Galangal / Galingale
The more our palates surf the cuisines of Southeast Asia, the more we realize there are so many more herbs and spices to choose from to infuse our food with flavor… I lived in Singapore and Indonesia for many years but I must say I was not as intensely focused on the local food scene at the time as I should have been. Working an average of 16-18 hours a day, I more often than not ate at hotel restaurants but in some cases, experienced spectacular local food in friends’ homes. While the tastes of Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore always struck my palate as being shockingly good and shockingly different, I never quite figured out the details of their herbs and spices, nor did I get to cook any of it at the time. Only years later in semi-retirement, when I dabbled in some Thai cooking, and realized I missed several Indonesian dishes, did I get to know some of the critical herbs and spices. Today, I actually have a kaffir lime tree in my tiny kitchen garden, my own siling labuyo bushes and a thriving galangal plant given to me by an Indonesian friend…
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lunch wouldn’t be on the table until very late. We fired up the barbecue and we grilled some pork barbecue that I bought from Ineng’s (uncooked/frozen). I must say that I am not as happy with Ineng’s compared to their first year of business, as I find their barbecue now to be less weighty, less lean and overall less good. Their cheaper sticks look like one piece of stretched out pork skewered in a wave pattern on bamboo. Nevertheless, the frozen packs of 20 medium-sized sticks are convenient and great lunch fast food when my daughter has friends over (as she did today).
I am a spontaneous market shopper for the most part, and I enjoy spotting unusual finds or particularly good looking produce. What to do with my finds is a secondary issue, as I am just so thrilled with the raw ingredients themselves. Here are a few snapshots of what went into my basket(s) this morning…First up are the most stunning siling mahaba or long chillies that I have EVER seen in my life. They had clearly been picked at their finest just a day or less before getting to the market. They were displayed in a small basket although I spied another 10 kilos worth of the chillies in the background. At PHP100 a kilo, they were a tad pricey but quality costs…so I quickly picked up 500 grams for PHP50 and they would have made a fantastic still life for a painter or photographer…
she also had lots of colored glass from the 1940’s onwards. It was not a collection destined for a museum, but an incredibly varied and personal selection of items that caught her fancy. It was her hobby and it kept her busy and brought her much pleasure. She never treated the stuff like it was untouchable, quite the contrary in fact. As kids, my siblings and I played games using old coins, napped on graceful old hardwood furniture with solihia (woven cane), slept in huge creaky four poster beds swathed in mosquito netting while telling ghost stories, and took baths out of huge glazed ceramic bathtubs that were probably over 200 years old and whose water sometimes harbored bug larvae. The house had dozens of chandeliers and oil lamps hung a few feet apart…not to mention a grandfather clock that eerily tolled on the hour and and in 15 minute intervals… and if the clock didn’t spook you while you snuck to the kitchen for a glass of cold water, the resident tuckos (ghekos) or the shadows of the large swaying langka or tambis trees in the garden outside probably would do the trick. Lola’s house was one of a kind, truly memorable, to say the least. Every nook and cranny of the house was filled with knick-knacks, the only common characteristic being they were probably old, dug-up out of graves or purchased from folks who faked antiquity…
(see previous post), I decided to attempt both a Bibingkang Galapong (rice flour) and Bibingkang Malagkit (glutinous rice) this afternoon. I scheduled the bibingka-fest for about 3p.m. and everything was ready when I got home. The cook had been to the market earlier in the day and came home with galapong (rice flour, though ideally, it should be pre-soaked rice grains that are then ground up, not just dry rice flour). The weather turned an ugly dark gray and rain dampened the whole effort, literally. But not to be deterred, we kept at it, wondering if highly wet surroundings had any adverse impact on bibingkas…
Not at all. I was so excited to make bibingka that when I visited those bakeshops last week I quickly bought several bags of glutinous rice flour that indicated it could be used for bibingka. When I got home, I realized Bibinkang Galapong was in fact made with regular and not glutinous rice! And since I don’t have a grinder at home, I have to wait until the next time someone heads to the market to do a galapong version. At any rate, I found a super easy recipe for bibingka in my dog-eared Enriqueta David-Perez cookbook and added a tweak or two and what I got were these brilliant first attempts at making bibingka at home…
Often, these items are the most basic things we take for granted (like macapuno) but never bothered to find out more about. I have eaten hundreds of bibingkas in my lifetime but always considered them to be things I purchased rather than made myself. So a few months ago when at the market in Batangas, I decided to see it they sold an old-fashioned bibingka “oven” made from terra cotta pottery. For very little money, we found this version that had a pre-fabricated cement base and a more traditional terra cotta bowl. I took it home to Manila and realized I didn’t have the contraption for the coals above the bibingka and it was put away and promptly forgotten until last week…
