There is a saying in the south that hungry is a mighty fine sauce. I personally had never heard the saying in my part of the South before, but there must be something to it. Filipino cooking is sauce driven. We always have to have some kind of dipping sauce with just about every meal. My girls love the little dishes used for these sauces and we try to collect as many of them as we can. We always manage to put them to good use too!

One of our favorite sauce to make especially in the summer months is salsa. But if you’ve ever made salsa, you know how much work it takes to do all the chopping. We’ve gotten so we just blend everything in the food processor and it works out just fine. I’ve even taken to using the blended concoction to flavor certain dishes.

Check out this week’s food quote meme for links to recipes that use tomato salsa.

 
 
 
 
There is a new meme called Food Quotes that I have been participating in and having lots of fun with. All you have to do is match a food related quote with a photo and post it on your blog every Wednesday. Actually, the posting date is flexible. It doesn’t have to be posted exactly on Wednesdays, but the host posts hers on Wednesdays and you have until the following Wednesday to add your link to her widget. If you’d like to join in the fun, visit The Healthy Lifestyle blog for directions.

The photos above are the first three I did using Photobucket’s poster application. Just click on the links to see the bigger version and visit my food blog.

It’s salad season! The days are longer, hotter and sunnier and I’m loving it! Several salad posts are in our kitchen and more in the line up. If you like the bitterness of greens, you may want to check out these two salads’ raw and cooked versions of Turnip Greens.

Filipinos have a penchant for creative nomenclature. That means we can get really creative when it comes to naming things. Just look at some of the names of small business signs anywhere in the Philippines and you’ll see what I mean. So it is only to be expected that this creative naming also extends to food.

Breakfast basics for most Filinos is fried rice (Sinangag) and eggs (Itlog). Most Filipinos would have rice and eggs for breakfast everyday with only the addition of a variaty of viand such as longanisa (Filipino sausage), tapa (marinated beef), tocino (marinated pork), daing (dried fish), tuyo (dried sardines), bangus (marinated milkfish), or pusit (dried squid). So when you’re in a restaurant ordering breakfast, you would combine the name of your viand with the name of the basics, sinangag (fried rice) and itlog (eggs). For instance, if you were to have the marinated pork, it would be ToSiLog – a combination of Tocino, Sinangag and itLog. You get the idea, right?

So far, I have made a couple of SiLog breakfasts in our kitchen. First, my husband’s favorite Filipino breakfast meat, Tocino which is pork marinated in soy, sugar, vinegar, salt and pepper.

The second SiLog dish I made is TapSiLog, short for Tapa, Sinangag and Itlog. Filipino tapa is beef marinated in lemon, soy and black pepper.

This is my husband’s close second favorite. But the best way he actually likes this is stirfried with onions and peppers ala bistek, for dinner.