Tap to view the purple deliciousness at full size.
If you’re looking for a different kind of dessert, check out the ube ice cream sandwiches at Mata’s Philippine Cuisine in Tampa (on West Waters, a quick drive west of Dale Mabry)!
Ube (pronounced “OOO-beh”) is a sweet purple yam from the Philippines. It has a flavor that I describe as a mild mix of vanilla, white chocolate, and hazelnuts. It’s been a Filipino sweets staple for centuries, but only in the past decade has it become popular in North America. That’s a shame, because you’ve been missing out on some amazing, colorful dishes as a result!
They put the ice cream between “krispy treats” made out of sticky puffed rice (which often gets called pinipig in the Philippines, but that isn’t accurate). Just think of it as ube ice cream between Filipino rice krispies treats and enjoy the flavor.
These tweets may be from a couple of years back, but they’re new to me, and they might be new to you as well. They take the way “western” (a.k.a. round-eye) writers dismissively write about Asian food, but turn the tables by using the same colonialist style on Karen cuisine. Enjoy!
In response to the tweet above, Amirul Ruslan decided that it needed to be turned into something that looked as if it came straight from the New York Times:
And the tweet also generated a lot of hilarious funny/sad responses:
I saw a whole rack of the above product at the grocery yesterday. I have vague memories of having some at a bar, but they’re from a while back. They’re also from that point when you’ve drunk enough that eating the pickled things in large old jars at the back of the bar seems like a good idea.
I think that Big John’s Pickled Sausage could be a key ingredient in a drink that I would call the Filthy Martini — a next-level Dirty Martini.
