Market Manila

There is something about incredibly fresh fish that looks like incredibly fresh fish. I know, that sounds dumb, but it is the same principle that applies to wine… until you have tasted really good wine AND really bad wine, you can’t really say when a wine is really good… Before the fish experts get crazy that I have misidentified these fish… I admit that I was vascillating between two Filipino names Tambacol, and Tulingan, and two English names, Mackerel Tuna and Skipjack Tuna. I have interchanged the use of names in other posts on this website so I am obviously unsure which is which. My crew refer to the fish photographed here as Tulingan and in different parts of the Philippines either the Mackerel Tuna or the Skipjack Tuna or both are referred to as Tulingan…

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Manila has just been ravaged by the strongest typhoon we have seen in decades. With winds gusting to 200KPH when the center of the storm crossed at midday Thursday, we saw tree after tree uprooted (photo above is our back yard, it was decimated) and neighbors’ roofs take off and just spectacular damage all across the city. We have no lights and will probably not have them for several more days. Marketman and family have temporarily moved to another location with very limited internet access and so I will be relatively quiet for the next few days. We are all fine. But many Manila residents are not. I hope all of you and your relatives are safe. It was a spectacular storm… But I am sure daylight tomorrow will show just how much we have to fix and repair… Hopefully things will normalize in a few days. P.S. I can’t believe more folks voted for their favorite pork dish in the poll question than have left a message for a UNICEF donation to Guimaras! Keep those comments coming please!

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I wanted to take this opportunity to reiterate just how much I appreciate your comments. Apparently, 95+% of Market Manila’s regular readers (who visit more than 3x a month) have rarely, if ever left a comment on this blog. Yes, that’s 95+%. That means that the vast majority of readers fall into the “voyeuristic” category that happily read the posts but don’t feel compelled to leave a comment, if only once in a while. I personally feel that the comments section of each post is almost as useful (or sometimes more so) as the main post itself…not only on controversial issues but on issues that are all obviously close to our hearts or stomachs. We all learn so much more from the comments, but participation does help. The comments add to our knowledge, they build on the sense of a community of like minds, with a passion for food, the Philippines, whatever; and selfishly, they let me know that someone, somewhere out there on the planet is reading the foolishness I am writing once or twice a day. Your comments truly do matter and I truly appreciate the regular and occasional commenters on this site. And if you notice the content of many of the comments, they seem to be so intelligent, humorous, thoughtful, intense, comprehensive, helpful etc. and I believe they directly mirror the type of folks who keep returning to this site day after day or week after week from all over the Philippines and over 80 countries worldwide!

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The Kid is home sick for the second day in a row. Some vile flu bug is going around her school. I distinctly remember when I was sick as a kid; sick meant lugaw or pospas in our house. It eventually turned into an incredible comfort food for me but I still associate it mostly with being sick. I’m not sure why it was standard fare when one was sick since most of the times it was a cold, cough, flu etc. which had nothing to do with the tenderness of one’s stomach… but nevertheless, if you were ill, you had to eat pospas. Frankly, when one is sick and feeling blah, do you really want to eat bland food? I always craved highly sour or salty foods when sick, and thankfully, my mom tolerated these requests and often obliged by bringing home a pack of salty sweet sampaloc from Mercury Drug or even that banned substance made in sweaty Chinese armpits (reference was my mom’s, not mine) red kiamoy.

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The most pungent of aromas was wafting out of our kitchen a few days ago and since I am on a quasi-diet and my sense of smell is heightened when it comes to food, I just had to get up and stick my head in the kitchen to see what was cooking. Omigosh, a fantastic kawali full of binagoongang baboy (pork with shrimp paste) was the crew’s lunch that day. I love this stuff but I resisted the urge to have some as well as I cannot eat this dish without a LOT of white rice. Throw in some pickles of some sort like burong mangga or achara and I would have consumed nearly a thousand calories in one sitting…

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My sukis at the Nasugbu market practically screech with glee whenever they spot me coming into the seafood section early on a Saturday morning. “Here comes that tall fleece-able tourist from Manila!” is likely what they are thinking to themselves. Show him some live prawns, prepare your biggest alimango, thrust those talakitoks still gasping for air (isn’t it weird that they gasp for air when they are out of the water?) into his line of vision and you will make your first sale and to a male at that (good luck daw to have a bueno mano buyer that is a guy). For some reason, I go along with this silliness, and I know I am getting fleeced, but I am just so happy to be there that paying an extra PHP10-20 per kilo is simply the cost of my not speaking Filipino as fluently as I should and acting like a hardass all of the time. This is my contribution to the trickle down theory of economics, it’s fine with me…

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Entertaining well at home need not be expensive. In fact, I find that I feed more folks better food, for less than a meal in a decent restaurant, when I invite them home for dinner. Plus you can linger and chat all you want without neighbors overhearing your juicy conversations and eat with your hands if that is preferable… Entertaining usually includes dressing up your table a bit. Which typically means there is a centerpiece, and traditionally that meant some flowers. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be flowers and it doesn’t necessarily have to cost an arm and a leg. As I get older, I stray further and further from the traditional and have experimented with more unusual centerpieces, often with interesting results. I completely understand why many painters from the past 5+ centuries have focused on still life paintings of fruit, flowers and produce…their shapes are so natural, colors so striking and form so comfortable. But most traditional oil paintings or even photographs tend to feature western produce… say a bowl of cherries, some plump grapes, a ceramic vase filled with sunflowers…

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Fifty pesos or roughly one U.S. dollar doesn’t generally buy very much these days, or does it? I was at the Nasugbu market over the weekend and for some reason it seemed to be bursting with all kinds of things that caught my fancy. I always find markets visually appetizing, with the freshness, shapes, patterns and colors of produce always getting my creative juices flowing. While I don’t normally go to the market with a budget or lists, I just buy what seems to be best that day, oftentimes with disastrous results like having too many chilies and not enough eggplants. But if you go with your gut feel and buy what’s in season, you will generally do well and spend less. Here’s a run down of what I was able to purchase for PHP50 on each item… it’s an interesting result, to say the least.

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