Market Manila

I don’t smoke. But I stopped in my tracks at the Bogo market when I passed by a stall with bunches of whole dried tobacco leaves and what looked like pre-made cigarette wrappers which nearly the color of the tobacco and not white or pale like commercial cigarettes… An older lady, who looked like she had enjoyed her share of tobacco for several decades, explained that the dried tobacco leaves were sourced in Mindanao, and she was selling them for PHP5 per leaf…

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My father was a HUGE fan of guinamos, all manner of small fish (sometimes shrimp), mixed with salt, and allowed to rot to the desired level of pungency. It was the color of death, and death in a bad way, or at least I always thought so as a squeamish kid, but was smart enough to never say it out loud. It sounds like a horrific process, the slow decay and disintegration of a fish in salt, not to mention the naturally gray color… I believe what you don’t see made, bothers you less… and this supports my personal theory why almost everyone loves patis and that less than 5-10% of the readers of this blog have seen it made, which can sometimes make one’s stomach turn inside out… But my recent post on small fish with beady eyes, which I also think are anchovy fry, set off a lively discussion in Mrs. MM’s Cebu office and one of her crew mentioned that he had a “tita” that made a fantastic guinamos sinabado… and like magic, a week later, while I was in Cebu, this small but incredibly pungent container of the stuff showed up on my desk at the office in Cebu, made just a day or two before…

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I found these unusual, frilly light and tasty seaweeds at the Bogo market. Didn’t catch the appropriate local name (had no ballpen) but they seemed to lump them all together with other seaweeds such as guso and lato. If I am not mistaken it was something like “saang bulaklak” and they said it only grew on a particular type of specimen sea shell. It looked exactly like a seaweed I had recently enjoyed at the Tsukiji restaurant on Pasay Road so I was rather excited to see it at the market. In Manila, a top quality mixed seaweed salad fluffed up with lettuce and a good sesame seed dressing can run upwards of PHP650 for a tiny bowl, so how I wished I had brought the other ingredients for this salad as I would have had these for breakfast as well!

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Nominations for the Philippine Blog Awards 2008 are now being accepted. The Awards Ceremony is tentatively scheduled for July 2008. It is a bit awkward for me to write a post about these awards, as obviously, I would highly appreciate it if marketmanila.com were nominated for an award or two or three, if readers felt the blog deserved to be nominated… :)

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They looked like really cool noodles, and in varying shades of green. Sort of like sea soba. But lukot, a Visayan ingredient, is something that I had NEVER seen before. So I asked the vendor at the Bogo market what it was… They smiled and said it was sea cucumber poop, or what appeared to be translated as sea cucumber poop. Omigod is right! Perhaps something was lost in translation, so I asked several others what it was… and roughly translated, they said “it comes out of a sea cucumber, they leave it in piles on the sea floor…” well, that didn’t help. So I took the photos and figured I could do some research later. Then just hours later, I saw the same ingredient on the island of Malapascua, and they said it was sea cucumber eggs, but they couldn’t explain why it came in so many shades of green and yellow brown, nor why a sea cucumber would just lay them on the seabed, for all the predators to scoop up with ease. And I admit I have bad eyesight, but I looked at these “noodles” really closely and couldn’t discern any individual eggs so I was a bit concerned… A little more googling back home yielded some alarming results. Was it actually sea cucumber poop? Bunches of sea cucumber eggs? Some other unusual stuff??? Some writers or bloggers simply ignored or avoided mentioning what it actually was altogether, choosing to call it marine spaghetti, spaghettini look-alike, seaweed, etc.

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Fresh and simple = incredibly satisfying. Our stomachs were grumbling after an early morning start and drive from Cebu City to Bogo, and seeing all the spectacular seafood at the market was really making matters worse… Then I turned a corner and spied this tindera’s (saleslady’s) simple breakfast and I nearly offered to buy it! But I had more manners than that, and asked for permission to photograph her and her breakfast instead. A simple soup with a crab, a small fish, some veggies and salt served with several cups of boiled rice. A meal for two set up on a bench right inside the market. Yum, is right. As I said in an earlier post, with seafood this fresh, you don’t need to do much to it to enjoy a superb meal.

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Now this is FRESH. In stark contrast to the fish in the previous post from The Pasil Market, all you have to do is take a look at these photos to realize the quality of seafood at the Bogo market was far superior to the large wholesale market in downtown Cebu. Bogo is a fairly large town near the Northern tip of Cebu, near good fishing grounds, and with a medium sized market. We scheduled our trip to depart from Cebu City at 5 a.m., precisely in order to reach the Bogo Market at around 7a.m., on a Thursday, one of two tabo or major market days each week. There wasn’t as much volume or variety of fish/seafood at the market when compared to bigger city markets, but the quality was so darned good that if I had an LPG tank, burner and pan, I would have been cooking up a storm for breakfast. We were still on our way to Malapascua, so we didn’t buy any perishables, but I could have easily filled a cooler at this market… And for some strange reason, despite many of the fish here being similar to those photographed at Pasil, I got the feeling there was a lot more dignity for the produce here. They would end up in people’s stomachs all the same, but here it was more genteel, more human, less ruthless… does that make any sense?

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The alarm clock was set for the ungodly hour of 2:00 a.m., and it blared for several seconds before it was silenced! Even for Marketman, an early riser, waking at this hour was painful. Did I really want to see the Pasil Fish Market in downtown Cebu, apparently the largest seafood market in the Visayas, that badly? Well, yes actually, I did. And I have wanted to see it for many years. A suitable guide, the father of one of my office colleagues in Cebu, who was a regular shopper and re-seller of fish from Pasil, would be waiting for me in a van, ready to head to the market in just 10 minutes. The office crew were somewhat mortified that I wanted to visit this market at its peak trading hour around 2 a.m., instead of a much less active version during the day. The crew expressed concerns about the seedy neighborhood, the various questionable “characters” hanging around the place, the sanitary conditions, etc. I had survived a trip to the Carbon Market at midnight several years ago, but I had to admit I was a bit apprehensive during that visit, so I wasn’t taking their concerns for granted. Instead, we agreed to hit the market with the guide and 3 guys tagged along to see the sights as well, a couple of them Marketman certified fish buyers… I was happy to have the company, and I would not have felt comfortable there by myself, taking flash photographs, particularly when it came to some of the more exotic, if not contraband fish. I do not recommend an obvious neophyte traipsing through the Pasil market in the wee hours of the morning… Having said that, nothing even remotely untoward occurred in the 45 minutes I spent at the market, though I was clearly a fish out of water and the hundreds of regulars there knew that…

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