It’s amazing how something as lowly as two vegetables you can buy off the sidewalk can turn a lowly dried fish meal into something that looks quite elegant (albeit minimalist), yet tastes wonderfully comforting. Take for instance this plate of daing, tomato and daikon salad, and rice.

Since I didn’t want to eat the Sinigang na Hipon¹ which we reheated from lunch (shrimp does bad things to my system, so I had to be content with pigging out during lunch), I opted for bottled daing in olive oil that was sitting in the fridge.

For me, fried fish is always good with fresh tomatoes, so I decided to dice a few up. Rooting through the fridge however, yielded half a daikon from a few days ago. Remembering the tomato and daikon salad one of my aunts prepared for me awhile back, I decided to try some myself.

Trying to recall how she did it, I diced two tomatoes, then peeled about 3 inches of daikon. I then proceeded to shave them into slivers, then rubbed them with rock salt—to get the bitterness out—until they went limp. Afterwards, I washed the salt out and tossed them with the tomatoes. It turned out just as I remembered. Perfect for the fish!

Chowing down happily, I relished every bite of the juicy tomatoes which provided a refreshing flavor against the salty fish. Despite dinner being a rushed affair, I was quite happy, showing that you don’t need exotic ingredients nor preparations to come up with a satisfying meal.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 1st, 2006 at 4:31 pm and is filed under how-tos, recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.