Cora's Taste of Manila is Filipino home cooking at its best

This week, I visited Cora's Taste of Manila in Cape Girardeau. This required a little planning, because Cora's just has a pickup area located at 2502 Tanner Drive, behind Applebee's. This building has been a hotbed of new restaurants and flavors lately, so I'm curious to see what might pop up next. But with Cora's, I had to order online at corastasteofmanila.com and then choose my pickup time. I showed up on a Friday, and my food was hot and ready to go.

Cora's Taste of Manila promises authentic Filipino cooking, and I was looking forward to trying something new. Since the weather had been so cold that week, Cora's was offering a dish called sinigang soup, or tamarind soup as I saw it named online. And there it was, my old friend tamarind. Tamarind is a fruit native to the western hemisphere, but Mexico is the biggest producer. The fruit is sweet and sour, but the majority of it is dried and powdered, and that powder is more sour than sweet. But it is a unique sour, not at all like the bite of citrus or the mouth-puckering sourness of an unripe persimmon laden with tannins. Pad Thai is a dish you may be familiar with, and its flavor comes primarily from tamarind. I happen to love pad Thai, so when I saw that this soup was flavored with the gently sour tamarind, I was sold.

My order came with a pint of soup and a pint of rice. I asked the owner as I was picking up the order how I should use the rice ... Should I put it in the soup? Eat it on the side? Pour the soup over it? That last one was the right answer, so that's what I did, with a couple of scoops of rice in a bowl and a couple of scoops of soup on top. I've been telling you how tamarind is sour, but it is not overwhelming. My soup was full of veggies — bok choy, okra and what I think was some sort of mild radish, and running throughout was the bright, subtle flavor of tamarind cutting through the heavy meaty taste of fall-apart-tender cubes of pork. This was absolutely delicious, and I loved every bite of it.

I am not sure how often Cora's will offer sinigang soup, but I hope they make it a staple throughout the cold months. It was hearty, comforting and filling.

Seth ordered tapsilog, which is a clever compilation of its individual ingredients — "tap" from tapa, beef, in this case sirloin, "si" from sinangag which is garlic fried rice, and "log" from itlog, a fried egg. And that is exactly what it was, strips of sirloin over garlic fried rice topped with a fried egg with a runny yolk. This too was delicious, but while Seth loved the sirloin and the yolk flavoring the dish, I thought the garlic fried rice was the star. If you love garlic, you must try this rice. Fragrant and delicious.

Tapsilog, a wonderful garlic fried rice bowl with strips of sirloin and a fried egg.Submitted by Rebecca LaClair

My sinigang soup wasn't spicy in the slightest (neither was Seth's dish, for the record). But while I tried Seth's rice bowl, he wanted to try my soup, and I dished him up a bowl. I noticed a longish, whole vegetable in one of the spoonfuls of soup I ladled onto the rice for him, and I even said aloud, "Huh. That must be a whole okra or something." Well, my friends, it definitely was not okra. Seth took a spoonful and put that vegetable into his mouth, chewing with gusto. Immediately, his eyes filled with tears, and as he chewed, his face began to turn red. "What in the heck did I just bite into?" he asked as he swallowed his mouthful. "Was it spicy?" I asked, and he nodded. So we looked up the recipe for sinigang online, trying to figure out what he just ate while he refused my offer of milk to tame the sizable burn. All I can figure was it was some sort of Thai chili, an innocent green thing that vaguely resembled okra but not really, and we should have known better. He ended up taking that milk.

Still, I can't recommend the soup more wholeheartedly, and like I said, it wasn't spicy in the least on its own. Just watch the whole chilis and treat them like bay leaves — you know, don't eat them, unless you like the burn.