The inspiration for this dish was David Chang’s roasted brussel sprouts with fish sauce dressing at a recent lunch we enjoyed at Momofuku in Las Vegas. We don’t often see brussel sprouts on offer in Manila, so I thought I would experiment with other brassica relatives — cauliflower, broccoli and red cabbage.

Cut cauliflower and broccoli into medium sized florets. Wash or soak well and drain and spin dry.

Slice red cabbage so that the central stem holds the leaves together. Heat up your oven to 400F. Into an ovenproof pan, heated on top of a burner, add some vegetable oil (grapeseed, canola, etc.) and add the brassicas and let them be. Once they start to brown slightly, place them into the oven and let them roast on high heat. After about 10-12 minutes, check on the veggies and turn them over for even browning. Cook for a total of 23-25 minutes (cabbage less) until well caramelized and colored.

This is what the veggies looked like after I took them out of the oven… I could have left them in a few more minutes.

Make a dressing of fish sauce, a touch of water, fresh lime (dayap) juice, sugar, chilies and chopped cilantro. Sprinkle dressing generously over warm vegetables and add some chopped wansoy or cilantro, thai basil, mint and green onions.

This was delicious. Not quite the wonderful dish we enjoyed at Momofuku, but brilliant for a first attempt.

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I love to find fresher, lighter preparations for some locally available vegetables, a refusal to believe that we just don’t have that many vegetable-based dishes in our repertoire in the Philippines. Recent data suggests that as a nation, we consume a phenomenal amount of meat, and that’s odd given the region’s seeming love affair with not only delicious, but economical and healthy vegetables and herbs. I am a carnivore, and couldn’t be otherwise, but I do love my vegetables and salads. This one experiment, a variation on this thai dish, is different enough, delicious enough and unique enough for me to cheekily add “a la Marketman” to it’s name.

Start with beautifully fresh sigarilyas or sigadilyas (winged beans) and cut them to small pieces and blanche in boiling water for a minute or less and shock in ice water to stop the cooking process and retain that vivid green color. Steam or blanche some shrimp until just cooked and peel and devein if necessary. Make a dressing by adding fish sauce, fresh lime juice (dayap), some sambal (not too much) a touch of homemade tamarind puree, a touch of brown sugar and mix until dissolved. Toss the vegetables and shrimp with the dressing, and add a couple of tablespoons of coconut cream just to mute and balance out the flavors. Taste and adjust as you desire. At the last minutes, I spied the preserved limes in the fridge so I added a scant 1/4 teaspoon full of finely minced lime rind (no pulp) to the dressing.

Chill for a few minutes in the fridge as the flavor meld together. Serve slightly cool. I added some purple basil for color but they were irrelevant. This salad was FANTASTIC. The little bits of powerful flavor from the preserved limes really provided an unusual punch. The whole thing just worked really nicely. Mrs. MM and I nearly finished this entire salad, and it was quite large. We left some on purpose so the crew could taste it and replicate it for future meals. It’s not really a filipino dish, but who cares, it tasted wonderful. Any reason to use more veggies and get us all eating them is a good one, as far as I am concerned.

Old post on sigadilyas, here. And here’s an interesting take on “Bicol Express” with sigadilyas.

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Chicken broth is universally recognized as being restorative. So when I am out like a light and the cook asks what I would like to eat for lunch, the automatic response is either chicken tinola or chicken arroz caldo. We eat this at least once a month, without illness, and I never tire of it. This version is a little more pungent and flavorful than a classic tinola that is more gentle and light, but with your tastebuds numbed by illness, it is the perfect antidote to the blahs…

First we brown some chicken parts in a heavy enamel coated iron pot. We only had chicken parts on this occasion so we did legs, wings and thighs. Otherwise, break down a whole small chicken and brown those parts in two batches.

Remove the chicken parts, and saute some garlic, onions, lots of ginger, lemongrass, the white part of leeks until softened and aromatic. Add a touch of fish sauce at this point, then return the chicken parts and add water (or better yet, a light homemade chicken stock with little salt).

