“No way,” said my suki. It was too cold to venture beyond the shallows. “Today, only nukos sa piliw.“ That’s the kind of squid I like, but beside the point. Sometimes I forget these fisherfolk work at night, often through it. Elsewhere, only shrimp — a lot of them. One guy had tanguigue (Spanish mackerel), and for having the balls to take on the hypothermic waters off the continental shelf demanded ₱500 a kilo for it. Perspective, my friends.
“Let’s check out Bato,” I told Jenny. It’s only a town and less than an hour away, but with a geographical advantage, and there we stocked up on fish, although most of what I bought were hardly deep-water: saltwater bangus (milkfish), really fine tugnos (anchovy fry), labtingaw (lightly salted, semi-dried fish), and caraballas or salay-salay (yellowstripe scad/trevally). After almost two weeks of subsisting mostly on meat and shellfish — two storms hit the region (if not our area directly) a week before Christmas, followed by a full moon — we were fish-starved.
I couldn’t have enough of the scad — or rather, no part of the fish escaped me. Deep-fried, everything was edible, from the head down to the bones and all the way to the tail. For starters and sides, respectively, the tugnos — in soup and poached in spiced vinegar. “Go, ’dong,” Ma said, “have more kan-on. You want extra?” Atot! I hadn’t reckoned on eating this much rice! Oh well, I close 2015 looking properly patay-gutom.
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