Market Manila

So, can YOU remember the words to that classic Filipino song, Bahay Kubo? Here are the lyrics to help you along; geez, I forgot how short that song was… And while I think I have featured most of the vegetables in that song, there was one, the last word, linga, that frankly I had no idea what it even was. Until a month or so ago, when I ran across a whole pile of small, dark khaki, sesame seeds at the Bogo market and asked what they called it and they said “lunga” or in tagalog “linga.” Aha! Who would have known? A lot of you, perhaps, but I was clueless. I didn’t even know we grew sesame seeds here. If I had to free associate, unfortunately, if one screamed “sesame seed” I would have screamed back “two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles on a SESAME seed bun.” That’s a Big Mac, to you. Hahaha. Sad.

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Actually, a cute kid, a baby boy, and two adult female goats, that is. :) The wild grass on an empty lot in Cebu was growing at a much faster pace than we could cut it so I was searching for an economical and environmentally friendly solution… And since early rains had hit Cebu and La Nina would likely result in an incredibly wet rainy season, the problem was only going to get worse. Even assigning folks with machetes every few weeks (to hack away like some gory murder scene in a low budget horror movie) didn’t seem to do the trick. So I had this brilliant idea that we should acquire several goats to keep the grass clipped short and neat. I asked a few people if goats liked to eat grass, and they nodded enthusiastically. So like a ding dong, without doing much further checking, I sent some crew to a goat dealer to buy two goats. They got two large or adult females and one baby boy (kid) thrown in for free. Total price was roughly PHP3,000, the equivalent of just 10 days of a human grass cutter, so I thought it was a good deal. But what did we know about goats, anyway???

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Don’t do this more than once a quarter! Don’t say I didn’t warn you. As I finished this bowl of goodness at lunch, I was silently singing “killing me softly with this adobo, killing me softly, with this adobo, spending my whole life, at Vicky Belo’s, killing me softly…” :) You know the song. Oh, and I don’t mean any harm to Ms. Belo’s business in any way, I just meant I would need her services to rid my mid-section of its unusually high fat content if I kept eating more of this! At any rate, what was I to do with about a third of a large garapon (jar) of slowly cooked, no soy sauce adobo, that I did a post on earlier, here? Adobo rice topped with shredded re-fried adobo, OF COURSE!

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Essentially brined lemons, these preserved lemons are used in all sorts of Moroccan tagines and other slow cooked stews. They add a salty, tangy hint of citrus to the dishes, but without the harshness and bitterness associated with fresh lemons. They keep for ages and you only use a teeny weeny bit each time so this recipe should be more than enough for a year’s worth of occasional cooking in the Moroccan style. The recipe is from Gourmet Magazine, and I made this batch with the intention of trying out a recipe they featured with crab meat, sambal oelek and preserved lemons on spaghettini pasta, link here.

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Apicio’s comment on the previous post regarding Gourmet magazine seemed so appropriate considering that I was just then writing about old, and I mean OLD issues of Gourmet. I started collecting various food magazines in the late 1980’s, however, with several moves across oceans, I had to throw out several years worth of magazines to lighten my luggage. In 1995, with a more permanent base in Manila, I started to save our food magazines once again. As such, there are some 500+ issues of various food magazines on our shelves, today. I was talking to a Canadian friend at dinner about this habit of saving food magazines and she jumped up, disappeared into a room and emerged with an incredible treasure trove… In one box folder, she had saved some very early Gourmet Magazines and she lent me three of them so I could browse through, photograph and do a post on them for Marketmanila’s readers…

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Happy Mother’s Day! I know a lot of folks head out to eat on Mother’s Day, mostly to give mom a day off from some kitchen work, but we tend to stay IN on holidays such as this one since the malls, restaurants, etc. are jampacked and you are more likely to get a mediocre, overpriced and somewhat stressful meal instead of a calm and enjoyable one. Of course there are exceptions, but today is a great day to enjoy food at home, as long as “mom” doesn’t have to prepare it. So here was Mother’s Day lunch at our place…

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Just a quick blurb. Jiggy, a long-time reader of marketmanila.com (though she comments under another name, which I won’t give out so you can’t put face to name together), emailed me this morning to check out today’s Philippine Daily Inquirer, Lifestyle Section. As many long-time readers probably know, the PDI and MM have this hot and cold thing going, with them doing a feature on Marketman very early in the life of the blog (article since removed from their site) that brought me lots of readers, then they did a feature on a beach house and its architect who won an award for the design, and where I cook a lot of the dishes featured on this blog (article since removed from their website), then they had a recipe contest where someone stole a yema photo from this blog among others, yet the guy won the contest nevertheless, and the newspaper eventually published a lukewarm evasive apology, then the whole “scribes and mangosteen” brouhaha wherein the writer posted a “heavenly” apology, and then another post regarding food writing/journalistic ethics which seemed to strike a raw chord with some PDI writers/contributors, and a couple of other behind the scenes interactions, including potentially positive collaborations on a feature on the public school feeding programs (never managed to set a mutually convenient date), and an article for their on-line version… so whenever someone tells me to look at my Inquirer, I am never sure if that is a good or bad thing…

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I more or less know what Filipino dishes are your (reader) favorites, from a poll I took on dishes and desserts last year. But I am curious if you order the same dishes when you eat out at Filipino restaurants. I ask this because MM & Family recently ate at several Filipino restaurants and noticed that the menus were incredibly long and included a huge number of dishes, say up to 100 or more, and we wondered if people really ordered that much variety while eating out. As creatures of habit, we probably limit our own orders to say a few dishes out of 20 popular dishes for our family. We certainly like to experiment, so the question is, are we so different from other folks at these restaurants, in that we order such a small fraction of the offerings? So if you care to share the information, can I ask you what 5 dishes are you most likely to order when you go to a Filipino restaurant? Thanks!

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