Market Manila

Mrs. Marketman seems to be addicted to the cooking shows on the Asian Food Channel. This pasta was inspired by a dish cooked on one of those shows (she doesn’t recall which specific show). It is classic Mrs. MM, simple yet elegant and absolutely delicious. It is perfect fare for Holy Week and just about anyone can cook this dish (for one or even a large crowd); just don’t let on how easy it was to make…

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Just a quick heads up to folks headed out of town for the holidays this week, caimito or star apples seem to be at the peak of the season in the Southern Tagalog provinces, and are abundant at roadside fruit vendors. I did a post on caimito several years ago, here, and please refer to that entry for the scientific names and other bits of trivia. I have never been fond of this fruit, I find the texture and consistency to possess a really odd mouth-feel. Frankly, I get icked out by it. But Mrs. MM is a huge fan of caimito (odd, considering she didn’t eat much fruit before we married) and likes a just ripe fruit to be straight out of a refrigerator and the flesh scooped out with a spoon from each half of a sliced fruit.

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Yup, it sounds bizarre. But it tasted pretty good. I think anything with a ham bone at its core usually turns out pretty good. The original idea was to try making a sinigang with an unripe pineapple as the souring agent. Thus far, I have made sinigangs of all kinds with raw tamarind or sampaloc, also with guavas, batwan, kamias, green mangoes, santol, sampaloc leaves, etc. Still on my list were sinigangs with “green pineapple”, alibangbang leaves, unripe sineguelas, and a few other less well known ingredients which sometimes find their way into sinigang across the archipelago. So we picked a rather har and apparently unripe, hopefully sour pineapple on our way back to Manila from Tagaytay. It seemed promising… but I had to get over one major hurdle…my fairly strong allergy to pineapples… I figured I could cook the dish, but would have to rely on others to taste it.

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In this day and age, not eating meat on a Wednesday, Friday or any other day, theoretically to suffer, is actually a more extravagant practice than it was ever meant to be. With our reefs depleted, oceans overfished and merchants opportunistic as ever, the laws of supply and demand mean that some varieties of fish/seafood actually cost more per kilo than chicken, pork or beef. Besides, the church no longer requires folks to give up meat on any day of the year, it merely suggests some form of reduced intake of stuff you like to remind you of how lucky you are otherwise (or at least that is Marketman’s interpretation…). Besides, if I gave up 1,000 calories a day for the entire lenten period, I would lose some 15 pounds, and that is something I want badly, so will I have done something good for mankind or simply for my bulging mid-section? I say this as it is Friday and true to tradition, the crew has laid out only fish for the day… I started off with a breakfast of fried danggit I brought from Cebu (PHP490 a kilo at the Taboan market, PHP800-900 at the airport rip-off stalls), though only a few grams goes a long way. Then for lunch we had some tortang dulong. And for dinner, some grilled tanguigue steaks.

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The last few vegetable posts have just been “too healthy,” and I thought some folks (like Lee, among others) were probably in serious need of a nice PORK FIX. So here is a simple sandwich I made a couple of days ago from “planned leftovers”. My first experiment with barbecued baby back ribs turned out so well that I have had my eyes peeled for more baby back ribs at S&R (they don’t always stock them, I find them only once or twice a month since I only go every week or so). When I found some last week, I bought 4 half racks and immediately applied a nice dry rub and let them sit overnight in the fridge. The next day we barbecued all four racks, knowing we would only eat about 2 racks for dinner. The leftover racks were shredded for a sandwich experiment the following day.

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The vegetables and herbs in Busay are actually inter-cropped or grown together with the flowers… not sure why or if this results in benefits for both the flowers and vegetables, but it was interesting to walk amongst the rows of veggies and flowers because it seemed so mixed up… but there must be reason to this madness. Now I understand why the Carbon market has such an incredibly varied selection of fresh looking vegetables - it is located just an hour or so away by foot, tricycle and bus from the farms… This is one of the closest farm to market journeys for a fairly large Asian city like Cebu. Again, I now wonder why vegetables don’t feature more prominently in local restaurant menus… they are almost an afterthought… In the first photo up top, I came across a pail of freshly harvested capsicums which, after many plantings from seed to fruit to seed again, have also become more localized, smaller and possessing a more intense flavor than their hybrid cousins in the West. These are really nice in stews, paellas, roasted, etc. The pail was just sitting there at the end of the day, apparently waiting for a trip to the market that evening…there was no one around to “guard it,” but I folks are very trusting in these parts…

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There always seems to be an abundance of fresh flowers for sale in Cebu City. Roses there seem more like the hobbyist’s garden varieties, rather than the commercially grown (heartless or is it soul-less) ones more common in Manila. Cebu roses open more fully, come in a spectacular range of colors, and they actually smell like roses. And they are almost always so incredibly well priced. For some reason the yellow roses here are just spectacular, albeit on the small side, but a vase filled with say 4-5 dozen of them never fails to lift spirits. In the past couple of decades, however, chrysanthemums seem to have become the most popular choice, probably because they are so hardy and reliable. Chrysanthemums have always struck me as being wake or funeral flowers, particularly the yellow or white ones, but they have somehow (together with their more colorful cousins) crept into the local ornamental cut flower scene… including weddings!, and I have always wondered where and how they were grown…

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My family is definitely biased about our mangoes, and I have written a post on Cebu mangoes before. Though I now admit that approximately 40% of the mangoes we currently consume come from the island of Guimaras, due to convenience (I have a suki at my regular Saturday market run), and they are very good, I am a Cebu mango lover, tried and true. I have often wondered how the Cebuano mangoes manage to not only possess a wonderful, smooth, flavorful, juicy and almost fiber-less mouthfeel, but also an incredibly thin, smooth and apparently, blemish free skin or peel. Well, now I know the answer to the blemish free skin… The last time I was in Cebu, I decided to take a drive out to Busay, an agricultural area in the center or heart of the island, and on the way, we passed by several mango plantations and I was stunned to see all of these fruiting trees with each of the fruit individually wrapped or sheathed in paper “jackets.”

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