Kitchen Kwento

R is for Recipes to Remember

This is the cookbook that started it for me:

Never mind that its cover features a tired ham, maraschino cherries, imported grapes and red delicious apples instead of foods remotely native to the Philippines. If I met Ms. Enriqueta David-Perez, I'd tell her that her cookbook was picked out from Manila's National Bookstore by my mother's 22-year-old hands, packed into a suitcase, flown across the Pacific, schlepped in various cardboard boxes across the continental US, and its recipes re-opened 26 years later, when I was 8 years old. And I'd thank her.

We lived in the Mojave Desert then. Summers were hot, dry, and boring. On days so hot even the ants stopped crawling across the pavement, the kitchen was my solace, and I pored over barely touched French and Moosewood cookbooks, trying to match recipes that called for truffle oil with our pantry's Spam, corned beef, rice, canned corn, spaghetti, and Pop-tarts. A true geek, I used a dictionary to decipher terms like "whisk" and "mince," cooking terms that were a language I had not learned to speak.

Home and homeland, bridged by recipes.

I remember the day I first dug out Recipes from the Philippines from between the shinier cookbooks. Paperbound, with frayed pages and a taped-together cover, it was like finding the dead sea scrolls misplaced among new edition bibles.

The recipes were different, sparse. In fact, they seemed to be missing directions completely. How much was a "bunch" of green beans? A handful? Although the cookbook was in English, I didn't understand it. Raised without the language of my parents, words like sitaw, kamote, or sili had no definitions. I had to ask my mother to remember. And so, this is how the rest of the summer went:

Mom, what's atsuete?
Um...Aileen, I didn't cook so much growing up, that was your titas. Let me think...

What's bibingka? What's espasol? What's kamoteng kahoy? What's MIKI BIHON? Where can we find pig ears?
Hmm, let's try here...

I would pick a recipe, demand my mother's help, and we would talk it through, call relatives for ideas, or drive miles away into the Mojave to the one Filipino/Pan-Asian market for ingredients. Some of our trials tasted good - like the tender espasol cut by hand into tender logs. Others, like bibingka using spoiled rice flour, were an epic failure. I'm just grateful my mother was patient through it all, digging back to recall childhood memories and become a living dictionary.

It was imperfect, floundering, and we made things up when we didn't know the "right" way to do it. But these attempts to channel Philippine flavors to a kitchen in the Mojave awakened a hunger for something I couldn't name. Heritage? History? In my child's mind, I simply knew there were recipes asking to be unlocked, and so turned to those pages - and my mother's memories - again and again.

What recipes do you remember?

Some Favorites:

Q is for Queen of Hearts

An apo and a lola, photo by Aimee Suzara.

Lola, I remember your hands. Those soft and strong hands nurtured 3 generations, smoothed over glass rosary beads in prayer, and fed a family's memory of itself. Hands like yours build up and hold up the foundation. They are the hands of a queen.

I was 8 years old when we first met. It was 1992, a year after Mount Pinatubo erupted, and 24 years after my parents migrated to the US. You and lolo waited for hours to greet us at the airport, finding us when we emerged from a sea of balikbayans - those who have returned to the land. In a half-dream, I raised your brown palm to my forehead in the first mano po, a gesture of respect my sister and I were taught before leaving.

I know your favorite color was green, but I don't know what your favorite room was. I don't even know if you liked cooking, but you fed us, your visitors, like royalty. Early morning was the shuff-shuff of your tsinelas on the concrete kitchen floor. The way you dished up crisp fried eggs and hotcakes wide as saucers with such precision, who would know you were nearly blind? Years later, as your body slowly aged, it seemed you could see farther than most with those hands, just as your mind and laughter recalled the faces and names of those long past.

While an ocean divided us, I was blessed by every visit with you. Thank you for the gift of your hands; your legacy lives on in every loved one you helped to nourish. In memory of Pacience Erfe Muyargas (1921-2011).

