White rice is a staple in many parts of the world, indistinguishable from one place to the next. What gets people’s attention is when it is presented differently, as with pusô/ketupat, in which it is cooked in a pouch of woven palm fronds, or, in the case of hineksa’ aga’ga’, the traditional rice dish of the Chamorro of the Mariana Islands, colored with annatto, hence known as “red” rice.
Some two years ago, my mother had cuttings planted that she said bore pods of the most vivid red. Now she insisted we drop by the farm so she could show us. They were hard to miss: a long row of shrubs loaded with what looked from afar like ripe rambutan fruit. It was only when the caretaker mentioned that the pods contained seeds used to color food did it dawn on me that I was looking at annatto.
The last time I was in Cebu, I made a point of dining in restaurants I had not tried before. The experiences ranged from amusing to instructive — on the whole, time and money well spent. Still, I yearned for something simple and familiar before I left. It was past 10 PM, so we decided on Ned Nanay’s Grill, a short distance from Cebu Doctors’ Hospital uptown.
To get to the giant granadillas, the owner’s son scaled a nearby tree that looked too twiggy to support his weight. That was how come I kept looking up, willing those branches to hold, and so noticed the strange fruits. They looked like…
Passionfruit — yes, that’s what these are. I am in no mood for toying around, so I will go right out and say that this variety produces the largest fruit of all passionfruit species, is more acidic, and elongated rather than round. It turns yellow when ripe.
POP QUIZ. Among the spices pictured above, which one is not actually a pepper?
It is said that there is a fiesta somewhere in Bohol province for every day there is in May. The joke is that you could hop from one place to the next and never go hungry — indeed pay for a meal — the whole time.
Five summers ago I dried my own chilies, it was that hot out. This year, the season’s just warming up, says PAGASA, maybe reach record-breaking levels in the coming months. I pray that the weather bureau’s wrong, but as long as I’m staying in, I figured I might as well make beef kosahos (better known as tapa) the traditional way. Rather them in the sun than me.
I’m starting to regret having found dried plum/kiamoy powder (Fat & Thin brand) at Metro Ayala in Cebu. I had only meant for it to add an interesting twist to my usual kalamansi juice, as with the drink served at Chong Qing Grilled Fish that I had liked so much. But now I dip fruits in it as well (that’s how the stuff is marketed, actually — as a dip). Even apple, which I do not fancy, has become eminently palatable.
Revisiting Roger Ebert’s “How to Read a Movie,” I was struck by this line: “One of the reasons I started teaching was to teach myself.” Well, that was exactly why I started this blog! The more I write about food, the more I realize how much there is to learn.