Adjust fish sauce, season with salt (if necessary) and pepper and let this simmer for 10-15 minutes or so. Taste to ensure it’s just right.

Prepare lots of unripe papaya and a few minutes before sitting down to the table, add the papaya to the pot and let it cook until just softened. I always wondered who was the brilliant first cook who thought to cook raw papaya and pair it with chili leaves, but perhaps the explanation is as simple as a disgruntled cook who thought she had a ripe papaya and when it turned out to be hard and green, she threw it into a pot of chicken soup instead, liking the unlikely results…

We also add lots of chili leaves in our version, better still if a couple of little unripe chilies are included for a bit of heat. Serve hot. I can eat this just by itself, or if you prefer the full-on experience, with lots and lots of steamed rice and a dipping sauce of fresh lime juice with fish sauce in case you still can’t taste anything through that fog of sickness. :)

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We were in the middle of the most ginormous wholesale mall on the planet in Yiwu, China. Or at least that’s what it felt like. Having walked a good 12 kilometers so far that day, with a bum foot, I was relaxing on a bench while our managers were scouring stores for more stuff we needed to buy for the restaurants. And along comes this vendor, pushing a cart down the hallway on the fourth floor of the building!

He stopped a few feet away from me and started peeling something as several customers came up and bought little bags filled with small little fruit or vegetables. On closer inspection, it turned out to be freshly harvested water chestnuts.

He would peel the water chestnuts so that customers wouldn’t have to bother with that task once they got home and prepared their dinner. Some folks popped a few chestnuts into their mouth like you might do with peanuts, though these were significantly bigger! And hadn’t been rinsed after they were peeled. :(

The peeler was a bit intimidating, much bigger than a standard western kitchen peeler, but it seemed to do the job well. I was worried that he would shave off part of his finger as he made quick work of the peeling, while smoking a cigarette, no less.

He didn’t speak a word of English so I couldn’t ask how much the water chestnuts were, nor what people tended to cook with them, but it was a nice diversion to watch him for a few minutes while I tried to give my feet a rest. :)

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Our wonderful guide Ruixi had been previously advised that Marketman was big on markets, so she made sure that a market was on our itinerary that day. After the fried pancake and hearty bowl of lamb meatball soup, we needed a short break from the eating. The market in the Muslim quarter was bustling, and we only managed to see a small fraction of it, but it was totally worth the trip. As soon as we got out of our tuktuk, we were greeted with this abundance of freshly picked strawberries. Wow!

Dried lotus seeds…

…goji berries…

…black raisins still with their stems…

…green or golden raisins (a personal favorite, so I bought a kilo’s worth) sourced straight from the farms…

…oddly shaped nectarines…

…mulberries, or I think they are mulberries…

…dressing a chicken (why do they say that, when Undressing the chicken is probably more descriptive) or is it a pigeon?…

…lotus roots…

…various green chilies…

…fresh water chestnuts…

…the most incredibly intense red dried chilies I have seen in a while…

…and crushed or ground as you pleased…

…sichuan peppercorns and star anise…

…seeds of all kinds, melon, squash, etc.

I can’t remember what these were, but if I had to guess, seaweed of some sort.

Tons and tons of apples. One forgets when you are conditioned as a child that all red apples are from Washington state, that they probably grow more apples in China than anywhere else on the planet. In fact, China grows nearly half of all the apples commercially sold on the planet, or a whopping 8x the apples grown in the U.S.!

And finally, walnuts and dates. If we weren’t headed to another city and we weren’t so limited by minimal luggage allowance, I would have filled a box with things we saw that day. More market finds in the next few posts…

The post To Market, To Market, in Xian, China appeared first on Market Manila.

This is an extremely rare photo of Mrs. MM sitting on a low seat in a somewhat grimy alley in Xi’an, China. Let me stress, this is NOT her comfort zone. But when traveling, we almost always do things that we rarely, if ever, do at home, it’s just part of the adventure. Actually, the alley wasn’t that bad really, but just before we managed to get this particular table, it was filled with other people, and let’s just say there were projectile this and that which was enough to make one’s eyes roll here and there. :)

Stop #2 on the Lost Plate Food Tour that morning was a ginormous cauldron (batya or filipino laundry basin more accurately describes it actually) of steaming soup. Thick enough to be a stew, it was a stick to your ribs (literally) type of breakfast treat. This couldn’t have been much past 9 in the morning or so, and there were lines for this particular purveyor.

