Rice with Sun-Dried Mangoes. Crusted Wagyu Beef Fillet Cashew-Humba Sauce. Kezong Puti with Guava Confit with Calletas. And Pili Sansrival and Mango Canonigo. The menu’s quite a mouthful and so are the dishes. They were quite familiar and yet entirely different to my palate.

One of the interesting things said that night came from Chef Myrna Segismundo wherein she shared to us the reason why the chefs presented these familiar dishes differently. She voiced that it has always been an issue how our cuisine can never get international acclaim. She then figured out that it’s because we don’t have the proper practices with our cooking. We just love to throw out ingredients together and start stewing.

For her, she mentioned that for a cuisine to be recognized, there should be an application of the best practices and techniques. It doesn’t intend to change the recipe but rather have a more uniformed technique in preparing the dish, making what we have something that is beyond lutong bahay (home cooking).

The dishes the chefs served to us were great examples of these familiar recipes made and created with the best international techniques and practices. Laudico even says that it’s not exactly fusion custion. It is still Filipino cuisine just done and presented in a different way.

The meal we had in the restaurant was quite exquisite. One of my favorites was the coconut milk dish that had a shot of lambanog in it. It’s similar to how they use white wine in European dishes. In this dish, the lambanog gave a nice heat to the dish and it didn’t overpower the coconut at all. Another notable dish was the sisig in a crispy basket. The shot of quail egg afterwards has that nice texture much like an egg cracked over a sizzling plate of sisig. The dessert was quite impressive as well. The Mango Canonigo was not too sweet and the cake was well-balanced with the mango.

The chefs really put up a great menu for us who were curious to experience 7100 flavors from our country. It was even greater that we could clean out our palate with a nice chewy gums from Orbitz. These gums are sugar free and they’re nice enough to clean your palate without having to affect what we’re going to eat next.

I want to thank Orbitz for giving us a chance to experience these great flavors! And thanks to the chefs for a great meal!