red/purple katuday

Nalabbasit a katuday.

It's February. And it's 14th. Supposedly a lovers' day for all. It's also flowers and chocolate's day, you can't imagine how many tons of cut flowers and chocolate bars may have been gifted upon and consumed on this single day of the year...

And to join the grand celebration of romance, I have here a heap of red flowers for you. Actually purple. And this is edible, mind you. This is a variety of katuday. What more could you wish for, beautiful red flowers and it's edible, too! We'll make a dinengdeng or a salad out of it to make it the more enjoyable, delightful, delicious! Naimas, naim-imas!

Let's enjoy the beauty of the blossoms first, before we subject it into a dissection to prepare it for cooking (click on the photos for a larger view):

For this dinengdeng, the purple katuday will be paired with crisp pallangs. I added camote cubes (not shown) to sweeten and starch the broth, thus making it a kind of buridibod.

Luckily, I've got some grilled tilapia as an "al-alia" (sagpaw, add-on) for my dinengdeng. I boiled it first in the simmering bugguong broth:

And it's done! It's just so unfortunate that the purple katuday lost its fabulous color and texture when it's cooked/wilted--it turned into an unsightly bluish black, much to my consternation, arrgggh! But anyway, the dinengdeng is so promising as you can see--the same bittersweet katuday flavor enhanced by the starchy sweet potato and the crispy and still green pallang:

The rest of the red blossoms, I made into a salad with KBL (kamatis-bugguong-lasona):

That's it. But I just can't get away with the royal color of this katuday, so let's have them in its majestic splendor yet again:

:::::