Market Manila

Suzette, a commenter, left an interesting comment about the movie Ratatouille on a previous post on Chanterelle mushrooms. It just so happened that we went out this evening to watch the movie, and while I found much of it to be rather boring and droll, I was deeply amused about being compared to the character Anton Ego (see photo here). Totally amused. Actually, I think I look a little like him, have that “imperious” and “intimidating” air if necessary, and I think I could make a wicked restaurant critic, but I eat at home too much to want to eat out that often. My favorite line from cartoon character Anton Ego, “I am thin because I LOVE my food, if it doesn’t TASTE good, I don’t SWALLOW!” Hahaha. As for the chanterelles, Suzette, you got the mushroom and the cheese, right, but shucks, I didn’t use any saffron… If you have seen the movie, you may think of Marketman as Anton Ego… that will keep me smiling for days… And just so you know, Mrs. MM has this thing about identifying the voice of any animated cartoon character (she can name the voice of Bart Simpson, for example, done by Nancy Cartright, yes, a girl) so we waited while the credits rolled for her to confirm that Anton Ego’s voice was that of Peter O’Toole. I am honored… :) Phew, I needed a light post after the heat generated by the recent PIPC post, see the comments on that one if you are inclined…

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Hmmm, so many guesses what I did with the chanterelles in the previous post that I decided to move up this set of posts on an impromptu Italian dinner we had last weekend. The food stocks and supplies in the Marketman household are at their absolute peak on a Saturday. If we are in Manila (as opposed to Batangas), I have probably visited several markets that morning and if I hit the foodstores in the preceding days, I would also have a ton of stuff in the fridge/freezer. So when we decide to spontaneously throw a dinner for 4-6 people on a Saturday afternoon at 4 p.m., we almost always manage to put a decent meal on the table in less than two hours, without additional marketing. We just make do with what we have in stock. Sometimes it is a modest meal, other times it is a “Gosh, are we glad we didn’t go to a mediocre expensive restaurant and have to battle the weekend crowd” moment… this dinner was one of the latter experiences…

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Finding fresh chanterelles in Manila is a rare occurence. So when I spied these small chanterelles at Santis a week or so ago, I picked up the little package, turned my face away to avoid staring at the price too long and decided to buy them without knowing what I was going to use them for. You occasionally find frozen chanterelles at Santis, though I suspect they are the result of fresh mushrooms that didn’t sell and thus got the freezer treatment. There must be a few hotel restaurants and high end dining places that demand these delicious mushrooms and I am happy to have the dregs, so to speak. This beautiful looking, “trumpet” shaped mushroom is a yellow golden color and it has a wonderful strong flavor that is enhanced by a saute in butter or a little olive oil. At PHP211 for a small package, it was pricey but not outrageously pricey…

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My earlier post on “Rich (Gullible, Careless, Stupid?) Pinoys Lose Millions in new financial scandal (PIPC Scam)…” got a LOT of attention from readers. A lot. Not only did regular Marketmanila readers read that post, but many new readers were directed to it as soon as Google rated it high on the search list for PIPC SCAM. I also got a lot of new commenters on that post, the newest of whom, called himself/herself “Inquirer” and gave a false or non-functioning email address as “tiny_tim@yahoo.com.” Now I normally just DELETE comments which are a tad histrionic in nature, if they come from a first time visitor to the site, a first time commenter who obviously hasn’t followed the blog for some time AND, finally, someone who gives a false return email address. However, I occasionally relish the controversy raised in some of these comments and let them stay, only to respond to them, Marketmanila style. How can I resist this urge to clarify an issue raised by the erstwhile assistant of Mr. Scrooge, the anonymous Tiny Tim? Is Inquirer/Tiny Tim the Fishpan Lady of the moment? Only long-time readers will understand that jibe, and I say it lightly, as usual… At any rate, I had planned a follow-up post to the first PIPC post regardless, so here it is. And if you go back and read the initial post for the first time, make sure to read my follow-on comments (there are several lengthy comments, longer than the post itself) so you get a fuller flavor of the discussion at hand…

