Market Manila

After a long stay at the beach, several waves of houseguests, meal after meal after meal of prepwork and cooking and clearing up and we are all typically wiped out. So on the way home, I like to leave the beach with the entire crew at around 9:30 am after a very light breakfast of fruit and tea and we head back to Manila at that odd hour to avoid traffic and better yet, to reach our favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Silang, Cavite called LZM. I wrote about them early in the life of this blog as having the best fried daing na bangus (fried milkfish) ever and I still believe that. Actually, it’s the BEST VALUE bangus since the price of the entire meal at LZM is a fraction of fancier Pinoy restaurants in Manila. At any rate, we typically get to LZM around 11 or just after, settle into a grungy table, deal with or just ignore the surly staff, hope the aircon is working and there are no cooties on the cutlery that is brought to the table in a glass that was once a Nescafe bottle and is now filled with lukewarm (not germ killing boiling hot) water. So lukewarm in fact that most bacteria would feel they were in a cozy sauna and they would multiply like crazy… We have never gotten sick there in many years of patronizing the place and we have always eaten very well for very little money…

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Marketman & Family just got back from a short trip to Hong Kong. Manila is our home, and we love it most of the time, but gosh is it nice to go to a city that just gets it! Where things work! Where efficiency is normal! Where Filipinos appear to be 3x more productive, despite originating from the same gene pool! From the plane, we cleared customs in no time (single line opening up to several officers, the most efficient queuing method, according to experts) – instead of the pick your line in Manila and get screwed with a long wait time when you have a drug smuggler up front – and I might add, Mrs. Marketman says the same works in women’s bathrooms in Manila where you pick your stall too!), by the time we got to the baggage carousel, our bags were out, we bought our train tickets in less than 45 seconds despite using a foreign charge card, and got a 30% discount to boot because 3 of us were traveling together. We went towards the train and as we got there, a new train pulled up and we got on, no wait. It took 28 minutes to the Central depot (exactly as stated, 28 minutes), then as we got off the train we immediately found the free shuttle bus that left just 30 seconds later for our hotel. The bus announced our hotel not five minutes later over the PA system and we were checked into a fabulous 44th storey hotel room with a terrific view of Hong Kong harbor (thank you to an old Hotel Gold Card from my working days YEARS ago when I spent over 100 room nights in the said hotel, or we would have been facing the mountains)…

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If you hail from the island of Cebu, you should know that today is the annual grand dance fest/parade that snakes its way around the city as everyone else gets smashed, if they can afford it, or not. A relatively new festival in Cebu (less than 30 years), I think it was the brainchild of public servants who wanted to have a rival tourist attraction to the older and more well-known Ati-atihan in Kalibo, Aklan. At any rate, it is great fun and it always amazes me how the competing teams can keep hopping on their feet for several hours straight. I can barely muster a dance or two at gunpoint. And this year, as with many recent parades, it passed directly in front of one of my family’s properties in the heart of Cebu so I decided to put up “VIVA PIT SENOR” signs, and for good measure, threw in three Marketmanila.com posters as well. They were tiny at 2 x 6 feet each and were really more for amusement than anything else. We were supposed to spruce up the place for the parade. However, I am curious if any regular readers who were in Cebu today for the Sinulog festival spotted these miniscule signs along the official route of the parade… I also totally forgot to switch on my television this morning (just got back from a trip) and wonder if anyone saw the signs on television, since the ABS-CBN cameras were across the street at an angle and so were the GMA7 cameras a little further down the road… hmmm… I wonder. At any rate, I wish all the Cebuano readers near and far a Happy Sinulog!!!

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Oatmeal is certainly touted as one of those “miracle” foods. It is basically good for you. High in fiber, no fat, sticks to your stomach like Elmer’s glue, cleans out your plumbing, taking bad cholesterol with it, and can be eaten even without dentures. I used to dislike it with a passion. I still dislike it in most forms. But now I can tolerate it in some forms. The easiest way for me to consume oatmeal on a regular basis is in a bowl of homemade granola, recipe here. It is really easy to make. Use the flaked coconut if you can get it (they had a lot at Metro Grocery in Market!Market!) rather than the more commonly available “dessicated” coconut here in the Philippines. Better yet, add lots of dried fruit to the granola like blueberries, cranberries, apricots, dried mango, papaya, etc. and it really tastes rather good. I make a big batch (probably good for 30-35 breakfasts) and store them in big bottles or garapon.

