inasar a kakalkalap a tilapia

Inasar is tinuno, that's grilled or broiled over hot coals. And yeah, right, these are tilapia fish just caught using a tabukol (fish net) from a pond.....

.... cleaned, and skewered at once and put on over eager embers.

And the result is this, inasar a tilapia served on a banana leaf covered make-shift table, with nakalamansian a bugguong (bugguong squeezed up with calamansi) for a dip, and of course, steaming steamed rice--picnic style.

Chow!

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naasar ken naprito a lames a sagpaw iti dinengdeng

Looking back at some old photos I took and watermarked some years ago, I came upon this. Fish. And it's grilled. And fried. Of which I added on to dinengdeng. It's boiled right in fish sauce broth. Slowly, to extract its flavor, its essence, to meld with the thickening soup. And then the vegetables are put in to join the simmering grilled or fried fish. Brought to a little boil to mildly cook the veggies, just a brief kind of blanching the fruits and leaves, to retain crispness, succulence, color, texture.

This was a fresh catch from the river, the Cagayan River no less, abundant in this type of catfish called kurilaw (kanduli in Tagalog).

Fish on the grill:

You know, grilled fish is best with veggies. It fuses a lot of flavor and aroma specially with dinengdeng, making the broth or soup doubly tasty. It’s a perfect enhancer for the bugguong-flavored stew.

This is the proof: the inasar (tinuno) a kurilaw gracing a dinengdeng medley of pallang, bukel-patani, young abichuelas pods, and marunggay:

More salivating photos of the dinengdeng, to give you more idea just how sumptuous it really is, it’s popping right out of the monitor screen ready for your rice:

And this is my dinengdeng the next day, still with inasar a kurilaw–this is actually a buridibod made of bagas ti aba (taro) with utong and marunggay–enjoy the show of gastronomic force of an Ilokano staple veggie stew:

And this is naprito a tilapia atop a dinengdeng--you've got here tarong, kabatiti, utong, pako:

It’s a torture, I know. Please just indulge your longing eyes.

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