Market Manila

If you are observing meatless Fridays, here is an absolutely easy, delicious and healthy dish for you. I never feel like I am “abstaining” when I have a nice bowl of pasta, or a fillet of sole, or a broiled lobster for that matter, but I don’t make the rules on this Friday thing… To make, boil some water in a big pot and salt it generously (say ½ fistful of rock salt, yes a lot!). Drop some penne pasta into the boiling water. Heat up a large saucepan and add some good extra-virgin olive oil. When hot, throw in some small cherry tomatoes (in abundance at the markets these days) and toss until just bruised/wilted. Add the pasta cooked to al dente or “to the bite” and toss and turn off the flame. Add small cubes of fresh mozzarella and sprinkle with freshly chopped basil leaves. Add grated parmesan cheese if you want a second layer of cheesiness. Serve immediately with some freshly cracked black pepper. Few things are easier and as satisfying to make. The just-melting mozzarella is a perfect match for the warmed cherry or “grape” tomatoes and the fruity olive oil coated pasta. Yum and double yum. What kind of sacrifice is that? This is also good with the semi-dried tomatoes I like to make when there is a surplus of fresh ripe tomatoes…

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I am a huge fan of fresh herbs and I always envy those photographs of kitchen gardens that are just bursting with various herbs at the ready for the cook’s scissors. I also have a kitchen garden which has some hardy herbs like tanglad (lemongrass), pandan (screwpine leaves), oregano (nothing can kill this), basil, makrut (kaffir lime), laurel (bay leaves), mint, galangal (yellowish ginger) but I seem to have a black thumb so many of the herbs I buy don’t last too long. Seems my problem is the soil and drainage and many of the herbs I like require better drained and different nutrient rich potting mixtures. Oh well… Despite this “herbs springs eternal” attitude, I keep trying… and two months ago I bought a healthy little thyme plant for a whopping sum of PHP250 and have taken great care not to overwater it, give it too much sun or trim too many leaves. It is still alive and I am thrilled! Here you see it in the white and gold cachepot. I love fresh thyme particularly in my lemon and thyme chicken and surprisingly, as a touch of the unusual in my paksiw na lechon recipe.

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Several months ago we had a good family friend out at the beach for the weekend. RM is the guy who helped me get this blog started and also the one who generously doubled my book donation drive during the holidays. He had asked if I would teach him how to make some desserts, and I think the most sought after outcome was this Chocolate-Coconut Cake that he had spied in my Francois Payard booked entitled Simply Sensational Desserts. I have used dozens of recipes from this Payard book and have never been disappointed. In addition to this recipe, we cooked or baked about a dozen different desserts from leche flan to yemas to angel food cake (so much easier to cook in bulk…) and we had what is perhaps the highest sugar/calorie intake weekend ever…

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Finer Italian restaurants in the U.S. used to serve a side dish of broccoli rabe with garlic that I really took a liking to when I lived there many years ago. It is a bit bitter but delicious. I have never been able to get broccoli rabe here (though I found broccolini once) so I try to replicate a bit of the taste with regular supermarket broccoli. This is a perfect side dish to a roasted chicken or perhaps a pan-fried porkchop. Quick, easy and tasty…

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My previous post on a totally benign fish pan elicited an incredibly negative reaction from Mylai Dimaculangan, in her first comment on Marketmanila.com. I was prepared to take it at face value or with perhaps “it’s a bad hair day” explanation. But it didn’t stop there. She added two comments (that I deleted) that took personal swipes not only at Chris, a chef and regular commenter, and me as well. I thought it best to simply ignore the comments but on second thought decided I should perhaps address the issue of elitism after the equally strong reaction other readers had to the initial and most innocuous of Mylai’s comments. I found this brilliant photo of me (above) at the tender age of 3, furious when my 17 year-old brother teased me incessantly, probably about my plastic fish pan…heehee. Got your attention, didn’t it? And no, I am not furious about this incident, more amused, possibly saddened, really…

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Kitchen gadgets are almost always a “luxury”…you can get a pretty good meal on the table with just some matches, a sharp knife and perhaps a spoon or fork (besides the ingredients for the dish, of course!). However, if you get beyond that puritan ethic, a whole new world of things for the kitchen opens up and the acquisitive amongst you know exactly what I mean. I think my heavy duty Kitchen Aid mixer is a necessity for example, so is my Dualit bistro toaster, my mandoline, knives, etc. Sometimes these gadgets serve a really good purpose that nothing else seems to be able to do…and a good FISH PAN is really very useful…particularly in countries where serving whole fish at the table is a frequent sight. A good fish pan is a generously sized oval shape and it can fry up an entire fish.

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Another all-time comfort food favorite in our home is “Pesang Manok” or boiled chicken soup. As with almost any chicken broth based soup, there is something incredibly soothing and restorative about it, something homey and bound-to-make-you-feel-better regardless of what ails you. It could be a cold or bout of flu, or sometimes, when you are just feeling low… Pesang Manok with rice is basic, delicious, and memorable. As with many dishes, it also varies slightly from home to home. Until I decided to feature this simple yet satisfying dish, it never really occurred to me to wonder what “pesa” meant or where it evolved from…

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This is Visayan “comfort food” at its finest. The essence of this dish is burned into the memory banks of anyone who grew up in Cebu and the rest of the Visayas. As a kid, we used to visit our grandmother in Cebu and despite her being generous in every respect food wise, nearly every single meal served in her home included either a version of this utan (vegetable) dish or a soup with malunggay which has the same earthy taste, and I absolutely ABHORRED it at the time! But because we were showered with lechon, consilva (caramelized bananas), fruits, ice cream and broas (ladyfingers), you just had to grin and bear this soup/vegetable staple. Not to mention the gentle lecture on how nutritious it was and how brilliant our bodies would be if we consumed enough of it (she lived into her early 90’s)!

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