Spaghetti with chicken sausages and rosemary-flavoured cherry tomatoes
Over the years I realized that the best pasta dishes I’ve made were the ones where I didn’t have to use a recipe. Once I’ve learned the 4 basic steps, it becomes easy to experiment with different kinds of ingredients and flavours.
Delaney’s spiced chicken thighs with a roast broccoli salad
This wonderful pair of recipes came out in the April 2014 issue of FishHead magazine under Delaney Mes‘ My Kitchen column. She creates recipes, I cook and shoot for her. She lives in Auckland and I live in Wellington but in this day and age of email and DropBox, distance doesn’t matter.
Chicken kare-kare
THE VERY FIRST DISH that came to mind when I was contemplating to become a vegetarian for the sake of love was kare-kare. It would be very difficult to give up. But love prevailed and I never had kare-kare since then. This was two decades ago. As fate would have it, the love was eventually lost and I had since gone back to eating meat (poultry, yes. four-legged animals, no.)
For Valentine’s Day, I received three gifts from my gorgeous partner-in-crime JD. First, a flower garden he cultivated in the backyard at 6AM in the morning of Valentine’s Day.
Second, a Jamie Oliver-inspired candlelit dinner for two in our kitchen (he cooked 3 dishes in 30 minutes!) and last but not the least, a huge gift-wrapped box. Inside was an orange tagine.
Roast chicken carcass
Who thinks that chicken carcass is only used for making soup or stock?
Well, the secret is out! You can actually make a complete meal out of it. All it takes is creativity. And some bits and pieces of leftovers.
Turkey Bolognese
I have been cooking different variations of turkey mince spaghetti for as long as I can remember and they were all good, but this is the best of the best I’ve ever made. Perhaps it’s the grocery-bought tomato sauce with red wine, or the mix of fresh herbs, or the grated carrots, or the red wine vinegar. Whatever it is that made the difference, I’m sticking to the recipe and I’m sharing it with you!
Leftover turkey pies in ramekins
Leftover turkey pot pie
A week after Christmas and we still had leftover roast turkey lurking in the fridge. Most people would just throw away whatever was left clinging to turkey bones and stuff. But not me. I don’t waste anything worth salvaging. That’s why I love second hand stores.
Christmas turkey
When it comes to roast turkey recipes, I leave it to the experts! I followed two recipes, one for brining and one for stuffing.
I have to thank Jessica of http://brownpaperbelle.com for introducing me to Marcella Hazan’s classic Italian tomato sauce recipe. Jessica used the tomato sauce for her Pizza On The Run. The moment I read about it, I just had to make it (Not the pizza dough, just the tomato sauce!) It is the simplest, easiest to make tomato sauce ever. Although it took 45 minutes to cook it, it’s the throw-everything-in-the-pot-and-forget-about-it-while-you-do-something-else kind which is so sexy if I may say so.
I am asked plenty of times, “What is your favorite Filipino recipe?” And I always answer automatically, “Adobo.” (And when I say Adobo I mean the chicken version since I don’t eat four-legged animals.)
The kitchen is my playground. 