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Kaffir or Makrut Lime Leaves are an essential part of Thai, Myanmarese and Laotian cooking. You would most commonly taste it in a Spicy Thai soup or curry and I particularly love the aroma and citrusy flavor it imparts. Known for a long time as Kaffir Lime, the Thai name “bai makrut” is now considered the much more politically correct term, as “Kaffir” in Arabic means “unbeliever” and as such, Kaffir can have derogatory implications. When we moved into the house that we currently occupy, a good friend and previous neighbor gave us a small “Makrut” plant that has since grown to over 8 feet tall! Thus I have a fresh supply of Makrut leaves whenever I need it. The leaves have a very distinctive shape, almost like two leaves mutantly merged together. I have grafted several plants from my mother tree and given them to friends, planted it at the beach, and even gave a plant or two to Gil Carandang, the guy from Herbana Farms at the Salcedo Saturday market. I have also noticed that some of the specialty delis in Manila have started selling dried Makrut Lime leaves that are a substitute for fresh…though I do truly prefer the leaves when fresh, a bright to dark green and incredibly fragrant. So good do they smell that they attract those seriously large caterpillars with a vengeance and once or twice a year I am out in the yard murdering would be butterflies or moths as they hungrily consume my precious Makrut Lime leaves…

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During the holidays, we usually have several bowls filled with candy, sweets and other goodies on the dining room table so that anyone who drops by can just pick and choose. Some years, the bounty is “Western” influenced with foil wrapped chocolates, candy canes, etc. But other years, it is filled with local goodies of all sorts. Sometimes, we have it all mixed up. When there are that many sugar-based calories on a table, it almost always looks good. Polvoron is a favorite “sweet” that I must have a taste of at least once a year. Recently, however, the prevalence of BAD polvoron has been a bit of a turn-off. I don’t know how to make polvoron, so I only eat it when it is received as a gift or, if I buy it. A disappointing polvoron is one that is incredibly dry and sucks up all the moisture in your mouth. It lacks flavor and often is too sweet. Sometimes it’s like eating a tablespoon of instant powdered milk. Yuck. So I was thrilled when I purchased three containers of polvoron from Blue Kitchen last December and they turned out to be really good. Not so dry, good flavor and just sweet enough. They even had a nice texture (sometimes, folks add bits of pinipig I think). And I think I must have purchased them the day they arrived at the store, since they appeared particularly fresh. They only last a week or two but that’s okay, they never last more than a few days in this house…

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I have like canned tuna since my high school days. Back then, our canteen had huge freshly baked pan de sals with different palamans (fillings) and my favorite was a mashed up tuna and mayonnaise concoction that was tuna-ish, rich, sweet and comforting all at the same time. Once I headed off to college in the U.S. Northeast, I continued to have tunafish sandwiches, shifting from pan de sal to whole wheat bread, often with some shredded lettuce and possibly some sliced tomato. Whenever I purchased canned tuna in the U.S., the newly opened can almost always yielded a fairly smushed up or flaked meat ranging from a paler color to a darker hue. Back home in Manila, the first few cans I opened seemed to have even darker meat and increasingly a fishy smell and more oily consistency. Smashed up and mixed with mayonnaise, the semblance of tuna flakes almost completely disappeared, almost turning into a fishy spread. Exposed to European tuna, like this PHP500+ bottle of Spanish tuna in the second photo, I had evolved into the wonderful bottled or canned tunas from Italy and Spain that had huge whole pieces of “white meat” and a delicious, non-fishy flavor. This was the tuna that originally made the vaunted Salade Nicoise so enjoyable…

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One of my pet peeves is wasted effort in the kitchen or grocery. If you spend enough time in there, you realize a lot of the activity can be done far more efficiently. When we first moved back to the Philippines, I realized we were going to the grocery almost every other day…I was so exasperated that I went into our home pantry and fridge and like the anal retentive consultant that I am, figured out our top 100 items in stock and made a computerized shopping checklist that was arranged by the AISLES of the local grocery we used to go to. That way, the cook would just tick off what she needed from pre-printed lists (with room for other items), then I would go off to the grocery and zoom down the aisles in a pre-determined traffic pattern, get everything we needed, avoided impulse purchases, never backtracked on aisles, and saved over 50% of the time we normally wasted in the grocery! That system worked fine for a month until the grocery started changing the location of their goods…which they do often…precisely because of folks like me! At any rate, this is an illustrative example of wasted effort…

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