Market Manila

I think I have developed a sixth sense for some things food related. Heehee, read on and decide for yourselves… I only have a subscription to Gourmet Magazine that arrives at our home every month. In addition, I keep a list of back issues of Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Australian Vogue Entertaining and Saveur Magazine. I have that list in my wallet because I buy back issues when they have dropped the price to say just PHP150 or PHP100 an issue from the original PHP400-550! I troll through all those magazine stores and slowly accumulate roughly 75-80% of all the back issues for a given year if I have been vigilant…and I save money in the process…after all, food isn’t generally that time sensitive and I never have enough time to read through a current issue of a magazine anyway. However, occasionally, I buy the Thanksgiving issues hot off the press, or a Christmas issue if there is a recipe that I might want to try that year. But that is rare, I don’t like to pay full price when I don’t have to. This morning, I was at National Bookstore and I spied the December issue of Saveur and while sealed in plastic, I felt a very strong urge to buy it without checking the recipes inside…

Read more…

Here we go again…another super typhoon bearing straight down on Metro Manila. As if we needed yet another howler to take off our roofs, wreak havoc with the electric lines, destroy our just replaced capiz garden lights, outdoor Christmas decor, replanted garden, re-stocked freezers, etc. I already had to cancel a planned Christmas office dinner with my team flying in from Cebu, still wondering if I can paksiw an entire 20 kilo lechon ordered for the event, worried about supplies for the next week or two… Hmmm, so at the risk of going off-line for several days with a blackout, I am writing this post now on the Top 20 Soup recipes I have featured in this blog over the past two years. Please click the links to get to the original posts and recipes. I hope all of you based in Luzon and especially those in the path of the storm code named “Durian” of all fruits, remain safe and out of harm’s way in the next day or two…

Read more…

Amazing what a catchy name will do for your popularity. Naïve that I am sometimes, I thought the name “Passion Fruit” was coined because the fruit ignited one’s libido or acted as some sort of aphrodisiac, or if I were to make a more graphic definition, that the texture, consistency and look of the pulp and seeds would react with one’s gonads in the same manner that raw oysters are supposed to have a similar effect… But my trusty reference books suggest otherwise, and I was nearly floored to read that the fruit seems to get its name from quite an opposite source to the whole “fired loins theory”… It seems, according to Alan Davidson in the Oxford Companion to Food, that the flower of this fruit is known as flor de las cinco lagas or “flower of the five wounds” and missionaries in South Ameirca used this to illustrate the cruxifiction of Christ and thus the Passion and from there… Passion Fruit! Yikes, talk about being way off the mark…

Read more…

I bet 99% of you wouldn’t have guessed that the Chinese Five Spice Powder that I made in the previous post was a critical requirement for this fabulous looking and tasting turkey… Yup, I have cooked this turkey recipe at least three times since I first saw it in the 2002 Thanksgiving Issue of Gourmet Magazine and their recipe is now, thankfully, on-line. It is extremely simple to do and results in a burnished, Copacabana-tanned skin that is incredibly appetizing, with the most flavorful of gravies. The fact that the recipe includes Damson Plum jam makes it a real keeper. It is a Marketman favorite. This 12 pound bird (don’t you just hate it when they aren’t 20-25 pounds at least – I mean who really wants to cook a petite Turkey??!) took just 2 hours and 40 minutes to cook (stuffing cooked separately). As it was roasting, we made a couple of different siahwa of stuffing. Throw in some baked sweet potatoes and perhaps one green vegetable dish and you have an “express” Thanksgiving meal. If you are looking for a nice holiday meal this December, this is a definite option. Not much fuss, very little last minute preparation and impressive looking results… Totally doable in Manila.

Read more…

Part of the added stress of living and cooking in Manila is the lack of reliable and well-stocked groceries and provedores. I needed some five-spice powder the other day and waited until the last minute to check to see if I still had some. Of course I didn’t and in a slight panic, rushed off to Landmark grocery that almost always has it. Of course they didn’t. So I took a wild guess and grabbed some star anise and coriander seeds and hoped for the best. Back home, the internet yielded the five spices I needed - cinnamon, star anise, cloves, szechuan peppercorns and fennel seeds. I had everything except fennel seeds and substituted anise seeds instead (the latter being lest sweet). Don’t ask me why I guessed coriander to be among the required spices. I all the five spices in a mini blitzer and voila!, homemade five spice powder! It certainly looked like the stuff I needed, it smelled like the stuff I needed, and I hoped it tasted like the stuff I wanted! If you want the maximum aroma from the szechuan peppercorns, toast them a bit before blitzing them… I suppose this is the chinese equivalent of the French quatre-epices. The recipe using five spice powder, coming up…

Read more…

Last Thursday was Thanksgiving. But there was no turkey roasting in our oven. We had foregone our annual Thanksgiving meal for a chance to dine on “An Ancient Roman Dinner” prepared by Margarita Fores, held at the reknown Goldberg Mansion beside Malacañang, by the Societa Dante Alighieri – Manila, for the benefit of the Pundaquit Orchestra / Casa San Miguel Foundation. We arrived at around 7:30 at 840 Solano Street, the equally old and proud residence beside the Goldenberg Mansion, for cocktails and appetizers. Its impressive façade, the large driveway, upon which the horse carriages could maneouver (if I hadn’t been so stressed, I would have arranged for a carriage from Ayala bridge so that we could make a Bond entrance!), the gardens and beautiful lighting all set the stage for an elegant evening which would hopefully take us back a century or so to a time when dinners were how they were meant to be. Rising up some wide stairs designed so the flowing gowns of the residents or guests could easily swish behind them as they made their grand entrance to the sala…) we entered a huge sala with several large chandeliers.

Read more…

Marketman is TOTALLY CRAZED. I have seen a newly decapitated chicken run around and the phrase “running around like a headless chicken” is totally and utterly apt at the moment. First work was busy last week and I was out of town. Then a mini-crisis of the good sort at the school that I help out at meant nearly three sleepless nights last week preparing a presentation that could make or break a situation. Then Google for some bizarre reason, totally dropped Marketmanila from its records and its robots were repelled by some bizarre bug in my system that I will never understand — my conspiracy theory has some disgruntled reader or person whose food I wrote about as being horrific sent their techy friends to attack me… But the Google issue seems to have been fixed now but 800 of my old posts will have a tough time crawling their way back to the top 10 of just about every search done on the underlying subject matter. Then I had the dinner last thursday, presentations Friday, 18 hours of sleep recovery Saturday and the realization that BAM! Christmas is just a month away! So let’s just say I am running around like a crazy person, arms flailing above my head, chanting nonsense as I stress out over the holidays…

Read more…

Sigarillas, Sigadillas or Sigarilyas or Winged Beans (Psophocarpus tetrogonolobus) was another purchase in my market basket yesterday. A plant native to Southern Europe (?!), this vegetable grows abundantly in Southeast Asia and its flavor suggests a hint of asparagus to some people. Almost squarish in shape, the “corners” have a frill that is perhaps the origin of the English name “winged beans.” I often see this bean in lengths of 6-8 inches or more and I always thought they were a bit tough… I read in my Encyclopedia of Asian Food and Cooking by Jacki Passmore that it should be harvested and consumed when it is NO MORE than 2.5 inches long… that would make sense to me as the texture would be softer/younger and the flavor more evocative of the asparagus…

Read more…