Tuna pasta freestyle

From now on, I will stop calling my food experiments "experiments" because when I call these as such, these sound hazardous to the health! :-) Instead, I will call these Freestyle. More adventurous and catchy, don't you think?


So on with our story of the Tuna Pasta freestyle...

Basil

There is a small section in the supermarket where they have small pots of herbs that are for sale; I have been eyeing this for quite some time now, but we did not have space in our old place to grow anything. But ever since we have moved here in Johnsonville (Wellington), we now have an area where we can plant gardens, we have flowering plants in one section, and there's even a sun deck where it can generally get warm and this heat gets circulated into the house! The sun deck is also great for plants that may otherwise find it difficult to grow outside and bear the rather strong winds and extreme weather changes.

I love our dinner!

Look what we had for dinner!


Thank goodness for the Asian store... every once in a while we can enjoy the simple joys of simple Filipino food. Last night we had no other than munggo (mung beans) and tuyo (dried fish)! Having food like this on the table remind me of rainy days in Baguio. You hear the incessant downpour outside but then the overpowering smell of the dried fish would teasingly invite you to the dining table.

And the munggo! I would ask my Nanay to set aside some cooked mung beans before she would pour it onto the fried pork bits. My cup of cooked munggo would then be mixed with a bit of sugar. Mmmmm... I love having munggo that way. And of course, the viand version is just as great!

My wife was thrilled when she saw these stuff at the Asian store. The tuyo costs around 4.50 and it's good for a couple of meals for two. It was likewise a surprise when there was dahon ng malunggay for sale! That completed the munggo recipe. But you'd be surprised... that small bundle of leaves cost $2.50! That would be somewhere around 50 pesos! But then again, it's imported. Suddenly, simple joys are no longer simple but what the heck... we still love our dinner!


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Filipino get-together food

Back in the Philippines, we always found things we can celebrate. Friends reunited, a promotion, the holidays, or even simply because it was Friday. In this case, a visit from my Team Marketing colleague Anthony Chua who was on vacation from Dubai was our cause celebre'.

We went to a bar and grill along Jupiter (the name I forgot) where Chu treated us to a night of good beer, good food, and good times.

Do you see the beer bottle in the photo on top? It's just how I want my beer to be!

Overflowing omelette

We wanted rice and scrambled eggs for breakfast one morning, but since it was a weekend we had the day pretty much to ourselves so we can take a bit more time to enjoy cooking. And what better way to have the humble scrambled eggs transformed into a scrumptious omelette for breakfast?


Having an omelette is like having a wonderful experiment. You can pretty much put anything into it as your filling, for as long as it can be fried and has no sauce. So I rummaged the ref and came up with leftover spam, some tomatoes, a medium potato, some cheese. All these are dutifully chopped.

Fruits and nuts, anyone?

I am, admittedly, not really a fan of fruits. I only have these on occasion, sometimes even skipping these even when they're just there sitting on the dining table waiting to be eaten. I'm just not fond of them.

However, I have recently been finding fruits to be very nice meal companions. Maybe it's because I miss the huge variety we have of fruits back in the Philippines. Our mangoes are to die for. Fresh pineapples, oranges and other citrus fruits, and a host of other fruits that change with the season are always present in our markets.