A little while ago, I got a sweet and savory surprise–two bottles of Little Rosie’s Filipino Dressing arrived on my doorstep. As the brainchild of local resident Pamela Loch, Little Rosie’s first began in 2005 in Ohio as she reminisced cooking Filipino favorites with her mom as a child. Since then, she moved production to Phoenix in 2011 and started selling her line of Filipino Salad Dressings and Marinades (the only line of Filipino salad dressings and marinades in the US) and recently launched them at AJ’s Fine Foods.
As she says, “Traditionally, there isn’t a ‘Filipino’ salad dressing recipe. I took time honored ingredients and staples in a Filipino kitchen, and using my mom’s recipes I created our salad dressings using cider vinegar, soy sauce and garlic and others. Growing up, we never needed a formal holiday in order to celebrate. My mom had a lot of Filipino friends and we gathered to simply enjoy food. With this in mind, I launched my dressings in hopes that others would use it to gather and enjoy life.”
Pamela currently sells two variations of her dressing/marinade: Original and Spicy. Both incredibly flavorful, I loved the sweet bite of the Original blend and the Spicy is very similar, just kicked up a bit with added red pepper flakes.
We loved glazing oven-baked salmon filets with the thick marinade (shake it up really well before using and it gets an almost syrup-like texture making it great for saucing up proteins), but it really popped with Brussels Sprouts (a favorite in my household). After parboiling the sprouts, I sautéed them in toasted sesame oil to get them nice and brown, then at the last few minutes tossed them with Little Rosie’s Original Filipino Dressing and added a sprinkling of toasted sesame seeds. SO GOOD. I make Brussels often, but this was a delightful variation and paired well with the night’s strip steak with red onion marmalade.
Little Rosie’s Brussels Sprouts
Try it with broccoli, carrots and bell peppers too… even the tiny person in my house loves the sweet tanginess of the marinade! A little goes a loooong way, so you’re sure to get plenty uses out of the 16-oz bottles (priced at $10.99).
Learn more about them at littlerosies.com.
We received complimentary samples to facilitate the writeup; however, our opinions are wholly our own. View our Disclosure Policy for more info.