Fried Garlic Peanuts
Freshly fried peanuts with garlic and salt are really good. 
I used to buy those little brown paper bags filled with fried peanuts as a kid (you know the ones that absorb all the excess oil into the paper) outside school or later as an adult when I worked for a bank in Makati. I never bothered to try and cook them myself as it was so easy to just buy them. But since I started this website, I find that my food radar is on more often and I am more than willing to try food related adventures that I hadn’t thought of before. So when I found this great dried legume and fresh nut vendor in the Baguio market, I purchased a bag filled with a kilo of freshly peeled peanuts with their skins on for PHP80 with the intention of trying to make my own fried peanuts. I also bought some great garlic on the way home so I was all set for my fried peanut experiment.
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locations around the Philippines as the markets and other tourist traps are chock-full of Good Shepherd wannabees… I wasn’t consciously keeping track but noticed the same kind of plastic containers and similar labels with brands like Shepherd Shepherd, R&B Shepherd, Mother Shepherd, Little Shepherd and Sheep Shepherd (doesn’t a shepherd herd sheep or do sheep herd shepherds? Heeheehee). I made a special trip to the Good Shepherd base outside Baguio (beyond the Mines View site) to see what the original purveyor of peanut brittle and other goodies had to offer. I had not been there in over 30 years and was kicking myself as they really do have some of the yummiest peanut brittle I have ever tasted. Finely chopped peanuts in a delicious wafer thin caramel and flavored with just a touch of butter that is cut and expertly packed into cylindrical plastic bottles and sell for PHP95 for 500grams… what a deal!
Read on for the amusing answer. They are up to their eyeballs in avocados at the markets right now! What is usually a fairly long season from May to September, the weather this year must have played a role in the massive volume and timing of avocados from mid to late June. Avocados (Persea Americana) are relatively new to the Philippine archipelago, introduced about 100 years ago by the Spaniards who got the seeds from Mexico. The fruit was introduced again in the early 1900’s by the Americans who, working with the Philippine Department of Agriculture, introduced the fruit from plants in Hawaii. A native of Mexico or thereabouts, all of the 500+ varieties of avocado on the planet today are descended from one of three original types of fruit from the Central American Peninsula. The fruit thrives in the Philippines and it is estimated that we produce nearly 50,000 tonnes of the fruit every year, mostly in backyards as opposed to organized plantations, according to government estimates.
market is Binatog, a warm concoction of boiled corn, coconut, sugar and milk. Last year I happened to be in Baguio on a record cold morning (8 degrees celsius or roughly 46.5 degrees fahrenheit, the coldest temperature in nearly 10 years!) and noticed a crowd buying cups of binatog from a vendor near the entrance of the Baguio market. I couldn’t be bothered to wait in line at the time and missed out on the warm snack. This time around, the temperatures were less frigid and the vendor had fewer customers so I decided to try some of his binatog. This must be a relatively unique Filipino concoction, a warm variation on the theme of mais con hielo, perhaps.
ungodly hour to trek to a market and poke around. Occasionally, the hunt yields a brilliant find… in this case, superb Sagada grown oranges. I always knew that the North was producing more and more oranges of various varieties and quality levels. A big article in one of the local papers just last year chronicled the travails of growers who were finding it difficult to match the price of cheap imports, etc. So I was not surprised to find several vendors in the Baguio market offering “Sagada Oranges.” But one vendor in the center of the market had a box filled with enormous and unblemished oranges, claiming they were not only from Sagada but sweet and seedless to boot. They were some of the best looking oranges I have seen in the local markets so I started to bargain. At a starting price of P160 a kilo, this was nosebleed material. I haggled it down to P120 a kilo and bought just over one kilo with the intention of tasting them back at the hotel and returning if I needed to buy more.
dismayed by the quality of produce on offer. Like I said in my post for the Salcedo market, this is close to the worst month for greens… the end of an extremely hot summer that has wilted just about everything, the start of the rainy season that rots everything and those factors combined with school starting (so everyone’s pocketbooks are strained and are buying less at the markets) makes for a very depressing market landscape. I was going to write on the FTI AANI Weekend market but decided to put it off for another day when it has better stuff…wouldn’t want to get you all so excited and you make a visit only to find mediocre offerings. At any rate, in a fit of Marketman madness, we decided on short order to jump into the car and drive up to Baguio for a dose of cooler weather and to see if there really was a dearth of veggies on offer from the bountiful North. So, here goes… a spell of Marketmanila in Baguio for the next couple of days. First The Good: the Baguio market is as good as ever with wonderful produce, fruit and even rice and legume selections. There was a noticeable reduction in choices due to the end of the tourist season and weather related farm output but most of the stuff on offer still looked very fresh. I spied great looking watercress, zucchinis, avocados, peppers, etc. Prices were way below astronomical Manila levels but you do have to bargain as some of the locals try to take you for a ride.
University website on tropical fruits. Our name, santol, is very close to the malay term for the fruit – sentul. The tree has since spread to most of Southeast Asia and also thrives in India. It is probably the only tree in the Meliaceae family that has edible fruit. The outer pulp of the fruit can be extremely unpalatable and astringent when the fruit is unripe but miraculously transforms itself into a sweet and flavorful ripe specimen. I love santol. I spent a few years of my childhood in Quezon City and in our front yard we had a humongous “Bangkok” santol tree that must have been a good 40 feet tall, or so it seemed to a short toddler… There are essentially two local varieties of santol, the “native” one with smaller fruits and the imported “Bangkok” hybrid that was first introduced over 50 years ago.
By all accounts, the month that I was away was wickedly hot, but now we have the twin downer of heat and high humidity! But weather report aside, it was time to hit a market — and better yet, a market having a birthday party. The Salcedo market has turned a year old — a terrific idea, that not only became a reality, it has grown to a substantial size in just 12 months. The residents from around the area are thrilled to have such a nice place to go to on Saturdays, stock up on produce and other goodies, eat some paella, barbeque and ethnic specialties and not have to pay P40 parking to some mall opertor (sorry, I digress into a pet peeve - did you realize that if you go to a mall grocery with your car and spend just P1,000 and pay P40 in parking you have added 4% cost to your groceries!!?)…