cooking – Page 3

Spaghetti in Malunggay Pesto Sauce with Tuna

This is the second way I used the Malunggay Pesto sauce I made.

What you’ll need:

1/8kg Spaghetti cooked al dente
1-2 cups Malunggay Pesto sauce
1 can Hot and Spicy Century Tuna
3tbs Grated Parmesan Cheese

The procedure:

While your cooked pasta still still hot, pour it in a bowl then add the Malunggay Pesto sauce until all strands are covered with the sauce. Add the tuna, do not throw the oil of the tuna yet. If you want, you can make the tuna slices smaller. Add the cheese and mix well. If your pasta looks dry like the above because of the Parmesan cheese, add more oil from the can of tuna. Serve with crackers or toasted bread.

Malunggay Pesto Sauce

Lately, I did a lot of cooking and experimenting and here is one of them. We all know how nutritious and beneficial Malunggay is specially to lactating moms. Did I mention it is easy to find too? This is the main ingredient of my latest experiment.

I first heard of the Malunggay Pesto Sauce in a TV show where they boiled the leaves first and used the broth as tea; and the boiled leaves were used to make the Pesto sauce. How healthy and cheap could that be?! This is a super saver specially when you have a Malunggay tree planted in your backyard or near your place like us. Without further ado, let me share with you how I made this fantastic Malunggay Pesto Sauce, which you can use in a lot of ways. I used it in different ways already.

Ingredients

1 cup fresh Malunggay leaves
4 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
3/4 cup extra virgin Olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Procedure

To create this flavorful sauce, you can use a blender osterizer or food processor. In this case I used MIL’s osterizer since we don’t have a food processor.

Put the fresh Malunggay leaves in the osterizer and then grate it. When I was doing this, I had a hard time crushing the leaves into pieces because it was all dry. After a few tries and mixing, the leaves were already small. This time I included the garlic inside and do some more grinding and grating.

While the osterizer is still running, I slowly pour the olive oil into the mixture through the opening in the cap. And instead of grinding, I press puree. This time it was so much easier because of the liquid. I stopped the processor to get everything mixed together and pureed some more.

When I was happy with the consistency, I added the salt and pepper into the mixture, pureed a little more then I was done.

I transferred my Pesto sauce into a microwaveable container, tasted it and then placed it inside the fridge. Important: Do not add the Parmesan cheese if you intend to store your Malunggay Pesto Sauce. Simply add it before you use the sauce.

I brought some here at the office and let my friends taste my latest experiment thus the photo above. I don’t know where to buy crostini here so we settled with Rebisco crackers. It was like a tornado passed in my cube. We were able to finish 3 packs of crackers in a matter of five minutes with 4 people eating.

Some of the remaining sauce, I already used for spaghetti yesterday but I forgot to take a picture of my lunch as I was super excited to eat it. I’ll post it here hopefully next week.

Fish Fillet and Tofu ala Tokwa’t Baboy

I’m actually cutting down on my meat intake and I was really trying to influence my in-laws to do the same so I prepared a dish that originally had pork but replaced it with fish fillet.

Ingredients:

750 grams of fish fillet, cut into serving size, seasoned lightly with salt and pepper and tossed in flour
1 250 grams cake of firm tofu, cut into eatable cubes
1 onion, finely sliced
4 cloves of garlic, crushed and finely sliced
a thumb-sized piece of ginger, sliced thinly then cut into fine slivers
1 green chili, sliced into thin rings
1/4 cup of soy sauce
1/4 cup of vinegar
1 tablespoon of Chinese cooking wine
2 tablespoons of sugar
6 onion leaves, cut into 1-inch lengths then finely sliced vertically
cooking oil for fryingProcedure:

Prepare the sauce by placing the soy sauce, vinegar, onion, ginger, garlic, chili and sugar in a jar with screw-type cap.

Heat the cooking oil in a frying pan until it starts to smoke. Cook the tofu in high heat until golden brown. Do this in batches if needed. Drain on paper towers.

In the same oil, fry the fish fillet until golden brown. Do this in batches as well if needed. Drain on paper towels.

Transfer the tofu and the fish fillet in a serving dish and pour over the sauce you prepared earlier, scattering the spices at the top. Sprinkle with onion leaves and serve.

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We ate this with fried rice and it was one wonderful meal. I used only 1 green chili because we have a kid at home. If you want to make it more spicy, you can add more chilis to your dish. Oh how I really love staying at home!

If there’s something I learned while preparing this dish, that is I should learn how to be more organized when cooking. I guess doing this more often will teach me that.

Thanks to Ms. Connie Veneracion for the inspiration.