Market Manila

I rarely buy our desserts for a dinner party. The one exception in the past has been the Vargas butter cake that I bury in fresh strawberries and cream. I have also ordered the Yulo chocolate cake for weekends at the beach. But I do like to make my own desserts and I typically lean towards a simple fruit concoction, a creme brulee or leche flan or a souffle if I am feeling ambitious. Guests often bring cakes when they come to dinner, and frankly, I don’t make great cakes, so I rarely try to whip one up for dessert. Especially not if I am slaving over the stove to get the main part of the dinner out. For the Filipino Christmas Dinner in the previous post, I was running a little harried the day before so rather than making dessert, I decided to order it instead. I had been meaning to try two “home bakers” for the past few months and now I finally had a good excuse…

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The first Christmas dinner this year had a Filipino menu in honor of a visiting balikbayan. The total guest list numbered around 20 people. Despite all the planning, the careful preparations, and tables set early, of course Mother Nature would choose to mess with the weather. So a last minute downpour meant a sudden retreat indoors, hastily transferring one of the dining tables and the bar before they were utterly soaked, and worst of all, figuring out how to get a roaring fire going in the barbecue to make a large paella and roast some chicken inasal… Yipes. The first dinner is always the toughest! As if that wasn’t disaster enough, I managed to break TWO digital cameras that afternoon or at least cause them nervous breakdowns and so the limited photos in this post. You will have to visualize the feast from the write-up…sorry about that! :)

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His real name isn’t David. He just turned one this past summer, and he had/has cancer and was undergoing treatment at that time. His mother emailed to ask me if I would post my gingerbread recipe last April or May so that she might attempt to do it while on a trip home from her overseas job in the Middle East. It was her son’s first birthday in June; but I understand from subsequent emails that she wasn’t able to make the gingerbread house on that trip… I felt a little bad because I got the recipe out a little late (on his birthday) and since we were on a trip abroad, couldn’t whip any gingerbread up. So here is my longshot Christmas pakulo for Christmas 2006… David’s mom, if you are out there and read this, the gingerbread house in the photo above is for your son. If you can manage to email me within 48 hours of this post (by Thursday noon, Manila time), and you can have the house picked up from say, Megamall, I would like to send this completely decorated home, done by the kids at a school that I help at, together with about a kilo of additional candy, for “David”… The school made 14 large houses this year, and they were distributed to various recipients including the Tenement School Taguig, PGH Children’s Charity Ward, St. Luke’s Pediatric Ward, Ang Muling Pagkabuhay ng Ating Panginoon Parish School Caloocan, Bukas Palad Foundation, Tondo Medical Center Pediatric Ward. But I reserved one for “David.” I have emailed David’s mom at the address she gave in April but have not heard back – she may have changed addresses or no longer frequents Marketmanila.com. I hope all is better with your son and that this little Gingerbread house will cheer the little one up… If I don’t hear from you by Thursday, I will donate the house to another children’s ward or similar charity…Merry Christmas!

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It’s origin is probably the classic French Galantine de Poulard, and for the last 40 years, I don’t recall ever eating a memorable Galantina, our localized adaptation to the classic dish. We never made this in our home, but often got them as presents and I was never thrilled with a slice of this served with some crackers or on bread. It always figured in Holiday buffets, simply because it was there. My wife’s family are far more the Galantina converts, they having grown up with a cook who was fantastic and made this dish very well. So it surprised me when one of the most requested dishes for the Christmas holidays from Marketmanila readers was for a decent Galantina… so here is my first attempt… not the finest result but with my suggestions, you guys can probably pull off a very decent Galantina indeed. And don’t let the descriptions intimidate you, this is really easy to do (follow the suggested shortcuts)…

