Market Manila

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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Daing na danggit is one of my favorite Pinoy comfort dishes, eaten at breakfast or any other meal, with lots of spicy vinegar, chopped tomatoes and often, fried or scrambled eggs. I have enjoyed this delicacy probably hundreds of times in the last 40+ years; but as with so many other pinoy favorites, I had never seen it made from scratch. Besides wondering how they deboned the fish, I always wondered who in their right minds was (thankfully) responsible for the task of preparing these fish for appreciative diners like myself… Now I know, and if you read the rest of this post, so will you.

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I set out to make a pork adobo the way I suspected my forefathers did a couple of hundred years or more ago. And it turned out to be the BEST ADOBO I have ever made and/or tasted. THE BEST ADOBO. Knowing that I did it from scratch, and toiled over a palayok (clay pot) on a wood fire for nearly three hours, perhaps I was just woozy from the smoke and loss of bodily fluids and salts or simply romanticizing the results. But a few days later, I tasted the adobo again, after it sat on the kitchen counter in a large garapon (glass jar) under a layer of solidified lard, in the sweltering tropical heat, and I knew this was the real deal…

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No, this isn’t a post on the porcine equivalent of the Jonestown massacre. I just thought that all of the seafood posts lately have been so healthy, and I was concerned that bonafide pork lovers, like commenter “Lee” from Bacolod, might be having pork withdrawal syndrome, so I decided to skip a few posts and do this one on a bunch of pigs that we walked into in the “backwoods” of Malapascua island. It was mid-morning and a bit warm, but under a grove of coconut trees, in the shade and on dark sand, about 8 pigs were napping and resting in their shallow and self made sand wells…

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Marketman & Family may head off to Athens, Greece and Istanbul, Turkey on holiday in a few weeks. While we have some guidebooks and obviously need to hit the major monuments, we are clueless about nice markets, food, produce, shopping, etc. So if you have been to Athens or Istanbul lately, would you have any suggestions for us? I know we won’t get to do or eat everything, but any useful tips you might have would be greatly appreciated. I know one of my commenters, Sha, who has frequented this blog since the first month, is based in Greece, but she is currently on a yacht in the Bahamas and hasn’t responded to several emails I sent. And I do know that at least one of my readers in the past was a Filipina based in Turkey, so I am hoping there are readers out there that can help… Many thanks in advance for your comments and suggestions!

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I am often asked how to pick fresh produce of all sorts, but fish seems to elicit the most number of inquiries. And frankly, until a few years ago, I wasn’t such a huge shopper of seafood at the wet markets, so my ability to choose fresh fish is something I have only acquired in the past 5-7 years. Obviously, practice makes perfect, so the first piece of advice I can give you is that if you buy enough fish, often enough, you can figure out the cues for yourself. But it helps to have some expert guidance. And mine came in the form of a crew member who grew up in Northern Palawan and seems to know a LOT about fish. Over the years, at various markets around the country, I have received many selection tips that I have added to conventional wisdom, personal experience, etc. Here are some of the things that may help you pick out the freshest fish and seafood around.

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My mother opened one of the earliest handicraft store chains with their first branch in the departure lounge of the Manila International Airport in the early seventies. Her enterprise grew to seven branches all over Manila on the back of explosive arrivals of Japanese tour groups that would descend on the shop(s), only to have one member pick an item (say an old coconut husk made to look like a shrunken head, example here) and the remaining 39 members of the tour group just HAD to bring the same souvenir home with them. It was a bizarre sight, this mass handicraft shopping, but for many years it yielded mom a healthy profit. More than the money, however, I think she loved those stores for another reason — it gave her a reason to visit the farthest reaches of the Philippine archipelago in search of handicrafts and items to stock in her shops. She had the perfect excuse to be out constantly shopping, and in the process picked some of the best finds for herself! Around 1974-1976, we sold a phenomenal amount of specimen shells, when they were plentiful and before their extraction nearly wiped out whole classes of this wonderful creatures. This was a cottage industry then, benefitting many lower income seaside dwellers, not yet the environmentally incorrect business that it is viewed as today. Mom eventually started a shell collection, and she would go on to acquire some of the rarest shells in the country (and on the planet at the time). Besides the rare collector’s pieces, she built up a broad collection of hundreds if not thousands of common specimens, and it was at that time that I first ran across this unusual shell…

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