Sardines and Upo Misua is a simple soup dish of canned sardines sautéed with garlic and onions then cooked with bottle gourd and flour vermicelli
I guess many Filipinos prepare this on a regular basis specially those ones who are on a tight budget, if you have upo growing in your backyard all you need to buy is sardines and misua which is very affordable back home, then this can feed a lot. Sardines on its own is already a food prepared by struggling families, we did this a lot when I was young, vegetables are then added like upo, patola or sayote to extend it even further, soup and misua also acts as an extender so all you need to do is pour this soup in your rice to give it some flavour.
Here in New Zealand this is quite expensive as Philippine sardines are imported and if I use the local brands, it does not taste the same. Also, upo is quite an exotic vegetable here, plus very few grow it so you seldom see this in Asian shops which makes it also expensive. We cook them once in a while because we grew up with this type of food and we do miss them occasionally, how about you, do you have dishes like this that you miss once in a while?
Oh? Never had mee sua with sardines. Interesting. Maybe I can give it a try one of these days.