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When I was about 14 years old, my mom was away for a couple of months on a trip, and my dad called from the office and said he had a couple of guests coming over for cocktails and dinner. When they got to the house, I had arranged for some pistachio nuts in a bowl to be served with cocktails (scotch, gin, whatever). But what I vividly recall from that evening was that one of the guests (supposedly a big-wig of some sort) popped several unshelled pistachio nuts into his mouth and he started crunching through the tough hard shells. I think he was so embarrassed by his “duhh” mistake that he just kept on chewing and swallowed all of the shells chased with a lot of scotch!!! Geez, I hope the stomach acids dissolved those shards or he would have had a nasty plumbing job the next day! I quickly opened a few pistachio nuts and discarded the shells in the provided receptacle to indicate how it was meant to be eaten, rather than being myself and saying something totally tactless like “hello?!? feeling like a squirrel, are we?” Lesson learned that evening? Know your nuts and know how to eat them…

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My favorite foodie movies include: Age of Innocence, for its spectacular cinematography of the numerous elegant meals that take place in upper crust, turn-of-the-century New York, with the exquisitely dressed tables and all of the attendant porcelain, silver, etc. I also loved Babette’s Feast for the utter single-mindedness with which Babette decides to put on the feast to end all feasts, despite her limited means. I also loved a recent English film, Gosford Park, that concentrated heavily on the inner workings of the manor staff and finally, I liked Kazuo Ishigura’s, Remains of The Day, on the lifelong dedication of a butler. For amusement, I loved the movie Tampopo on the Japanese love for noodles… I mention these movies because I think there is a part of me that would fit in better in a different era of dining and entertaining, but I couldn’t permanently move there without my airconditioning, kitchen aid mixer, Viking stove and computer with internet hookup… When we have our December holiday parties, we pull out all of the stops and these are major events in the household. Aside from the careful planning and acquisition of food, the preparation and cooking and the serving, there are a whole lot of other tasks that are required to make a truly memorable meal…

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We must be one of the few countries in the world that can legitimately claim a different set of seasons from the rest of the planet… We have three: Dry and Hot Summer Season, Wet and Humid Rainy Season and the Fabulous and Fantastic Christmas Season…each lasts about 3 to 4 months each!!! While malls start their Christmas music on September 1st, we never really used to get into the Christmas décor until the first week of December and never hung our parol(s) until December 1st, at the earliest. There is nothing that heralds the onset of the Christmas holidays in our home like the hanging of our Parol or Christmas lantern. We have always preferred classic white paper parols but we have occasionally strayed from that pure and simple version (which we always made at home) and have purchased colored Pampanga-style lanterns as well as natural capiz shell lanterns… I wrote about the classic parol/farol last year, and I continue to lament the disappearance of the paper versions from the streetside vendors, but such is progress…in fact, when was the last time you saw a paper lantern?! At our home, however bastardized and confused our holiday traditions might be, we ALWAYS have a parol along with our Christmas tree.

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Here is the Marketman & Family 2006 Gingerbread Edition… A Winter Scene in New England. And after attending the first Misa de Gallo this morning, a fitting post for today… Set on about 12 square feet of styrofoam, there are roughly three levels ranging about 5-6 inches from the lowest point to the highest point. I mention this because so many Gingerbread creations are on a flat base… we found this year that the hilly landscape really added to the visual interest. On the left of the scene is a red Vermont or New England style barn. It isn’t too visible but the dough was quite red because of food coloring. We also went a bit wild on the décor and laughingly refer to it as the ridiculously OTT (Over The Top) barn. While is it bizarre looking, oddly, it is apparently a New England tradition to paint some barns in totally bizarre designs (presumably to add visual interest to the landscape in a stark cold winter and/or to find the darn thing when everything else is buried under snow). This barn has a field with several horses contained within a picket fence. The back of the barn is a sharply rising mountainside with several “evergreen trees” growing out of it. The is a guy on snow shoes in the woods overlooking the barn. Beside the barn is casually strewn bicycle and on a bench up front is a “Lolo” feeding birds. The small figurines are made of resin, and each year we add to the collection…

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