Market Manila

No, this post isn’t about the Italian restaurant at Serendra. Not even about the more famous little Italian pizzaria/restaurant from the Upper East Side in New York or its cousin in Vail(?), Colorado. It’s about the actual tool, a half moon shaped cutting implement/blade/knife known as a Mezzaluna. When you have lots of herbs to chop up, I find that using a good sharp mezzaluna is far more finger friendly than using a chef’s knife. When you make a porchetta or any of several mediterranean/mezze style dishes with hugh quantities of chopped herbs, try using one of these knives… they are excellent. The problem with it is I don’t get to use it enough and it tends to get shunted into some dark corner of a drawer or cabinet, for me to discover a few years later…

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I thought I had closed off the Mad Crowd Media rant with this follow-up post, but I received an email from Nestle yesterday and thought I should post it to give everyone air time as it were…

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It’s been almost a year since I have done a post, or two, on books by my bedside. Here is one of the taller piles on the floor by my side of the bed at the moment…

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I know, I know, pork gets your heart pumping but your arteries clogging. I just took a quick look at the posts of the last 10 days and they were chock full of piggy posts. But the reality is really more like this typical lunch that I consume while on a “diet”. Here, a vibrantly colored, relatively low-calorie meal with an open face sandwich made of whole grain bread, toasted, with a low-fat mayonnaise egg salad and several stalks of blanched asparagus. A tiny 1/4 cup serving of tomato soup mixed with water, not cream or milk. And a few salad greens dressed only with a sprinkling of balsamic vinegar, no oil. Yup, that’s it. For me, that is gorgeous but torture…

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If you had the curiosity and idle time to read my rant last week entitled, “Mad Crowd Media, Don’t Piss Me Off,” and the nearly 100 reader comments it has since generated (including a response from one of the principals of MCM), then you might be interested in this concluding post, with an email response on behalf of one of the multinational companies whose product was a subject of two of the MCM emails. I was glad to see the passionate and often vehement comments of marketmanila.com readers, the vast majority I noticed, possibly 95%+, appeared to be in sync with my views on the matter. I was glad to see that many readers DID find the four emails from MCM to be distateful or offensive, and many felt that the manner, style, and possibly unethical content was worthy of a comment…

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The stormy weather in Manila during the past week has influenced our menus, and we have been hankering for warm, comforting soups. And one of our favorite soups of all time has to be a Vietnamese Pho (sorry, can’t figure out how to put the proper accents on that foreign word). I once spent a few weeks in Vietnam for work, mostly in Hanoi, with a quick side trip to Saigon (I like it’s old name better than Ho Chi Minh), and everywhere I tried a pho, whether at a hoity toity hotel or restaurant or streetside vendor, it was absolutely delicious. The broth tasted like it had been brewing for hours and hours, and it didn’t seem to have an artificial cube of anything (though for all I know, they used some). Besides the flavorful broth, the noodles also seemed top notch, still a bit chewy from being so fresh, and the herbs were fragrant beyond belief… obviously natively grown and recently picked. I got the feeling that each purveyor of pho would rather sink into a vat of burning oil than serve a sub-standard pho.

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A couple of folks have asked me for a cream of kalabasa soup recipe. Mrs. MM is more the kalabasa soup expert, but here is the simplest way I know how to prepare a kalabasa soup. Take some butternut squash ideally, but our own kalabasa (bright orange, not under-ripe) will do nicely, and peel it, de-seed and de-gunk it, then cut into large chunks or about 1 inch square, brush with good sweet butter and season with salt and white pepper, and place on a foil lined pan and into a hot oven, say 400F for some 30 minutes or so until the squash is soft and cooked. It should be slightly caramelized but not burnt.

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Some food pairings are simply made in heaven. One of them is cabbage and pork. So with more than a third of that huge log of porchetta left in the fridge, I decided to do a quick porchetta and cabbage stir fry and I was very happy with the results. This dish literally took less than 10 minutes to cook, tasted terrific, and was highly economical to boot. Place a very large saute or fry pan over high heat. When the pan is very hot, add several slices worth of porchetta, chopped into half inch or smaller cubes, with herbs and all. Add one chopped onion, medium dice. Then sprinkle some kikkoman or other light soy sauce as this sautes… Next, chop up roughly half of a medium sized green cabbage and half of a medium sized napa cabbage.

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