P is for Palengke

On the road to the local palengke (market)

Mangaldan, Pangasinan. At 5 am, the tinny, insistent noise of a cellphone alarm jarred me from fitful dreams. My sister and I slowly crawled out from under a cocoon of blue-green mosquito nets, and readied ourselves in the dim house, the same house our mother lived in as a child. The neighbor, Ate Lidia was leaving at 6 for the palengke (market), and I had asked if we could please, please join her. After sampling the delicious cuisine of my mother's hometown, I wanted to see where it all came from.

Mom, sister, Ate Lidia, my cousin Jan, and I piled into a tricycle taxi. Usually the province felt like the temperature of warm stew, but on this morning the air was cool and sharp on my skin. My loose hair whipped in the wind as the motorcycle sped us down the near-empty road, past vibrant green rice fields, and through the bumpy streets of town.

We stopped at an intersection where rainbows spilled onto concrete. Shoppers laden with bags sifted through displayed vegetables. Hands among long green beans, red-skinned onions, and glossy purple eggplants, some vegetables displayed in baskets, others in brilliant piles, no table needed. Lidia easily sought out the choicest produce. Walking through - grazing the market, it felt like - she squeezed a bean between her fingers to test it for firmness, and examined a tomato's mottled skin. With her generous smile, she commented to our mom which are pangit (ugly) and which were good to eat.

Bangus, the pride of Pangasinan

After tying up shopping bags full of vegetables to the back of the motorcycle, we traveled towards the river and the fishmarket, to find bangus and other fresh fish. Bangus, a tender, finely-boned milkfish, is the pride and lifeblood of the region. Pangasinan's bangus is said to be the best-tasting in the world.

And find it we did. The bangus were just plucked from the waters, their smooth silver bodies supple and eyes clear as marbles. These fish were a far cry from the plastic-wrapped, frozen filets I remembered from childhood. Haggling men and women counted out fish and coins. Shrimp and tiger prawns wriggled furiously inside hot pink and blue plastic tubs. Fishermen shattered blocks of ice with bolos and hammers into steaming white fragments. Old women and young girls balanced round, woven bilaos on their hips, full of green-and-yellow kalamansi and red sili, the freshest flavorings to complement fish.

Back home, Lidia smashed ginger and garlic with the side of a knife. Scales were scraped off from the fish and flew all over the kitchen, the innards plucked out from slit open bellies. Although she had a gas burner, our Lola Remy preferred the clay stove out in the back. Fed by bits of wood and coconut charcoal, that stove imparted a delicious, subtle smokiness to everything cooked over it.

With sinigang on the menu, I was excited to see how they would make the sour tamarind base. We had already gone to the market in the morning, hand-selected vegetables and fresh fish. What unique ingredients would be added to the pot, I wondered? So it was with some surprise when I saw the familiar yellow Mama Sita packet with instant powdered sinigang base appear. It was a healthy reality check for the Fil-Am-romanticizing-the-province mindset the morning had put me in.

In less than 20 minutes, a meal of fresh squash blossoms and tendrils, sinigang (a one-pot soup soured with tamarind), and garlic sauteed prawns was ready. Everything was so fresh there was no need to overcook or overpower the delicate flavors. I could honestly say everything was delicious (somehow even the instant Mama Sita sinigang tasted better than I ever remembered it). With each mouthful, I tasted the harvest of the water and land, the smokiness of the cooking fire, and felt that somewhere, in my belly, I could sense my mother's world a little more deeply than before.

We left the province that afternoon for a 12-hour drive back to Manila. With sleepy eyes I watched the town fade away through the car windows, become replaced by a ribbon of roadside stalls hawking fresh goat, salted eggs, and jars of pink shrimp paste. At one point, I woke up as we passed nearly a mile of stands selling nothing but yellow and red watermelons, cut into rounds and hanging from twine to display the colors. The road itself was a long, winding stretch of palengke.

