Market Manila

A weird combination title for a post, I will grant you that. But read on and you will understand. We had to attend a funeral this morning at Loyola Memorial Park, Marikina. We had never been there before so we went pretty early to ensure we were there with lots of time to spare. We got there half an hour early and parked under the shade of a large tree, turned off the engine (don’t you just hate folks who keep their engines running while parked?) and lowered the car windows. I was truly enjoying the breeze and the wonderful 75 degree temperature and somewhat cloudy/sunny skies. The park, at first glance seemed like such a serene place to be laid to rest, and I was lulled into a feeling of great comfort that anyone placed here would be happy forever. If the temperature in Manila were like this year round, I would think I had died and gone to heaven. At any rate, as we were sitting there, we were taking in the landscape and watching the incredible amount of activity in the immediate area… After several minutes, I decided the memorial park was instead an incredible microcosm of many of the things that make this country such a basketcase in so many ways… Instead of a flat sea of green grass marked by noble uniform white tombstones, the landscape was, to say the least, a bit lubak-lubak or uneven. And I don’t mean rolling terrain, I mean unnaturally uneven and ankle twisting material. Worse, the fields had two kinds of grass, nicely manicured Bermuda over interred bodies that obviously were willing to pay for it, and carabao grass allowed to grow wild for either empty plots of owners who obviously weren’t willing to pay an extra fee or empty plots… So what you get is a checkerboard effect of lush verdant plots against nearly brown and dying ones. From far above, one would be forgiven if he mistook the place as prosperous haciendas next to blighted farms.

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The shocking finding of some recently publicized American medical experiments on dieting concludes: “To lose weight, you have to either eat less, exercise a lot more, or do a little of both…” Duhh. I think taping one’s mouth shut and handcuffing yourself to a perpetually moving (no brownouts) treadmill for a few weeks is the only guaranteed weight loss system. Then again there is leaving you in the middle of the Sahara dessert with just water and a rudimentary map to the next oasis. Or hanging you upside down from a massive Mango tree so you get a headache from the blood rushing to your head and you would have difficulty swallowing any large amounts of food and liquid. Maybe sticking me in a room with the Shittybank executive responsible for credit cards for 10 days straight would also allow me to lose weight, albeit through giving him/her a continuous earful about the ills of their ilk… So, essentially, eat less and eat better. Get off my rear end writing posts and pace incessantly as I formulate my next complaint letter or read the daily newspaper. Which by the way, if you have the Philippine Daily Inquirer today, January 30, 2007, please read the two-page paid letter of Kit Tatad in the main section. I don’t know him from Adam, but he wrote a political message that I really enjoyed reading…

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The first attempt at melding wagyu beef with some greens was a bit of a disappointment in that the beef was superb tasting but the cucumbers and tomatoes were a weak, watery foil to the beef. So I decided to add substance to the greens and at the same time, try to make the wagyu with more of a Thai dressing that would hopefully make the whole salad a bit more substantial, pop out more at your tastebuds. So for the base of Salad Version 2, I used crisp small romaine or cos lettuce leaves and added some slices of cucumber and tomato. You could easily add some seedless grapes for a touch of sweetness (the best Thai Beef Salad I have eaten was at the Oriental Hotel, their restaurant beside the river, which added grapes to their beef salad, excellent!).

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An in-law’s father passed away over the weekend. A friend’s mom also suddenly passed away as well. It was a weekend where you drop everything else and try to be of some help… wherever the bereaved family needs it. So when Tita N requested that I do the flowers for her husband’s wake, I of course said “yes.” I have only ever made one arrangement for a single previous wake, so let’s just say this was probably out of my comfort zone. But let me step back a bit and say two very clear memories stick in my mind if you mention the word “wake”: the first was the coverage of Jackie Kennedy Onassis’ funeral, where her mahogany casket was only adorned by thousands of lilies of the valley, in the shape of a cross, and done by the florist Robert Isabell. Thank goodness Jackie O died when lilies of the valley were in season… And they must have found every single bloom on the planet available on the day of her funeral. The second memorable wake-related snapshot in my mind was in my teenage years, as I passed a florist in New York City, and they were preparing a “blanket” to drape over a casket, and on that blanket was a sea (figuratively) of over a hundred white enormous cattleyas (orchids). It was stunning in conception, stunning in the extravagance of using several dozen of the finest Hawaiian grown cattleyas and stunning just simply to behold. I lingered outside the window of that florist to watch for a few minutes and wondered if the person who would be under it would appreciate the blanket…