The soup, made with little lamb meatballs, cabbage and various other vegetables, probably a starch thickener of some sort, or one of the veggies acted as a natural thickener, was heady with aroma and chockfull of stuff. at about $1 or just a little more, it seemed like an incredible bargain, all over again.

Several ladles full of soup are placed in a large bowl. The man serving it makes very, very pointed efforts to count the number of meatballs that get included in each bowl, then you can choose a little or a lot of chili sauce, chopped herbs and greens to go on top of it.

I love how abundant these servings are, you don’t get the feeling that it’s all carefully costed and measured to the gram (except for the meatballs, of course)… and it definitely looked like one got his money’s worth. It’s heavily vegetable inclusive, but the strong flavors of lamb also make this meaty at the same time.

You get an old or dry piece of bread for each bowl (we split one order into three bowls) and you break this bread up into little pieces. Ladle the soup over this and mix until the bread absorbs the liquid and it all gets even thicker and heartier. It’s got your carbohydrates, vegetables and protein all in one bowl. I found this a bit heavy and I have never liked starch-thickened soups, but I must say, it was delicious nonetheless. I don’t think I could have finished a whole order, but it was definitely worth the experience. It was still a bit cool the morning we set out on this tour, so a bowl of hot soup was a welcome treat.

We were increasingly flabbergasted by how economical and abundant the meals on this tour were turning out to be. I can’t imagine doing a similar tour anywhere in the Philippines with the same kind of reaction, perhaps only in places like Bacolod or Pampanga, but at PHP40-60 per large serving of anything? Not so easy… After the soup we got back in the tuktuk and headed to the nearby Muslim market…

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I have always loved a properly made Melanzane a la Parmigiana or Eggplant Parmesan. There’s something so incredibly comforting about the texture, the oozing cheese, the tomato sauce that makes this almost as comforting as Spaghetti with ragu or Bolognese sauce. It’s also pretty high calorie, I suspect. But sometimes you just want a shortcut version, or at least I do. So when I came across this recipe from the New York Times, and I happened to have several large western eggplants wallowing in the fridge, I decided to make my own version for dinner that evening.

Instead of frying the eggplant naked like in the NYT recipe, I decided to coat the eggplant slices in a bit of seasoned flour, egg and breadcrumbs and deep fry them for a couple of minutes and let them rest, hoping the heat would fully cook the eggplants interiors, and they did. Just make sure you don’t cut the eggplants more than say 1/2 inch thick or you risk a bit of raw eggplant at the center, and that’s unpleasant.

On a large platter, I put down a bed of of wild arugula, topped that with the fried eggplant slices, a quick tomato sauce made from canned san marzano tomatoes crushed and sautéed with olive oil and salt and pepper, then slices of good mozzarella, lots of ripe tomatoes sliced in different ways, lots of shredded basil and drizzled some olive oil and balsamic vinegar over everything. Oh, don’t forget some salt and pepper as well. This wasn’t really a gooey eggplant parm, more like a hot and cold salad with all the right flavor highlights. It was a HUGE HIT at dinner that evening, and something we will definitely be doing again soon.

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Every year I look forward to the months after the Christmas holidays, because unless storms have ravaged agricultural areas, the produce in markets only gets better and better. That is, of course, until the wicked heat of the summer months brings it all to a sweet end with all those fabulous tropical fruits. These beautiful native “heirloom” tomatoes are one of my favorites… with thin skins, tasty and less acidic flesh, I love these in simply thrown together salads, or mashed with some bagoong and lasona for a classic Northern condiment called KBL. They are starting to appear in markets now.

Other older posts on native tomatoes here, here and here.

The post Native Heirloom Tomatoes Starting to Appear in Markets Now… appeared first on Market Manila.