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Driving around Cebu last week, and out of the corner of my eye, I spotted some humongous bananas that were a dark red, almost purple. They were stunning and impressive looking. I had seen those only once or twice in my life before, so I made a mental note to buy some so that I could taste them and feature them on the blog. A few hours later at the office, I asked some of the crew to go buy me some and they spent several hours scouring the city of Cebu for the illusive red bananas, re-tracing the routes I had passed earlier in the day and there were no big red bananas to be found. As you can imagine, any lengthy discussion about bananas inevitably ends in a bunch of giggles, what with comparisons of size, color, consistency, taste and what not. :) I don’t mean to be crude, but most of you understand what I mean. And worse, when I asked locals why it had such a name, some suggested it was the fruit of a male banana tree and forget my retort of “how can a male tree give birth”? I am currently reading a book called “Pig Perfect” and apparently the same sort of giggles inevitably breaks out when folks make sausages from intestinal casings, the process just being too suggestive to ignore…

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I just got back from an afternoon class combining food styling tips and food photography given by Pixie Sevilla Santos and Jo Avila. They are such nice folks and clearly professionals in their respective fields, but the main thing I learned is that I will never be a professional food stylist nor a food photographer, period. Together with a half dozen other bloggers, we went through the basics of food styling, planning a photo, prepping the food and actually taking the photo. A lot of the seminar was really geared to more commercial purposes or perhaps a magazine photo shoot, and there were many interesting tips about composition, color, height, angles, centering, plating etc. While I have taken over 20,000 photos of food and produce for this blog, I HAVE NEVER considered myself a competent photographer; and worse, my hands shake like I have Parkinsons disease or something, so blurriness is a Marketman trademark. And I use the most basic shoot and point Canon Ixus 850 camera, with no fancy lenses and hardly any photoshopping after the fact, except to crop out my shadow or to get a specific part of a dish…

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From the age of 11, I spent every single summer (10 fantastic weeks) with my sisters in New York, a trip which I looked forward to more than any other event in a calendar year (including my birthday, Christmas or any school party). Every single weekend during those summer holidays in the 1970’s, we drove out to my sisters weekend homes/cottages in Quogue and Easthampton , well before it was considered fashionable to “weekend in the Hamptons”… That was where I learned to harvest wild strawberries, pick raspberries and blueberries and cultivated strawberries right on the fields they were grown in, select and cook ears of corn that were picked literally minutes before, and stop at practically every single farmstand on the Southern and Northern forks of Long Island. It was an education that I wasn’t even aware I was enrolled in at the time. I had a small vegetable garden that I tended there, was grossed out when a deer tick attached itself to my chest one year, witnessed a summer where caterpillars literally ate EVERY SINGLE leaf on the island and you could hear them chewing (probably with their mouths open), and planted a tree or two that are probably quite huge by now. In retrospect, this is where my roadside food shopping genes were almost certainly cemented into place. Though my mom was a world class shopper as well, and bought from nearly every roadside stand and market she passed in the Philippines, I think I got hooked on “trickle down economics” on the farmstands of Long Island…

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I wrote about some rattan or yantok vines that I spotted roadside in Coron, Palawan a few months ago and some of the commenters on that post mentioned that rattan also has a fruit… I didn’t know that, and since then, have been on the lookout for rattan fruit. I found some in the markets this morning and since they seemed very reasonably priced, I decided to buy some so that I could try them for the first time. Actually, I have seen these many times before, but I never realized that they were rattan fruit. I thought they might be related to longgan or lychees or even snakefruit/salak, a delicious Indonesian fruit that we used to get in Bali quiet often… but oddly, I never bothered to taste the rattan fruit before. Rattan used to be a very common vine in the archipelago when it had more virgin rainforests, and the country is home to at least 40 different species of rattan, from very thick poled ones to rather slim varieties. Not all rattan fruit is edible, however. The fruit from Calamus manillensis (a variety of rattan with a larger diameter vine) is edible and it is now actually raised in small plantations for commercial sale.

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