Haunted by the inescapable US fastfood chain

Post-Palengke. The scenery closer to Manila was a sharp contract to the palengke. We passed dozens of McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Chevron stations, and Starbucks, where my dad stopped for a tall espresso that tasted, well, just like the ones in California. I thought about how even on vacation thousands of miles away, it seemed impossible to escape these familiar glowing logos. They served as reminders of the ways US multinationals have commodified and disrupted foodways both within and far outside its own borders.

And I couldn't help but think of the Bay Area I left behind. Considered a hub for American foodiedom, its growing flurry of street food carts, artisan products, and food blogs fill me with excitement. But still, I couldn't shake the feeling that in all the "buzz" it is easy to forget that these, too, are not new. The intimacy of the palengke is in my roots, in all our roots. Fresh, seasonal, and local food is not a concept, and its more than resistance to a commodified food system. Its simply how our relationship to food is meant to be.

Palengke Picks:

Death of the Palengke

Market Manila

O is for Oh My Gulay

  
OMG: adobong kangkong with crispy garlic.

Except for the occasional lilikoi juice or seaweed salad, as a teen I rarely ate from the plant kingdom. A "real meal" to me went something like...Spam musubi, noodles, adobo, or sticky bbq. But somewhere along the way, the plant kingdom called. I slowly learned to crave and to cook dark leafy things cooked with lots of garlic. Sauteed mushrooms turn me to mush. After years of ignoring my parents and picking out the little green half-moons from the pinakbet, I finally get how bittermelon is delectable. Oh my gulay. I love those vegetables.

There's a half-truth in the perception that Filipino food is meat-heavy. Yes, our culinary heritage has meaty favorites - from sisig, to lechon, to adobo and more. But these dishes are only a sliver of the spectrum, without the traditional gulay dishes that use just-picked vegetables and fruits. As one of my titas says, "Well of course we would cook with gulay. We just go outside and pick something from the garden!"

I had the chance to taste more of the Philippine's wealth of gulay - some dishes rich in familiar flavors, others new and unexpected. Here are some flashbacks from Jan. 11 foodtripping:

Casarap Restaurant and art gallery, Batangas

Casarap is self-described as a “greenhouse cafe in the midst of a self-sufficient and successful organic farm.” This garden-art gallery-green restaurant was founded by Emma Alday, an environmentalist, slow food advocate and former nun. Located right at the 90 km marker off the National Highway, I estimated a quick 30 minute trip. But we somehow got lost for 2 hours, taking unmarked turns, and caught behind funeral car processions. But that's life, and it set the tone for a laid-back 4-hour lunch in the garden.

Gulay that's easy on the eyes

A charmingly painted sign tells guests to be aware Casarap serves slow food - both in cultivation and in preparation. This salad of edible cobalt-blue flowers, crispy cassava, and tiny pepinos was just one of the gems we finished off, together with fresh halo-halo, coconut ice cream drizzled with lambanog (a local coconut wine). There were many others I hoped to try - including wild fiddleheads in coconut milk - but we learned that reservations must be placed in advance so the ingredients could be harvested to order.

Nipa hut dining at Balinsasayaw Restaurant

Balinsasayaw is a Palawan-style restaurant that has taken root in Batangas, and its my mom and dad's favorite spot. The sprawling, garden-like grounds always seem to be full and bustling. I order a fresh buko (young coconut juice), sip slowly, and wait...

...for our orders to arrive. The vegetarian Palawan Express is the stuff dreams are made of, and its just spicy enough, rich with coconut milk, and subtly sweet from tender vegetables. Like the famous Bicol Express, this dish is studded with chilis and radiates a spicy heat relatively uncommon in Filipino cuisine, something that makes this Bicolana very happy.

Returning to the Bay Area, I already miss the flavors of the Philippines. But I feel inspired to take some of the flavors I've come to love using local-grown gulay. More to come!

Oh My, There's More Gulay:

Oh My Gulay Restaurant in Baguio

Happy Slip Utters Oh My Gulay at 1:25