The quest for laing: Samar edition
We love laing and will travel far and wide to get it. Recently we discovered that there is a Samareño version of laing, and we only had to travel as far as Dennis’s house in Makati to sample it.
Pinangat is basically laing and seafood wrapped in more laing. The Samar variation is like the Bikolano original, flavorful and intense, but not spicy. Knowing of our preference for laing that sets our hair on fire, our host served chilis on the side.
The pinangat tasted even better with a scrumptious Samar seafood spread: humongous prawns, crabs and slipper lobsters. When the seafood is this fresh, complicated recipes are unnecessary: serve immediately!
Slipper lobsters are not really lobsters, but “decapod crustaceans” doesn’t sound as tempting. They look like fossils from the Jurassic period, but are easy to open and eat—none of the slapstick comedy potential of eating crab in public (crab’s legs flying across the table, crabmeat landing in your seatmate’s hair and other disasters with pliers). Peel off the soft shell under the prehistoric bug, scoop up the meat and eat. Delicious.
Our host Dennis Lustico (the designer!) and his enormous Labrador Truman.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
January 20th, 2013 at 02:07
Do Dennis’s a restaurant for these succulent dishes? I’m a hard-core laing fan also!