Market Manila

We were all ecstatic about the successful Pinakbet in a Palayok effort, and the fire was still going, so the crew decided to boil several semi-ripe saba bananas in what must be one of the simplest yet most satisfying eats this side of the Pacific. In a large palayok, add water about halfway up and turn up the fire. Before the water gets to the boiling point, add several saba bananas and then cover and wait patiently for it to come to a boil, ours took near 20+ minutes. Then when the bananas are soft and cooked, remove them from the water, peel them and dunk them into a bowl with generous amounts of fish bagoong, vinegar and cut up siling labuyo. Excellent! The starchy sweetish banana with the salty, sour and spicy dipping sauce was wonderful. I’m not sure the palayok did anything for the overall flavor of this dish, but the experience of fanning the flames, the smoke, the long boil, the anticipation of peeling open a banana boiled over an open flame and the classic mingling of bagoong, suka and sili are simple Pinoy comfort food at its best!

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Take a really close look at the photo above. Notice the almost otherworldly sheen on the vegetables that retain their individual shape and distinct characteristics. Notice that despite obviously being cooked and actually steamed at high heat, they look whole and undisturbed. Imagine the fragrant mix of fish bagoong and bagnet or lechon kawali together with the vegetables, a heady aroma of really good things. Adjust your eyes to the all natural colors, darker, deeper, and earthy. This is the pinakbet I cooked in a palayok. As authentic as I will ever make it. And believe me, it was superb. But superb. And better yet, incredibly easy to make.

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I always thought vegetables were more photogenic than humans. At least fresh vegetables compared with fresh humans. Unless of course they were supermodels in bikinis on a remote Hawaiian beach (though many of them aren’t so striking in person and when stripped of make-up). Time and time again, the natural beauty, color and shapes of fruit and vegetables and even seafood make for naturally stunning still lifes. I have mentioned this before, and have posted other photos of produce (here, here, here, here, and here, for example) that were simple and yet stunning. So in preparation for my attempt at as authentic an Ilocano pinakbet as I will probably ever make, I had not only the palayok and wood fire at the ready, I assembled the following selection of veggies…

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Ever since one of Marketmanila’s readers (Pito, and his sister Onie) posted a comment that his mom sold mangosteen cakes, and I ordered one and found it very interesting, I have been curious about how it was made. And with several homemade bottles of mangosteen jam still in our pantry, I certainly had the main ingredient… But the heat of the moment passed and it was just another one of those things on my food “to do” list. I suppose I could have patterned a recipe after other coffee cakes, adding the mangosteen jam in lieu of other key flavoring ingredients, but I never got that far. A few weeks ago, another regular reader forwarded a recipe for mangosteen cake and the frosting… She recalled the recipe from childhood, lost her handwritten copy, remembered the brand of cake flour that had published it on their cake box, wrote to the company, and they miraculously sent her the original recipe which she forwarded to me! Isn’t that too cool? However, in deference to the Pito and his mom, I have decided not to publish this mangosteen cake recipe in its original form, nor my “enhanced” version (which is photographed here) at this point in time. I realize that most people inclined to order this cake wouldn’t take the time to bake it, nor would many Filipinos based abroad be able to make it without ready access to mangosteen jam, so it will have to remain a mystery for now…

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Heeheehee. I made up that third name in the title of this post. There isn’t a whole lot written on ayap in my reference books or on the net for that matter. Common in Northern Philippine cooking, particularly on the Ilocano coast, even Ilocanos naturally refer to this as ayap or sitaw interchangeably. It is used as sitaw or yard long beans are used, but I find it is up to 1/3 or of the length and is less floppy, but not hard either like a string bean. It lies somewhere in between. Not sure if it evolved from a yard long bean but it is interesting in that it is different… I spotted some from an Ilocano vegetable specialist at the FTI Taguig market so I bought a small bunch for PHP20. It would be an authentic ingredient in my piece de resistance palayok cooking experiment, up soon…

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Frankly, I was shocked by the responses to my most recent poll on whether readers had ever cooked using a palayok over a charcoal or wood flame. Almost 45% of folks (as of this writing) responded in the affirmative. I was really genuinely surprised. So the novelty that I experienced learning to cook in a palayok may be lost to many of my readers. I have been wanting to learn how to cook using a palayok for years. A few of my long-time readers have even emailed me to ask if I knew if there really was a noticeable difference between cooking in a clay pot or not. So when we took a trip to Ilocos last year and finally acquired a number of different sized palayoks and the base on which they stand, I was simultaneously excited and apprehensive. In fact, it took nearly nine months before I actually got up enough nerve to finally give it a go. Actually, several of those months were spent trying to find firewood in the middle of the city… in the end, I had to “import” the wood from Batangas! So this week is palayok week on marketmanila.com, it doesn’t get any more “native” than this…

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Several folks emailed asking about the slicer I used for the apples in this post a few days ago. I used a Japanese slicer, which I thought I had featured previously, but I was mistaken. I own a couple of really top-of-the-line mandolines in stainless steel, fancy french slicing contraptions that are a “must have” in fancy kitchens, like this one (oops, just realized I haven’t featured a mandoline as well, and I use it often). However, I have always heard about the Japanese Benriners that were supposed to be much simpler, cheaper and easier to use and clean. Every Japanese kitchen or most of them at least, have this tool as it is essential for many of the wonderful garnishes used with sushi and other dishes. From my minimal understanding of the tools, there are several types - those that slice thinly, shred, julienne, or make those long spaghetti like curls of carrots and radishes. At any rate, the last time we were in Hong Kong, we dropped by a large Muji store with all things Japanese, and I was THRILLED to find several slicers for just $3 or 4 a piece, a huge bargain when compared with a say $150 mandoline. I bought several, the slicer in these photos and a julienne slicer. What is amazing is that they are so lightweight and easy to use, they have a dual blade so they slice on the way down AND back up and the resulting slices are uniformly thin. But be careful, as with a mandoline, they are dangerous if not used properly - you could shave off your fingertips and take a quick trip to the emergency room…

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I was thinking about childhood comfort foods the other day and realized that I used to love it when my mom cooked up a pot of Chile (or Chili) Con Carne. Literally translated as “Peppers with Meat”, my mom’s version was immediately notable for the lack of heat or peppers, as she didn’t like them. So this dish should have been called just “Carne” in our home. But then she added red kidney beans. And it had tomato sauce, and other spices with minimal heat. I have no idea where she picked up this recipe and why it became such a favorite in our home until you deconstruct the dish and realize it can (and often was in Manila) be made with relatively economical ground beef and readily available dried beans. It was tomatoey (almost sloppy joe-ish or ketchup-ish) and paired brilliantly with white rice. You could cook up a big batch and leftovers tasted better and better as the days passed. I had never cooked the dish myself, so I resolved to do so… if I could find some decent kidney beans. Oh, and one more thing, the tastebuds must be hereditary, to some extent, as The Kid loves chili, and orders bowls of it at Chili’s, but it has no beans…

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