Dayap & Dalandan Juice
Tue 23 Aug 2005
The simplicity and pure taste of the santol juice in an earlier post 
had me thinking about the basic flavors used in local juices. My current cold/cough also means I am craving anything with a high Vitamin C content. Because the markets were flooded with really nice small dayap last weekend, I overbought as usual. I made a pitcher of dayap juice using about 1.5 kilos and it yielded about 6-8 glasses. These fruit had superb flavor. It is best described as bracing, clean and clear citrus essence at its best. The fruit weren’t as juicy as lemons or larger limes but the flavor was impressive. Squeezing the juice out of them was a little bit of a workout.
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An inefficient digestive system means they are unable to extract much from each mouthful so they have to pass serious volume through their plumbing to keep nourished. If they had to shop at the Salcedo market for their bamboo shoots at PHP40 a kilo, they would have to spend upwards of PHP2,000 a day on bamboo – yikes, that’s about PHP730,000 or USD13,000 a year! Now where would a panda bear get that kind of money just looking adorable and cute, albeit endangered? But seriously, the rains usher in all kind of new growth and bamboo shoots are here in a big way. I bought some brilliant looking bamboo shoots last year from Nueva Vizcaya and stir-fried them Chinese style. No one told me you had to BOIL them first and I nearly had throat seizures… how can a Panda digest that???
Wracking our brains for a nice place to eat a midday meal, another friend suggested Milky Way Café on the corner of Pasay Road and Paseo de Roxas. It’s funny how old restaurant favorites fall to the wayside when you get caught up in new cuisines, visit new restaurants, move out of town for a while, or when a massive and protracted labor strike closes down the original… The original Milky Way is just about as old as I am and I remember the old Milky Way mostly for its ice cream. The updated version is a professional upgrade that applies all of the best of modern culinary knowledge to some old Filipino and international favorites. The Gamboa family behind this familiar brand name know their food. The chef behind Milky Way Café is the same one behind the superb El Cirkulo Restaurant in the same building.
Yum. Street food converted to a high brow home dessert. First take a perfectly ripe (I like mine shy of ripe) saba banana and slice it thinly but not all the way through. Make at least 4-5 cuts and fan the banana out. Dip in a mixture batter of flour, water and egg and deep fry until a crisp golden brown and the banana is cooked through. Drain on paper towels to remove any excess fat. You can eat these plain or sprinkle with some powdered sugar for some sweetness. They are terrific like this.
become a relatively popular fruit in the Philippines and Indonesia. Known as langsat in Malay, these fruits grow wild and in cultivated plantations in Southeast Asia. Most common in Borneo, Java and Mindanao, these tropical fruits ripen and spoil relatively quickly and are rarely seen in the West. In the Philippines, over 75 % of all lanzones is grown in Sulu province, a revelation for me as I always thought Laguna and the Southern Tagalog region was the primary area of cultivation outside of Camiguin in Misamis Oriental – hmm. Camiguin is known for its annual lanzones festival and their fruit is supposed to be unusually sweet and delicious. In Luzon, the lanzones season has just started and will last another 5-6 weeks at most. In the South, Mindanao has lanzones from January to April.
places to be on the entire planet, I lived just a stone’s throw away from the Aquino residence in the suburbs of Boston. If Cory or Ninoy were cooking up a pot of adobo I could probably smell it downwind from their kitchen. I didn’t know the Aquino family but in the previous year I saw Ninoy speak twice in the Boston area. I think Ninoy was a visiting lecturer at Harvard and/or MIT and he spoke at Boston College just a few months before he returned to Manila, that fateful August, only to be met by an assassin’s bullet. I was an undergraduate at Boston College and our campus on Chestnut Hill was directly across the street from the Aquino home while they were in exile. News of Ninoy’s murder reached the U.S. on the early morning of Sunday, August 21, 1983, a day after my 19th birthday…
He even forwarded a link to an article about a new fangled gadget that OXO is coming out with to make the task of slicing a mango easier – yikes! An American who spent many fond years here in the Philippines, he is convinced, as I am too, that some of the world’s best mangoes are from this country. So, while this post may seem superfluous for most, here is a quick run down on mango slicing. Before I get to the knife, however, I must put in a brief mention on eating a mango without any utensils at all.
that have survived a really hot and dry summer. In the past few weeks, fresh young ginger has been making it to the local markets and I got some for myself today. Ginger (Zingiber officinale) as it is photographed here is actually the rhizome of the ginger plant. It is an extremely important spice worldwide but is generally used in two forms – fresh in most southeast Asian cooking and dried in most western style cooking. India is one of the largest producers of ginger (more than half of the world’s entire crop) but it does grow in many other regions and countries around the globe.