CNT Lechon, “A Taste of Cebuano!”
An early Father’s Day pasalubong (gift) was a box containing several kilos of CNT Lechon (roasted pig) flown in from Cebu. I have seen so many passengers claiming these boxes at the baggage carousel in Manila over the years and have always wondered how the lechon could possibly manage to survive a one hour trip in a 45 degree Fahrenheit cargo hold, not to mention the pre-departure wait in the bowels of the Cebu airport… But before we get to the contents, I would like to have a little fun with the box itself. My wife 
always sniggers uncontrollably every time she has a CNT box sighting. It very proudly states CNT LECHON, “A Taste of Cebuano”!!! Hahaha! Is there a roasted Cebuano inside the box? What is a taste of Cebuano, someone giving us a verbal preview of the dialect? Hahaha! I jest of course. I know what they mean, and so do most of you with ties to the archipelago. But someone really has to correct their English, don’t you think?! I mean, Hello, Marketman to CNT owners… A TASTE OF CEBUANO???. Frankly, I could go on and on with this… A Taste of Cebuano… does that mean you only taste a male from Cebu? Are the female specimens not as tasty?! Do you chew it or drink it? Okay, okay, enough already (particularly since my own English skills aren’t fantastic either)… :)
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Because the chili family is a very varied one, I think the best I can do is to say it is probably a capsicum annuum, possibly a descendent or distant relative of the Anaheim chilies which are in turn known as green chilies and used in Mexican stuffed peppers. At the market a few weeks ago, I came across these utterly stunning green chilies and I had to have some. My suki said they were like siling mahaba but just bigger and greener…and folks liked to cook them stuffed with meat. The only government agricultural document I have found on long green chilies describes three different types of long green chilies as being of the django, hotpot and hotshot varieties. It doesn’t help that some folks refer to these as finger chilies in some material… at any rate, these just LOOKED terrific so I bought a kilo or so of them. I went through a large basket of the chilies and picked the biggest ones…
of a 
or we had received a generous gift from a dinner guest, friend or relative. My first pick out of the five (yes, there are only five) shapes were always the cookies with the super dried up raisins, then the pretzel shaped ones with large grains of sugar on top. Third choice were the rectangular ones, the round ones fourth and last and my least favorite, the horseshoe shaped cookies. I loved the consistency of the shapes, the SMELL of butter and the rich sweet flavor. Though these cookies have about 30% butter content, it seems that the heavy scent of dessicated coconut is what contributes to the very “buttery” smell.
the year, the flame trees would lose most of their foliage and were instead covered in the sharpest hues of orange and red blooms. I distinctly remember an early helicopter ride from Manila to Bataan to visit an Esso (Exxon) refinery (before it was forcibly expropriated by the Philippine government and became Petron) where I was utterly mortified sitting in the front seat of the company chopper with my father, wondering how fast the craft would plunge into Manila Bay if the rotors stopped functioning, and I only began to feel safer as the landing drew closer and the green landscape below us was dotted with intense bursts of orange from blooming flame trees. I once read somewhere that as Magellan hit this part of world in his famous voyage (where he was slayed by a distant relative of mine in Mactan, according to my grandmother), he spied the same flame trees in bloom on the coastline of the Marianas (or was it the Philippines?) and they looked like the forests were ablaze or in flames… and this was written into the chronicles of the voyage… Hmmm, I wonder if that is true…