Market Manila

Olive oil is one of those ingredients that I would have to include in my pantry if, for some reason, I was forced to pick just 50 food items that I could store and eat for the rest of my life. And despite having consumed endless gallons of the stuff, from the finest freshly pressed and cloudy extra-virgin oils to the yuckiest supermarket quality “pure” oils, I have only been up close to an olive tree some 3-4 times in my life. So during our recent trip to Greece, I made certain that I got good and close to an olive tree, and took photographs as well. Olive trees where everywhere in Athens, with an ancient one on the acropolis, said to be more than a 1,000 years old. Olive trees are native to the eastern mediterranean region and they thrive in very dry and hot and otherwise considered “harsh-ish” conditions. Spain, Italy and Greece are among the largest producers of olives/olive oil, though many Greeks scoff at the success of Italian marketers who sell so much olive oil to global markets, but a substantial amount of their raw material was actually grown, processed and purchased in Greece…

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Street snacks/food has always fascinated me whenever I visit a new city. And while most of these carts were probably targeted at tourists, it is still interesting to see what is on offer and what folks are eating… In Greece, of course the first cart to catch my eye was a pistachio vendor. He had just arrived at his spot and was still setting up. This “sea” of small, flavorful pistachio nuts was spread out on the cart and he would sell them by the kilo (though) you were certainly welcome to purchase as little as a couple of hundred grams if you desired.

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Here is THE footwear post from our recent trip to Greece and Turkey. It’s funny how “traditions” seem to grow, even on a blog, and whenever we go on our annual trip, I now get several emails asking for “the shoe post, the shoe post”! Talk about regular readers! The first time I posted a shoe post, it was about our finds in Florence, Italy. That post got quite a bit of attention, and it made me think bout that “extra shoe gene” in most Filipinos (and yes, that applies to both females and males). Anecdotal evidence at best, but some of the comments were a bit rabid, in a nice way, if you know what I mean! Then a trip last year to New York, yielded another shoe post and the same strong reaction, so I figured a number of you would be interested in this post… We didn’t buy shoes on this recent trip, we bought sandals. And a LOT of sandals at one fairly well-known sandal maker in Athens…

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I once celebrated New Year’s twice. Once in Manila, then at 6 a.m. on the 1st of January, boarded a plane for New York and somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, the stewardesses popped open bottles of champagne, and we celebrated the same New Year’s again. I thought that was pretty cool. But being practically in the center of the same storm, in two different cities is a bit unusual, don’t you think? Last weekend we were in Manila, and on Sunday morning woke up to a typhoon (international code: Fengshen) raging outdoors. That typhoon had changed courses rather erratically near Boracay, and as we now know, wreaked havoc on ferries at sea (with hundreds still missing), and wiped out farm crops in Central Luzon. The “eye” of that storm probably passed just 10-20 kilometers away from our home. Flights out of Manila were affected all day Sunday. On Monday, in relative calm, we flew to Hong Kong, on a trip planned months ago and using airline points (thus tickets are less flexible). Storm forecasts seemed to “confidently” predict a Northeasterly course that would take Fengshen to Taiwan. So much for storm forecasting…

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This would be the first of three meals we would enjoy at this unpretentious, clearly family run taverna just 30 meters from our hotel in Athens. One guidebook described it as lacking ambience, and I am happy they did that, or we would have trouble securing a table. With the mom running the tiny kitchen (say 4-6 square meters), the dad watching the restaurant located in two retail storefronts and the sidewalk outside, and a daughter and/or son waiting tables, this was a hole in the wall that served honest to goodness Greek food, at extremely reasonable prices. We over-ordered our first time at the restaurant, but that was done on purpose, so we could taste more dishes over the span of just a week’s visit to the country…

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Thank you for responding to the recent poll posted on marketmanila.com regarding the most expensive ingredients in the world, and over 1,000 votes were received for the multiple choice question that included saffron, caviar, vanillin, truffles, bird’s nest and foie gras. The correct answer is…

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You want to film what? A pot of adobo made the way Marketman theorizes that it might have been made say, 200-300 years ago? Hmmm. I have been pretty consistent about turning down several offers to appear in television interviews or shows, but I did come close to doing a feature last Christmas on the gingerbread houses we do in our home, and how some of the houses we do at a school are donated to various children’s wards in hospitals around the city. At the last minute, the television station’s insistence that I disclose my full name on camera, despite it being irrelevant to the story, put an end to that idea. And before that I declined to do a show with a visiting Australian chef for similar reasons. Then there was the request to do a story on the public school feeding program we all pursued last year. And radio plugs on other occasions. Basically, I have not wanted to draw attention to me personally, but to Marketman and Marketmanila.com. And I have only ever considered that exposure when it had some real positive benefit, such as bringing attention to charitable causes, or helping to increase local or regional awareness of the Philippines and more specifically, Filipino food. I thought I could still feed the marketmanila.com part of my life, but keep the rest of it relatively private, for a variety of reasons. So when two requests to appear on television arrived on practically the same day a couple of weeks ago, I was in a bit of a conundrum…

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While this should really be treated as the official “Round 1″ lechon attempt, the first dry run described here yielded very decent results, so I guess this is now officially Lechon #2… All you have to do is a take a good close look at the lechon skin in the photo above to know this was an improvement on the first roasted pig. Not wanting to re-invent the wheel, we decided to engage the services of a traditional and “professional” town or barangay lechonero, Mang Fredo, and see what he did differently to ensure a delicious lechon. This was certainly a wise move. And thankfully, he was a “classic” kind of lechon guy, not many tricks or shortcuts up his sleeve, just good old common sense, a few flavoring tricks, and the patience of an ox.

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