Market Manila

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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Native chickens, whether from the North or South, taste better, in my opinion. They have more flavor, character and grit. They are often much leaner/tougher than farm raised chickens, but for certain dishes, that is highly desirable. I recently had a superb tinola made with native chicken and malunggay and lemongrass that had been cut just minutes before and I can tell you it was much more memorable than some really pricey soups I have ordered in fancy shmancy restaurants. When I used to visit my grandparents in Cebu during summer vacations, my grandmother, a doctor, would almost always serve a soup made with native chickens and malunggay. But what used to shock me no end, as a city slicker 8 year old, was that she had many grateful patients (who she had treated and never asked for payment if they couldn’t afford it) who would often line up outside her front gate to seek more medical care and would bring native chickens, a piece of broken antique pottery, a skull or teeth as a token gift for the doctora. Often, our lunch was a freshly whacked native chicken from a patient’s back yard. Too real for an 8 year old…

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I have written about balimbing (carambola, starfruit), the fruit, before. It isn’t one of my favorites, but I have seen balimbing for sale in the markets often. Though I wonder about when it is really in season as I have seen them in the markets around now, at the height of summer, and oddly, I have seen them in the fall or later in the year as well… Do they bear fruit several times a year, like some mango trees? But oddly, I have never seen a carambola or balimbing tree. Or at least not knowingly.

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Just a quick post for those seeking something new, fruitwise. The Kid brought these kiwiberries home from the grocery a few weeks ago and they were pretty cool. We tend to avoid overly “engineered” fruits that seek to create new hybrids by splicing genes from here and there… yet they often yield some pretty interesting results. I don’t know much about kiwiberries, but I suspect they fall into the category of commercially sponsored adjustments to the natural evolutionary process of fruits and vegetables.

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Dulong is the common name used in the markets to sell the fish in the photo above. And I have always to referred to these as dulong, probably because my mom called it that, and thus I did earlier posts entitled “tortang dulong“, and “daing na dulong“. But those were technically incorrect post titles. First of all, “real” dulong is that smallest fish on the planet (if you were in grade school when I was) that some say only come from Lake Buhi in Camarines Sur. However, even that claim to fame by the “real” dulong (pandaca pigmea), has been beaten by an even smaller fish, schindleria brevipinguis, from Australian waters, and underwhelmed by an EVEN SMALLER fish, a member of the carp family, found in Indonesia…

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This post is dedicated to Isabel, a long-time, and apparently avid reader of marketmanila.com, who rarely or never leaves a comment on the blog. She started reading the blog while a resident of Cebu, because her sister, an equally high I.Q., and utterly brilliant lawyer (and defender of Marketman on several occasions where we won or settled several legal cases to our satisfaction), mentioned it one day. Isabel has since travelled the globe, and from the furthest reaches of the planet has logged on to see what’s new on marketmanila.com. She even asked her sister, to ask me, if I could tell which unusual countries she was logging in from and I assured her that the country statistics were available, though I wouldn’t be able to discern if a specific hit was from her. She has now returned to Cebu. And I thought of her immediately when I saw this tambis tree in full bloom at the family office. Why Isabel? Because she apparently thought my first post on tambis was wickedly off the mark. And that Marketman’s native fruit credibility had sunk a notch or two. That I was clearly full of boogers as far as this particular fruit, tambis, was concerned. Heeheehee. I jest, of course. Her sister, the brilliant lawyer, simply let me know that I should revisit the tambis/makopa issue and I have had it on the back-burner for some two years or so…

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The chicos that we harvested last week in Cebu, and which I managed to bring some ten kilos or so of to Manila as checked-in baggage, were ripening at an alarming pace… I was determined to find another way to enjoy this fruit besides eating it fresh/chilled. Plans to try a chico pie and even a jam or spread were for naught. A chico shake experiment didn’t turn out too brilliantly (the milk and chico combination didn’t float my boat), but this incredibly simple and rather delicious chico sorbet or granita was a hit.

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Despite having featured several crab varieties and dishes in various posts over the years, I have apparently never done a post on alimasag, or blue crabs, the creature/basic ingredient. So here it is. I presume they got their name from the fantastic hues of blue and green on their shells, and they seem to be fairly wide ranging from the Americas to parts of the mediterranean and Southeast Asia as well. If I am not mistaken, their scientific name is Calinectes sapidus (or callinectes sapidus) and photos of this species differ slightly depending where in the world they were taken. At any rate, in the Philiippines, they are differentiated from alimango or mud crabs in that they have a thinner shell, a lighter and less dense meat and sometimes taste ’sweeter” than alimango meat. They are my second favorite type of crab, just a shade behind the alimango…

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