For the longest time, I had seen Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Mario Batali, and them likes fry up zucchini flowers like it was nothing. It was nice and orange but I never could imagine how it tasted. I hardly ate flowers. I see a rose petal on my soup from a wedding — I take it off.

That said, it took a trip to Italy two years ago to find out that there’s something nice and lovely about this zucchini flower dish. I fell in love with the balance of the herbs, the nice gooey cheesy ricotta, and the crunch of the flowers. As soon as I got home, I was wondering how can I do it… can I even do it?

Since then, I’ve been trying to chance upon some zucchini flowers but never really managed to find anything close to it until last week when my uncle cooked pinakbet with some squash (kalabasa) flowers. It looked like the zucchini flowers but I wasn’t quite sure it would work. So I gave it a shot today and the experiment was a success.

Fried Kalabasa flowers ala Tuscano

I took after this recipe and modified it a little to my tastes. Rather than using ricotta cheese, I mixed parmesan and quickmelt cheese. Herb choices were slim in the market but they had lovely leeks which I just minced and put it in the cheese concoction. The flowers were also smaller so I had to use lesser batter.

We had no egg this morning but I figured that if I just make a tempura-consistency for my batter, it might just work. Mix cold water with the flour, season with some salt and pepper, and voila!

This dish turned out to be a really nice, even better and crispier treat compared to what I had in Tuscany. Blame it on the tempura batter or something but in the end, it was a sublime gooey snack. It wasn’t as laborious as I had imagine either. Needless to say, my first shot at localizing something I had abroad with supplementary local ingredients worked wonders.

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!

My experiments with pesto started when an aunt from Italy came home and started to make her pesto. The first thing she asked my mom was to buy some fresh basil, which 15 years ago was completely unheard of in our islands apart from its dried counterpart. So she decided to create a different kind of pesto, pounding a large bunch of Italian parsley (kinchay) along with some garlic. There were no pine nuts easily available nor did we have Parmesan cheese back then. With piping hot pasta, she tossed her green mashed concoction and called it pesto. It was one of the best things I’ve ever tasted.

For years, I really didn’t give myself a shot in making a batch of pesto like my aunt did. But a really expensive bottle of pesto compelled me to find a cheaper and probably better alternative to the ones bought from the groceries.

My first pesto recipe was simple. It merely had fresh basil (a pack is never more than 30 pesos), garlic (a bulb is around 5 pesos), and olive oil (A bottle is around 100, but this has more use than just a pesto). Pine nuts were still unavailable so I settled for these three ingredients for a good while, mashing them together with my pestle and tossing it to the hot pasta with some salt and parmesan cheese (if I’m lucky to have some). When my mom noticed the hours I slaved away for just a cup’s worth of pesto, she taught me how to use the food processor and it was merely a matter of tossing these three ingredients in the blender then a button for the whizz.

For years this was what my recipe was like. Nothing really fancy about it apart from making the pesto with the freshest ingredients. Occasionally, I’d make batch of pesto base, keep it for one or two weeks and mix in other ingredients to have a change of flavor like tuna, chicken, mushroom, or even cream. The basic pesto base is as versatile as the Italian red sauce. There’s so much that you can mix it with it will have the sweetness of basil and the tartness of garlic. It’s simplicity and ease immediately made pesto as one of my favorite things to cook that whenever friends come over. You can never fail with pesto as long as you have a good pesto base.

The funny thing was when I recently went to Italy and I told my aunts my pesto recipe and they immediately expressed concern on why I was missing the ever important pine nut and why I had to even think about mixing pesto with cream. Having never tasted the difference a pine nut made, my aunts showed me why pine nuts were integral to pesto.

The thing that made pesto stick well to the pasta was not the olive oil but the pine nut. When pounded, the pine nut was like a paste that could absorb the oils and flavor of the basil making it stick to the pasta without putting too much oil in it. The result is a less oily pesto with a nice gritty texture. It was nice and creamier to the mouth.

Oh well, whatever you do with your pesto, I think as long as you have a great base, you can pretty much do whatever you want. Don’t be afraid to stray from the cardinal base. Take that pesto to the next level with your own pesto experiment!