Blueberries & Blackberries
I love berries. Blueberries, blackberries, raspberries and strawberries… Picked fresh off the vine, berries are unbelievably sweet and flavorful. 
On Long Island, I used to pick both wild and cultivated strawberries and cultivated raspberries every summer and their flavor was ingrained in my memory banks. Living back in the tropics, they are the fruits that I miss the most. So when I spy them in a store, I buy, buy, buy. Today at Price Smart Fort Bonifacio I was looking for some chocolate chips but they were “out of stock” so I swung by the produce area and saw these small plastic containers of blueberries and blackberries at a very reasonable P160 per pack. Okay, okay, at roughly P1-1,250 a kilo they are wicked pricey but you don’t need that much to dress up a fruit salad.
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First on the list is carbohydrates. Bacchus carries an extensive line of De Cecco pasta and rice for risotto. While everyone assumes that there is little distinction between dried pastas, they are mistaken. De Cecco is one of my favorites and I am thrilled that Bacchus carries a fairly comprehensive line. They also at one point carried three different types of rice for risotto (Arborio, Carnaroli and Vialone Nano) but they seemed to be down Carnaroli at the last visit. Boohoo, as that is my rice of choice for risotto. It has a higher amylose content that allows it to absorb a lot of liquid that results in an ultra-creamy risotto. A fourth type of rice for risotto, Baldo, I have yet to find in Manila. Oddly, despite the generally accepted popularity of Arborio, most top chefs seem to prefer Carnaroli and Vialone Nano.
And perhaps a future one for equipment. I love Bacchus. Period. Opened to the public in 1996, this is a food and wine connoisseur’s haven. I must relate a side story about Bacchus… when they first opened their cellars to buyers, my wife and I were invited to one of their first “tastings” in their cellar. Being new, and giddy, they opened bottle after brilliant bottle and we must have tasted over 8 different excellent wines in one evening. Since they were so good we swallowed instead of spitting so let’s just say we got a tad bit tipsy. Of course at the end of the evening, guests were sort of expected to buy some bottles but I was so shocked by the prices as a salaried consultant, that the most attractive wine I could find was a stunning Brunello di Montalcino that ran roughly P5,000. As I was paying for it, I noticed the other guests (generally tycoons and tyocoonlettes) were paying for cases of wine and spending tens (even hundreds) of thousands or more in one go. Yikes. Thanks, Bacchus, but we weren’t in that league. Never did get invited back for another tasting…heehee.
There is something so right about someone who actually raises the plants or produce that they then cart down to the market to sell. They can speak to you about the care of the plants, the conditions under which they thrive, how much water and fertilizer they need, and where they might like to tan themselves (i.e., shaded or full-sun; the plants, that is). Teresa has been at the market for years, I believe first at the Magallanes outdoor markets in the late 90’s, which moved to TESDA then on to FTI on the weekends.
These small tart mangoes are not underdeveloped or baby large sweet mangoes but rather a species of its own (Mangifera altissima). The tree is very similar to other more well-known mango trees though their leaves are bigger than that of the typical carabao mango tree (according to Domingo Madulid’s book: The Philippine Archipelago). The fruit is typically pickled, brined (soaked in a salt/water solution), or cooked with other vegetables. It can also be eaten raw with salt and sometimes tomatoes and onions for a mouth puckering side dish.
How did this happen? Reason # 1: apples don’t grow here, so the best alternative was canned Comstock apples in syrup courtesy of the U.S. bases. Reason #2: Filipinos seem to have a super sweet tooth, so over the years, recipes for apple pie have piled on more and more sugar (partially to hide crappy underlying apples). Reason #3: The emphasis on a flaky crust was lost in translation (and made more difficult by watery local butter and hot and humid weather)… so the end product is often a super gooey sweet mush filling covered with a soggy pastry dough. In the past two decades, I have probably baked over 200 apple pies and I don’t really keep a recipe except for the proportions of ingredients for the crust. My sister taught me how to make this dessert and it is one of my favorites. It is totally simple to make, and always a hit with guests. Her recipe was actually once published in the New York Times, I have to find it and post it in the future with her permission…
It is probably a Blackstreak Surgeonfish but don’t hold me to that as there are so many different bloody types of surgeonfish that it’s more than a tad confusing. Just make sure you haven’t purchased a poisonous aquarium specimen. Relatively large at about 1.8 kilos, the fish was reasonable at just P80 a kilo.
I love linguini a la vongole (white clam sauce), clams possilipo (tomatoes, etc.), clams oreganata (breadcrumbs, oregano and bacon), clam chowder, etc. I hate raw clams (once ordered them at age 12 at the Windows of the World restaurant at the now obliterated World Trade Center) that are chewy and worse, unclean clams.