home cooking

Taste Test: 52 Noodles at Punked Noodle

| Khursten Santos

Last year, I said to myself that as soon as the new year starts, I’ll start on something that would get me to write more often in my blog. In a way, it will encourage me to share a lot of things with you folks and it would make my cousins abroad really envious of the things I leisurely have here in Manila.

Kidding aside, I realized that for a site that declares its love for noodles… I rarely talked about noodles. I know. My bad. ^^;; But I am a noodle person and I love noodles and I though I should really do everything in my power to share this love with you folks.

Hence, the 52 noodles at Punked Noodle.

This is my valiant effort to share my weekly instant noodle or pasta experience with you people. Yes. You heard me. This year, I’m going instant. It’s easy on my wallet and well… don’t worry, since I only eat 52 noodles, I’ll try not to stack up on the MSG.

What makes this easy is rather than going to restaurants, I’m going to groceries and hunt 52 awesome noodles for to try. These noodles should be well within our reach and I will also consider the cost of getting them (unless if they were gifts to me. I can’t do much about that.) as well as their flavors. This is awesome for my highly impoverished wallet and also easy to fix when I’m much too lazy to really cook something up.

I hope this will also encourage you to try out the strange noodles that line up our groceries. If you have any suggestions for me (from the cheapest to at least the pricier brands) I’d be more than happy to try them. If you want to give me the gift of instant noodle, I’ll be happy to receive them as well! Just leave me an e-mail!

I’ve pretty much done my noodle tasting ahead so that I’m ready to post by Sunday. The first noodle is… close to one of my favorite noodles ever.

Toshikoshi Soba and a still memorable new year

| Khursten Santos

This may be a month too late but it’s still a very fond memory to me. I started my new year the same time as the Japanese and this year, in the spirit of my love for noodles, I had my first Toshikoshi Soba. 年 越し蕎麦 (toshi koshi soba) may look just like your regular soba dish but it actually represents the ending of the year and the start of the new. Japanese would usually have a bowl of soba the minute midnight strikes. It’s similar to how Filipinos should have pancit. The toshikoshi soba’s a symbol of longevity that we may endure the coming year.

Continue reading →

Another approach to the noble tilapia

| Khursten Santos

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!
Continue reading →

Re-make of Korean Beef Stew

| Khursten Santos


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.

See, there was this fast food stall in Landmark named Kimchi

Not exactly a ‘Clammy’ Afternoon

| Khursten Santos

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!

One of the simplest and tastiest pasta dishes I’ve come across

Pesto experiments!

| Khursten Santos

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.

Continue reading →

Pasta ala bulungan

| Khursten Santos

Pasta ala bulungan.

Seriously. My mom went on a marketing spree in Bulungan last Sunday. One of her hauls was this big bucket worth of mussels, locally known as tahong, for 20 bucks (roughly $0.50). It must be around 3 kilos worth of mussels. She also got a bunch of shellfish innards sold for Php50 a kilo. The interesting thing with these innards is that once she looked closer, she realized that the innards contained scallops in it. And scallops for 50 bucks is definitely a bargain in my side of the country. The moment she got home, she showed me her seafood stash and I can’t think of anything else but adding it into a pasta.

My aunt from Italy taught me this recipe. It might be close to a simple marinara sauce but lighter and sweeter in flavor. Whenever we have seafood, even if it’s just mussels, I always try to cook it in this way. You can’t go wrong with this recipe as long as you have fresh ingredients. You can’t get that sweet briny taste if you don’t have fresh seafood. More than that, you’ll also get a tummy ache if your seafood’s not fresh. In this recipe, I only have mussels and scallops. You can be more experimental with your ingredients by adding other shellfish like clams, halaaan, and maybe some shrimps.
Continue reading →