Laswa is among the quintessential native Ilonggo dish you'd find in most homes and turo-turo places in the region. It is basically a stew of an assortment of vegetables like kalabasa, talong and saluyot among others. Others have sitaw, takway, patola, sigarilyas and even puso ng saging. Salt is the basic seasoning and seafood are the most popular sahog especially shrimps, crabs, kalkag and dried fish.
But another dried seafood made its way to the list of sahogs as a few days ago, I was surprised that the laswa on our table dried locus (squid) as the sahog. Maybe we ran out of the usual sahog and there was only a pack of dried squid in fridge making it the perfect candidate for the laswa. Despite being in a soupy dish, the squid still proved to be tough and I prefer it to be eaten fried or roasted - with lots of sinamak.