Happiness is ... giving in to guilty pleasures
It's a freezing cold night in New York—and the first in quite awhile where I had nowhere to be and nothing to do. That in itself is a big enough treat in this city where we seem to be moving from one place to the next incessantly. But as soon as I got home, I thought I'd up the ante. I slipped into some comfy jammies and wandered into the kitchen to make a wickedly delicious yet unbelievably easy-to-make dish that I've been obsessing about for awhile: Aligue Pasta.
Aligue is what Filipinos call crab roe—that rich, unctuous treasure that is as sumptuous as it is treacherous on the arteries. I spotted some crabs in Chinatown a few weeks ago just overflowing with the good stuff. It was all I could do not to pick them up and lick them right there.
Lovers of artery-clogging food and generally enterprising folks that Filipinos are, some bright minds back in the Motherland thought of bottling up these treasures, making aligue readily available in grocery stores—you know, so you don't have to put too much effort into tempting a heart attack.
Outside the Philippines, bottled aligue is available in some stores that sell Filipino products. I scored a bottle of Navarro's Crab Paste at Fou Lee Market while on vacation in Seattle. My dear friend Pattie, who is a food enthusiast, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York and the woman behind the beautiful Cintai Corito's Garden in Batangas, recommends this brand's Premium Quality version, but I had to make do with the regular variety and it was still pretty good.
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