Streetside Donuts
Around the corner from the seafood section of the Nasugbu market is our favorite rendezvous. 
Or “run-des-voos” as my Assistant/Chief of Stuff (COS) likes to pronounce it. No, it’s nothing tryst-y, just the neighborhood Rendezvous Bakeshop with all the provincial or small town favorites on offer. Outlandish sweetish breads with red food coloring in the middle to mimic a jam or other more costly fillings or palaman, bread with coconut fillings, cheese bits, chocolate swirls, etc. These are breakfast and snack fare, fillers to be had with your Nescafe or Coca-Cola. We buy loads for everyone in the house. But what I really like at Rendezvous are the piping hot donuts. Let it not be said that I only feature only high-brow food – at PHP2 per donut (USD 3.6 CENTS EACH), these are the economy food find of the year… sweetish dough rounds are all over the bakeshop rising until they are plunged into a huge vat of hot vegetable oil to create a golden crust that hides the soft chewy center.
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Get there too early and the fish haven’t arrived. Get there too late and there is nothing left. Go after a night of big waves and there are no fish on offer. After a strong moon, warm current, heavy rains, gosh knows what other maritime conditions affect the catch… But that is exactly what makes going to a quintessential medium-sized seaside town’s market something I look forward to every time I am at the beach. Add on the price premium for being unable to sound like a local and you have a real market adventure in the works…
to the beach for some rest and relaxation. Some rain is fine – it cools, it calms and it nourishes the plants that produce the oxygen we breathe. But too much rain is a real damper – it rained at least 48 hours straight! After the dominoes, game of LIFE, video games, DVD’s, books, etc. you just wanted to join the closest Association of Active Mold Spores! It was so wet and humid that you could just breathe in your daily suggested intake of 8 glasses of water… What to eat on such a rainy weekend? A large bowl of steaming hot sinigang na sugpo (spicy prawn soup). I posted an earlier recipe for tamarind 
you been for the last 20 years!?! Seriously, this is my favorite butter cake of all time. A Makati icon, it deserves to be in the Hall of Fame of home-cooked specialties. It is light, airy, consistent, flavorful, moist but not wet and sweet but not cloying. I have tried to make butter cake many times using many different recipes, many grades of butter, different pans, cooking temperatures, etc. but none has come close to this. The Vargas Butter Cake has been melting in people’s mouths for the past two decades, I think. The recipe is a closely guarded secret but I suspect one of the key components is canned rather than fresh butter. Somehow the intensity of flavor must come from a canned butter rather than the pathetic watery locally available butters. The lightness may turn off Western afficionados of butter cake that like it dense but this is a uniquely Filipino twist to butter cake… almost like the attraction some find for really pouffy mamon. Maybe if I hung around outside their house and rooted through their garbage I could figure out what makes this cake tick.
Guavas (Psidium guajava L.) are part of the huge Myrtaceae family that includes eucalyptus and even makopa. Though no one is certain, guavas are believed to have originated in Mexico or slightly further South in Central America according to Alan Davidson in the Oxford Companion to Food. Another expert source, Elizabeth Schneider, writes that they are native to Brazil… at any rate, they now flourish throughout the tropical world and are an extremely common backyard fruit in the Philippines. Until just two decades or so ago, the smaller more “native” guavas predominated. Today, millions of those backyard trees still exist but the more commercially oriented large shiny skinned hybrids are what we see in the markets at relatively steep prices. There is a tremendous variety of guavas from those the size of small grapefruit to those the size of a small apricot. They can be green, yellow or even orange in color and can be extremely pungent and flavorful when ripe.
Just as most bacons are reddish in color, I think in the old days this was a result of adding saltpeter or potassium nitrate or is it sodium nitrate to preserve the meat. We have gotten so used to reddish breakfast pork fare that we continue the tradition today mostly with red food coloring… On the same day I made tapang baka, I decided to make my first batch of tocino as well. Take some pork loin or boneless pork chops and slice thinly. For a kilo of pork add about 2-3 tablespoons of rock or kosher salt and 4-6 tablespoons of granulated white sugar. Press the salt/sugar mixture onto both sides of the meat and put this is a clean bowl to cure in the refrigerator for at least two days before frying or freezing for future use. Use more salt and sugar if necessary but keep the proportion the same (that means, more sugar than salt).
I did the modern version which is really more of a marinated beef than a cured beef but it still had the same taste and none of the hibbie jibbies that might occur if I air dried or otherwise salt curedbeef like they did/do traditionally. In the “old days,” I suspect that tapa was a result of the lack of refrigeration and the need to make beef or any other meat last for several more days. So as with ham in other countries, we treated meat with salt to preserve it. To make, I purchased about a kilo or more of medium sliced beef (sold as Filipino beefsteak cut, whatever part of the moo that’s from) and sliced it into smaller pieces. The finer the quality of the meat, the less tough the resulting tapa should be. I then used a meat pounder to smash the beef to tenderize, thin and spread it out. I did this instead of the more traditional torture process that involves a spiked mallet that seems to put lots of holes in the meat… After that I placed all of the meat in a mixing bowl and readied the spices…
most people would be offended if you described the pain you are encountering sticking to your South Forbes Diet while they worry about where their next carbohydrates are coming from. Some readers over the past few months have suggested that everything featured on this site is a bit “high-brow” and often out of their reach. While I will not apologize for some of the delicacies and luxuries that I have featured, I do get irked when people write such things without realizing that many of the recipes that I have described are in fact quite economical on a per serving basis. The same people who are likely to write these comments are just as likely to have said this after eating a PHP49 value meal of a deep fried chicken wing served with a bit of rice and wickedly fattening gravy… well, do they realize they could replicate that meal at home for less than PHP20 and not have to pollute the planet with one more styrofoam fastfood container? Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand the concept of value and of convenience, but many are missing the point if they are not cooking more economical, tasty and nutritious meals right in their own kitchens.