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I was experimenting a few days ago with the wagyu yakiniku that I also posted about many months ago; I wanted a healthy-ish beef and vegetable salad for a diet-ish lunch. Wagyu beef, the generic cattle behind the famous Kobe Beef (perhaps 99% of which has never felt a masseuses gentle/brutal touch nor gotten drunk on Kirin beer, by the way, despite persistent apocryphal stories to the contrary) is pretty darn good, in my opinion, in small doses. I wanted the taste of a little beef but also a lot of vegetables to temper the dastardly fat content of the beef. Grown in Mindanao somewhere, I have found the yakiniku cuts to be well-marbled and while fatty, very yummy…

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This was a spectacularly good morcon. I had all these great plans to do tons of Christmas favorites last December, but as usual, I got swamped with everything else and didn’t get to all the planned posts. As a kid, I didn’t like morcon much as it was typically very dry and somewhat tasteless. The tomato-ey sauce that often accompanied morcon was what made it bearable for me. And this wasn’t a big dish in our household growing up so I never really developed a childhood fondness for it the same way many readers waxed poetic about this, galantina, rellenong manok,etc. in the run-up to holiday posts last year. So after my somewhat tasteless results on galantina, I was a bit skeptical about yet another anchor dish at the Pinoy holiday table…

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I was out of town for two days for a photo shoot. I was not the “shooter” but rather the “shootee.” Oh my gosh is right. Oh my gosh is right. The combination of trepidation, embarrassment, self-consciousness and egads-ness all wrapped up into the same very long extended moment (an entire day!). I always oddly wondered what it was like to have those round light reflector thingees trained on a subject in professional photo shoots. Well, I wonder no more… they are hot. Bloody hot. Hahaha. I can laugh about this now, as I did later in the day of the shoot as well, but I started off the morning with a serious amount of anxiety… I can’t say much more about this at the moment. The results might be so shockingly bad that it will never make it to the public eye… but we won’t know for months so don’t hold your breath. And bad results wouldn’t be the fault of the photographer, stylist or their phalanx of assistants… more likely the real cause would be the incredibly outrageous amount of middle aged fat that has gathered around my neck area that would make me the perfect candidate for one of those “before” shots for some dubious cosmetic surgeon. Now I completely understand the concept of unflattering angles. I actually had a great time. Thank you to the totally professional crew of folks that chose to endure a day with a suddenly insecure Marketman. Keep tuned for more information on this adventure, but for now, the sneak preview photo above was snapped by one of my own crew in between “takes” for the real thing. Notice how “white and bright” the soles of my humongous feet are…that is the effect of those round light reflector thingees! Heeheehee.

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This somewhat unusual conical stainless steel strainer is called a chinoise, or a chinois if yours happens to be male. I am not sure why it is called that (sometimes it is translated into “China Cap”) and although I am sure I have read it somewhere before, I am not so curious that I would spend hours researching the matter. The easy guess is that it somehow evoked in some cook’s mind the fact that it looked like a Chinese person’s hat or cap, though that would seem to indicate a more traditional wire mesh strainer that looks more like a half melon rather than a conical strainer. At any rate, this is one cooking item that may eventually have a name change for politically correct reasons. I happen to think it is very elegant to call it a chinoise, but that is just me. My chinoise is quite large with a diameter at the mouth of the strainer of at least 10 inches. Some models feature a screen mesh but mine is simply made of stainless steel and has tiny perforated holes for the soup, stock, sauces, etc. to filter through. It has clips to latch onto the side of stockpot and by virtue of its length, it is obviously for use in deep large pots…

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