Reliving my salad days

"My salad days / When I was green in judgment: cold in blood..."
-Cleopatra （Antony and Cleopatra, Act 1, Scene V）

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According to Merry and Websty, the origin of the word 'salad' can be traced back to the Latin 'sal', which means salt.  The earliest salads were seasoned with-- you guessed it-- salt.

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My two Salad Rules are:
1. At least three colors are present.
2. One of those colors should be green.

Then I try to apply the five-taste-rule in Korean cooking: bitter, salty, sweet, sour, and hot tastes should all be present in a dish to make it balanced.

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"Eat cress and gain wit." (Greek proverb)

Last Day 18

Mango coated with chili soybean paste + carrot + nori + peanuts

Last Day 19

The recipe for Cyma's Roka Salata (Greek rocket salad) can be found here.

Kimchi noodle soup PLUS

As the saying goes, 'necessity is the mother of invention', and in my kitchen, it couldn't be truer.

I was tempted to just grab a fresh Chinese lumpia at Landmark Supermarket in Trinoma last night but the price (70 pesos!) hindered me.  So I racked my brain instead for possible things to cook with the leftover ingredients in the fridge.  My eyes wandered to the noodles aisle so I thought kimchi soup it is!

I use to live with two of the coolest Temperate Asian dudes in a co-ed boarding house run by a notorious white Canadian guy.  One was a talented Japanese b-boy who showed me how to make okonomiyaki (a savory pancake usually eaten as a snack) and the other was an opinionated aspiring Korean diplomat who taught me the recipe for kimchi soup.  Now, I didn't make notes back then, but all I can remember was adding kimchi and Lucky Me Pancit Canton noodles (without the sauce and powder) into a pot of boiling water, then dumping Spam Hot & Spicy slices.

Since I don't eat Spam, I sliced and re-fried instead the leftover tofu I had for Day 11 (which had been marinated overnight in soy sauce, vinegar, and garlic before they were fried), then added it to the boiling soup of kimchi and noodles.  I added a bit of chili soybean paste since the hotness of the kimchi had been diluted by the water.

The PLUS part: I was about to enjoy my soup when I remembered that I bought nori some two months ago and it was just chilling in the fridge, unopened.  So I took two sheets out, tore them to pieces, and added them to the steaming spicy bowl of noodles.

Last Day 14

The best things in life are cheap!