Humongous White Onions
Now that the rainy season has arrived in fits and starts, the quality of locally available vegetables has started to deteriorate and prices have escalated dramatically. Onions and carrots, in particular, tend to plumb new depths for horrific quality, with locally grown or stored onions getting soft, mushy or rotten. Carrots are also awful and frankly, slimy… The local red onions seem to hold up a bit better but even those are suspect. And prices 
will soon rise from their lows of say PHP25-30 a kilo to as high as PHP60-70 in the months ahead. You may not be aware of this but a LOT of our Spanish or white or yellow onions are now imported by the container load from China and other Asian neighbors and while they seem to be better prepped (dried and cleaned for longer shelf life), they are also older… Last year I noticed that the Dole Company was occasionally putting out these utterly gigantic and shrink-wrapped white onions at major groceries. I have only purchased these onions 2-3 times but I am really thrilled they are available and will probably use them a whole lot more this rainy season.
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these fantastic pieces with patterns cut out on the paddle. It always seemed awkward to me to pierce the sliced tomatoes and mozzarella on my own serving platters, but I never thought someone about 100 years ago would have thought to design an implement precisely for that purpose. I didn’t know tomatoes were even that popular at the turn of the 19th century in the United States!
and there always seems to be an interesting selection of modestly priced art. We have our favorite exhibitors at this Fair (only on its third time out) with the black and white photographs of Isa Lorenzo and The Silver Lens Gallery being a family favorite but we also come across other interesting artists and purveyors of original art. Last Saturday, I was on the lookout for something totally unusual, painted coconut shells. A reader of this blog who resides in the beautiful hills just outside Puerto Galera in Mindoro recently sent me an email to say she would be exhibiting their unique painted coconut shells at the Saturday Art Fair and I must admit, I was intrigued by the idea…
Then the other end of the implement has a narrower scoop to really reach deep into the bone and get at all of the remaining good stuff… Isn’t it just amazing? For an item designed and manufactured in the 1800’s, it has a decidedly modern aesthetic. The lines are clean, solid, and almost sparse. If I were asked to guess, I would have incorrectly said it was a more Scandinavian design along the lines of the very modern Jorg Jensen designs of the 1960’s and 70’s. There is no borloloy or unnecessary design. Yet the weight of this implement is impressively heavy…there is no messing around with that marrow extraction!
can’t claim to have invented them. Nevertheless, green mango shakes were a novelty when I was a teenager, and since I loved sour flavors, I ordered them often. I knew a lot of people who ordered them thinking they were drinking something very healthy and low in sugar (probably masked by the acid tart green mangoes). Over the years, I veered away from the incredibly tart shakes though I always managed to have one or two per annum. Lately, the versions I have tasted have either been curiously milky or creamy (Wysgal suggests it might be due to the addition of some powdered milk!?), too watery, lacking in any distinct green mango flavor or excessively sweet. So I thought, “how hard can it be to make a decent green mango shake?”
that you can buy without difficulty at the tender age of 10. Military recruits can presumably shoot an insurgent before the recruit can drink a San Mig Light. We need licenses to drive a motor vehicle, licenses to practice law, licenses to care for the sick and suck out their excess fat cells, and licenses to push pencils and tap calculators. But, ohmigosh, NO licenses at all to become a parent, other than mandating that the mingling egg and sperm must have met each other voluntarily only after their hosts achieved the age of 18 (at least in the Philippines)… There are no fitness tests, no seminars, no mandatory reading material that covers child care topics like nutrition, mental health, emotional intelligence, etc. No financial tests to see if you are capable of providing adequate caloric intake and a roof over their heads, not to mention a decent education. No psychological analyses to see if you actually should NOT perpetuate your gene pool for the good of overall mankind. And frankly, who would design, administer and score such tests? Are we really fit to be fathers simply because we carry an average of several hundred million doodads in our gonads? Hmmm, food for thought this Father’s Day, is all I can say…