Market Manila

Apicio’s comment on the previous post regarding Gourmet magazine seemed so appropriate considering that I was just then writing about old, and I mean OLD issues of Gourmet. I started collecting various food magazines in the late 1980’s, however, with several moves across oceans, I had to throw out several years worth of magazines to lighten my luggage. In 1995, with a more permanent base in Manila, I started to save our food magazines once again. As such, there are some 500+ issues of various food magazines on our shelves, today. I was talking to a Canadian friend at dinner about this habit of saving food magazines and she jumped up, disappeared into a room and emerged with an incredible treasure trove… In one box folder, she had saved some very early Gourmet Magazines and she lent me three of them so I could browse through, photograph and do a post on them for Marketmanila’s readers…

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Happy Mother’s Day! I know a lot of folks head out to eat on Mother’s Day, mostly to give mom a day off from some kitchen work, but we tend to stay IN on holidays such as this one since the malls, restaurants, etc. are jampacked and you are more likely to get a mediocre, overpriced and somewhat stressful meal instead of a calm and enjoyable one. Of course there are exceptions, but today is a great day to enjoy food at home, as long as “mom” doesn’t have to prepare it. So here was Mother’s Day lunch at our place…

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Just a quick blurb. Jiggy, a long-time reader of marketmanila.com (though she comments under another name, which I won’t give out so you can’t put face to name together), emailed me this morning to check out today’s Philippine Daily Inquirer, Lifestyle Section. As many long-time readers probably know, the PDI and MM have this hot and cold thing going, with them doing a feature on Marketman very early in the life of the blog (article since removed from their site) that brought me lots of readers, then they did a feature on a beach house and its architect who won an award for the design, and where I cook a lot of the dishes featured on this blog (article since removed from their website), then they had a recipe contest where someone stole a yema photo from this blog among others, yet the guy won the contest nevertheless, and the newspaper eventually published a lukewarm evasive apology, then the whole “scribes and mangosteen” brouhaha wherein the writer posted a “heavenly” apology, and then another post regarding food writing/journalistic ethics which seemed to strike a raw chord with some PDI writers/contributors, and a couple of other behind the scenes interactions, including potentially positive collaborations on a feature on the public school feeding programs (never managed to set a mutually convenient date), and an article for their on-line version… so whenever someone tells me to look at my Inquirer, I am never sure if that is a good or bad thing…

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I more or less know what Filipino dishes are your (reader) favorites, from a poll I took on dishes and desserts last year. But I am curious if you order the same dishes when you eat out at Filipino restaurants. I ask this because MM & Family recently ate at several Filipino restaurants and noticed that the menus were incredibly long and included a huge number of dishes, say up to 100 or more, and we wondered if people really ordered that much variety while eating out. As creatures of habit, we probably limit our own orders to say a few dishes out of 20 popular dishes for our family. We certainly like to experiment, so the question is, are we so different from other folks at these restaurants, in that we order such a small fraction of the offerings? So if you care to share the information, can I ask you what 5 dishes are you most likely to order when you go to a Filipino restaurant? Thanks!

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Daing na danggit is one of my favorite Pinoy comfort dishes, eaten at breakfast or any other meal, with lots of spicy vinegar, chopped tomatoes and often, fried or scrambled eggs. I have enjoyed this delicacy probably hundreds of times in the last 40+ years; but as with so many other pinoy favorites, I had never seen it made from scratch. Besides wondering how they deboned the fish, I always wondered who in their right minds was (thankfully) responsible for the task of preparing these fish for appreciative diners like myself… Now I know, and if you read the rest of this post, so will you.

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I set out to make a pork adobo the way I suspected my forefathers did a couple of hundred years or more ago. And it turned out to be the BEST ADOBO I have ever made and/or tasted. THE BEST ADOBO. Knowing that I did it from scratch, and toiled over a palayok (clay pot) on a wood fire for nearly three hours, perhaps I was just woozy from the smoke and loss of body fluids and salts or simply romanticizing the results. But a few days later, I tasted the adobo again, after it sat on the kitchen counter in a large garapon (glass jar) under a layer of solidified lard, in the sweltering tropical heat, and I knew this was the real deal…

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No, this isn’t a post on the porcine equivalent of the Jonestown massacre. I just thought that all of the seafood posts lately have been so healthy, and I was concerned that bonafide pork lovers, like commenter “Lee” from Bacolod, might be having pork withdrawal syndrome, so I decided to skip a few posts and do this one on a bunch of pigs that we walked into in the “backwoods” of Malapascua island. It was mid-morning and a bit warm, but under a grove of coconut trees, in the shade and on dark sand, about 8 pigs were napping and resting in their shallow and self made sand wells…

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Marketman & Family may head off to Athens, Greece and Istanbul, Turkey on holiday in a few weeks. While we have some guidebooks and obviously need to hit the major monuments, we are clueless about nice markets, food, produce, shopping, etc. So if you have been to Athens or Istanbul lately, would you have any suggestions for us? I know we won’t get to do or eat everything, but any useful tips you might have would be greatly appreciated. I know one of my commenters, Sha, who has frequented this blog since the first month, is based in Greece, but she is currently on a yacht in the Bahamas and hasn’t responded to several emails I sent. And I do know that at least one of my readers in the past was a Filipina based in Turkey, so I am hoping there are readers out there that can help… Many thanks in advance for your comments and suggestions!

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