Market Manila

The Philippines really should figure out how to brand our homegrown pork. There is Kobe Beef, why not “Pinoy Pork” or an equally hokey or catchy name, depending on the spin doctors. When I am at a loss for an easy and delicious meal, I very often think pork, pink pig, porcine taba, wild boar, black native hogs, and flavor-filled fat, fat, fat. I could probably pick local pork out of a line up of more Western-raised pigs… ours just seems to have so much more glorious fat cells. Can you tell I fell off the diet wagon while traveling last week and plan to return to my strict exercise and diet regimen tomorrow? At any rate, here is something we eat once in a while and every time we make it, it results in a truly satisfying meal. First add some vegetable oil to a stianless steel pan over medium to high heat. Saute a lot of sliced onions (in rings) until they are soft and translucent. If I have them, I use the whiter “native” onions that are actually opaque when cooked, as this are apparently the favorite for bistek tagalog… Take the onions out and heat the pan over high heat…

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Update: We’ve moved! Yahoo, so far so good…

This website is finally being moved to a new, faster and hopefully far more reliable host. Over the next three days, nearly a thousand posts and several thousand photos will be “transferred” to our new home. I am told by my brilliant tech consultant that there may be glitches, slowdowns and possibly even temporary loss of access to the site over the next three days. I apologize for this service interruption, but this is truly for the better. In the longer term, we shall all be happier. While I am going to refrain from adding new posts for the next three days to ensure an smoother transfer, please feel free to check out some of my older posts (there are nearly 1,000 in the archives) if you get Marketmanila withdrawal symptoms… Wish us luck and I hope things will start to get better next week though continued bugs and glitches may be likely for several more days… Thanks!!!

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These were superb pies. I kid you not. I have never made a strawberry and rhubarb pie before and I was stunned by the results. Absolutely delicious; redolent with rhubarb tartness and flavor, tempered by the sweet mushy strawberry notes with slight crunch of tiny seeds, and a buttery, flaky crust. The recipe is from a Maida Heatter book but I took some liberties with the proportions and the crust is the one I use in my apple pie recipe, here. This is totally simple to make, and everyone who tasted it was a little “blown away” and not an ounce of this first experiment was left over. There are several requests from friends for me to repeat this, and like really soon. So I hope they have more rhubarb this weekend at the markets…

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A classic pairing of rhubarb and strawberries…they photograph well together, taste superb together and in this case, came down from Baguio together…making this a really nice honest, “seasonal” dish in the making. I will post the recipe up next but I didn’t know what to do with these great photos so I decided to post them separately… I think I am going back to the market this weekend to get me some more rhubarb…

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Here is another superb chocolate dessert that will trump almost any restaurant dessert for Valentine’s… it’s a really simple recipe by Thomas Keller for Bouchons au Chocolat. Literally translated as “Corks” of chocolate, these are warm and utterly luscious. They call for narrower, tall muffin like baking molds but I just used a regular muffin like mold… Served straight out of the oven, and packed with melted chocolate, they are a sophisticated version of those American chain restaurant lava cakes. To make, you will need 10-12 molds about 2.5-3.0 inches wide. Butter the molds and dust with flour, removing extra flour. Next sift ¾ cup all purpose flour, 1 cup of unsweetened good quality cocoa powder (I used Valrhona) and 1 teaspoon salt into a bowl. In the bowl of your electric mixer, mix together 3 large eggs and just under a cup of granulated white sugar until very pale in color, roughly 3 minutes. Add ½ teaspoon of vanilla extract. Add about 1/3 of the dry ingredients, then 8 tablespoons of melted butter, the dry ingredients, more butter, etc. until all mixed in. You will use a total of 24 tablespoons of melted butter. Add 6 ounces of semisweet chocolate, but I added 8 ounces of Callebaut 60% baking chocolate.

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You can’t buy love; but if you can “buy”, go buy these exquisite chocolates instead. I once walked for nearly two hours up a very long street in Paris looking for the main shop of La Maison du Chocolat, and when I finally found it, I knew it was well worth the effort and callouses on my flat feet. Visit their equally luscious website for more details, but suffice it to say you just can’t go wrong if you show up with a 1 or 2 pound, beautifully wrapped box of these excellent chocolates; if she or he turns her/his nose up at this gift, look for someone else more worthy, and eat the chocolates yourself… It’ll set you back big bucks (about USD100 for 2 lbs if you buy at the shops; more if shipped by Fedex) but considering some of the other stuff you could waste your money on…I think it’s a pretty good deal, with some moderation, of course. Try their orange rind in dark chocolate, their excellent truffles, huge chocolate macaroons, and you will understand why this is on my Top 10 list for any special occasion requiring sweets of some sort. Smooth, rich, flavorful and quite possibly, one of the best chocolates for sale. I’d pick these morsels over caviar any day. And I LIKE caviar!

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Farro is the grain that fed the legions… how’s that for your tidbit of the day? I am certain that I have learned something every single day that I have “fed” this website with posts. Whether from my basic research, reading hundreds of cookbooks, the comments of readers, or my necessary bias towards trying new things and having to look them up…I think I have learned more than most students would get from a one year studying for a Master’s degree in food trivia… heehee. At any rate, I was watching the food network the other night and Giada di Laurentis (isn’t she too thin to be taken seriously?) was making a farro salad that looked really easy and simple and I recall having a package of farro in my pantry so, voila! Farro Salad a la Giada, but altered by Marketman… Please click this link for more information on farro, it is quite fascinating, actually. And now that I am in search of more wholesome grains from a diet perspective, farro is a better alternative to brown rice, in my opinion. It has a nice texture, good vehicle for other flavors and is healthy to boot! Farro is slightly different from spelt, though some books use the grains interchangeably.

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An elegant, relatively easy and make ahead dessert that always makes guests happy are these simple pots de crème. Essentially a chocolate custard, these are smooth, rich and very chocolatey. My sister gave me a 5 kilo block of chocolate last Christmas and I had to come up with several ways to help use it all up (only half of it is gone by now, despite nearly 10 uses so far…)! I made them during the holidays but never got around to writing up a post and decided to save it for Valentine’s. The recipe is from this terrific cookbook, Bouchon, the more informal restaurant of Thomas Keller of The French Laundry fame. I have cooked more recipes from this book than his other beautiful cookbook, The French Laundry Cookbook. Served with some incredibly ripe and juicy red strawberries on a silver tray, dotted with fresh mint leaves and dusted with generous amounts of powdered sugar, this was a sweet way to finish off a huge holiday meal!

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