I found myself with lots of red fruit leftover in the fridge, a post-Valentine surfeit shall we say. And a couple of packages of young spinach from Malipayon farms still unused, half a block of feta cheese, and nothing much else for lunch… The salad isn’t as odd or unique as it sounds… watermelon and feta, is another fruit and salty cheese combination I’ve done before for example.

So wash and dry some young spinach, throw it into a nice photogenic bowl. Slice some leftover strawberries in half and sprinkle those over top. Take a couple of tablespoons of leftover pomegranate arils and add that to the colorful mix. Crumble feta cheese all over in what begins to look like an Italian flag of sorts… then take a tablespoon or so of leftover raspberry coulis, add some white wine vinegar, salt, pepper and olive oil and drizzle that all over. It was a surprisingly tasty combination. Visually stunning, and the berries and salty cheese worked quite nicely together.

P.S. If you’ve been missing your regular dose of marketmanila, I have been reasonably good on instagram, so just google “therealmarketman” and “instagram” and you can view the feed on-line instead of having to sign up for instagram. Next up, our Valentine’s dinner at home… :)

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A few weeks after we returned from our South African Safari mid-2014, I was speaking with Gejo Jimenez of Malipayon Farms when he dropped by to make a delivery of greens, and I mentioned that I had noticed so many pea shoots used as a garnish on snazzy dishes in Cape Town. I asked why we didn’t have it as it must be pretty easy to grow, and he promised to look into it. Tom Yao are another stage of pea sprouts as well, but much “younger” and they are on offer in several groceries, so a few days older version couldn’t be so complicated…

…so fast forward a few months and Gejo dropped by the house again, this time bearing some of his first few pea tendrils, lovingly grown from very expensive peas. They were fantastic, redolent with the flavor of peas, just a bit stronger than those grown in cooler climates. I was amazed and just tickled pink to have them just fresh off the farm. I immediately asked him if I could write about them, but he asked that I defer until he had a steady crop, so he might have a headstart on competitors and be the first to offer it to his restaurant clients. I agreed, then promptly forgot to ever do the post.

But if you had sharp eyes, you might have caught the pea tenrils on this appetizer plate I put out last Christmas, with bone marrow, tripe and oxtail marmalade. A guest or two commented on the pea tendril salad, and I just smiled and said I had a “special source”… so competitive, these dinners. I am KIDDING. I had made Gejo promise to supply me with pea tendrils for the holiday dinners, in exchange for raising the idea with him. But I paid for this order.

The next day, for a chef’s nibble (SANDWICH) I put lots of leftover crabmeat with mayo onto a section of french bread and topped it generously with the pea tendrils. It was delicious. But what was really amazing is that an idea just months before, taken up and run with by Gejo, had yielded a bit more choice in the local produce scene. I have since spotted the tendrils in various restaurants in Manila and send Mrs. MM knowing looks about the likely source… Thanks Gejo for growing this stuff, and if I find anything else that is of interest, I will let you know!

This kind of collaboration is something that makes maintaining this blog so incredibly rewarding. And it is not necessarily “commercial free”. Gejo sells this stuff now, but I was pleased to help bring the idea to market in my little way, without any gain intended. And it’s my pleasure to inadvertently make the blog a venue for restaurateurs to discover the produce so he can grow more and sell more. You cannot imagine how many purchasers for restaurants, hotels, airlines, etc. contact me per month with the most (often) ridiculous requests, I now ignore most of the idiotic ones, but help others when I can. Several chefs have also mentioned they find new stuff on the “pages” of this blog, so I am happy to be medium…

The more I see what different folks “in the know” put on their blogs, or more recently, instagram accounts, which I discovered late, the more I realize so many recommendations or “mentions” are tainted with a commercial aspect that is possibly unsavory. No one mentions if they were paid to mention an item, or if it was given or eaten for free, etc. As a good discerning friend said to us lately about a peer, “have you seen xxxxx’s blog/instagram account, has he/she sold out or what? It’s so blatantly filled with xxxxx…” Once you sell out, it’s almost impossible to back pedal. Impossible. :(

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