Cane & Orchids
After a non-nostalgic mouthful of fibrous sugar cane, I set aside the remainder of the 6 foot stalk 
and had good intentions of using it as skewers for sate or pork barbecue. A few days later, it was obvious I was not going to have an edible use for the sugarcane, so I was mulling the quick chuck into the trash can… but it seemed a real shame to just dump it. I decided to experiment and pulled out a ceramic cache pot or planter and stuck half a block of oasis (floral foam) in it. I cut the remaining cane into three varying lengths and stuck them into the oasis. Next I lodged a small piece of water soaked oasis halfway up the stalks and placed 4-5 short stems of orchids I had from the market into the oasis. I tied the bunch with twine just to make sure it stayed in place. The base was covered with dried moss. Total cost of this arrangement? About PHP30 for the cane and PHP40 for the orchids (oasis, twine and moss I had lying around)…
4 Comments Send this post to a friend
the market the other day so I bought it with the intention of just peeling, gnawing on the fiber and extracting all of the sugarcane juices. Then I thought I should really find out more about this plant/ingredient that figures so prominently in our food today and promptly got stuck for hours reading, exploring, googling, etc. That’s why there was no post yesterday! Here is the seriously distilled version of thousands of pages of incredible information on sugarcane and sugar. About two-thirds of the world sugar supply today comes from sugar cane (the rest from beets! and other plants) and Saccharum officinarum is the most prolific cane of all. Believed to have originated from a wild grass in New Guinea, it spread throughout Southeast Asia, then on to India where the recorded history there is extensive starting several centuries B.C., then the Middle East. It was later brought by the Spaniards and Portuguese to Central and South America which then all sparked off the slave trade from Africa, etc. etc.
I’m not sure if I want to laugh or cry. Continuing on the theme of sweet, easy peasy Filipino party food, I decided to examine this staple of many large Filipino gatherings. This must certainly be a throwback to the era of the 1960’s where our selection of canned or preserved food items was miniscule compared to what is on the grocery shelves today. Instead of concentrating our efforts on a superior tropical fruit salad (too much peeling!), think juicy pineapples, melons, mangoes, passion fruit, bananas, starfruit, dalanghita, etc…our mothers and grandmothers were turning western…cranking open a can of Dole or Del Monte mixed fruit, draining the pallid and limp contents and tossing in some canned cream and sugar and stirring gently. Chill in the refrigerator while getting those beehive hairdos done at the parlor…remember those dryers that looked like huge eggshells…this was definitely the new modern way to live!
Is this a holdover from 1950’s Filipino-American fusion cooking? Were our mothers so bowled over by Betty Crocker (the brand, not a real person, did you know that?) that we churned out a salad that was fundamentally unsuitable to a hot and humid tropical country where mayonnaise spoils faster than you can properly say and spell salmonella? Don’t get me wrong, I love macaroni salad. My mom made it for large gatherings with buffets laid out. I continued eating it at college cafeterias in the U.S. and later with terrific fried chicken that my sister used to and still makes. It just seems so odd that it would achieve such a vaunted position in our party food line-up in just the past few decades. According to my brief search for macaroni salad history, its earliest beginnings were in the United States in the 1950’s…
The Metro at the Ayala Mall in Cebu is enormous and packed to the gills with goods. I love it and always make it a point to shop there for pasalubongs, unusual imported goods not found elsewhere, or just to see what is on offer. Their prices are generally low and the selection downright impressive. I always wondered who did their purchasing or merchandising because they have some really unusual things, often items not otherwise distributed in the Philippines. The imported selection of cookies, munchies, teas, olive oils, etc. are sometimes even much better than the swankiest groceries in Manila. Well, if you didn’t already know, Metro is now in Manila, at the Market!Market! Mall of Ayala in Fort Bonifacio.
year-old Market!Market! Mall (outdoor market area) in Fort Bonifacio, Taguig. Just a few minutes drive from the Makati CBD and surrounding areas, the mall offers a bright, airy, clean, safe shopping environment for the vast majority of relatively upscale shoppers who live nearby and who are more mall rats than serious market foragers. You’ll see an early to mid-morning smattering of International School moms loading up on fruit and greens, a Makati housewife with cook in tow haggling for a peso or two discount while spritzed with expensive perfume, or neighborhood working professionals sitting down to a meal of Ineng’s barbecue or Buddy’s Pancit Lucban. The outdoor market has over 60 vendors that sell mostly flowers, plants, fruits, vegetables, grains, etc. There are a few seafood vendors but no butchers. Another huge section of vendors is just about to open and there should be a significant increase in the types of goods for sale.
it means to cook with vinegar and some spices and vegetables and the resulting brothy concoction is superb with tons of rice. Everyone has their favorite type of fish, whether bilong-bilong, those flat silvery fish, bangus (milkfish) or even apahap (sea bass). It is a very healthy dish as it is high in protein and good oils and generally low in fat. When applied to meats, however, paksiw not only means cooking with vinegar but often with sugar, soy sauce and in the case of paksiw na lechon, liver sauce. The resulting stews are often dark, substantial, artery clogging and absolutely delicious, also great with lots of rice! Take out your tooth floss as we explore paksiw na lechon a la Marketman…
and I felt so smug about the number of calories I had burned off… maybe in excess of 4,000! So when the weekend rolled along I was feeling like the invincible Marketman! That disheveled being that swoops in on unsuspecting markets and food stalls and acquires calories like there is no tomorrow. Saturday morning started with not one, but two, servings of Angus Beef Belly with mashed potatoes and garlic fried rice. We also bought a medium sized Vargas butter cake. And two humongous ensaymadas made more or less the old-fashioned way from a baker in Pampanga. My family shared a huge slab of roast beef also acquired from the Weekend Gourmet (see earlier post). We were celebrating a birthday in the house so I bought a couple of kilos of cebu lechon that I had with some of my homemade achara. I had ensaymada and biscocho for a snack, a reasonable dinner, a homemade session of “Frigid Rock” – Marketman’s home version of “Cold Stone” where I set out a chilled marble slab and mix all kinds of goodies into ice cream (more on this in a future post), and a final slice of cake with tea to put me to sleep. Sunday began with some wild boar tapa and rice. I also made some lechon paksiw which we had for dinner. For lunch we tried to be good and ate healthy Japanese. But what good is that if there is butter cake at home?