When my father told his guest that I had prepared something special for lunch, I knew I had the osso buco down pat. Pa is so finicky, I had long given up trying to figure out how he comes to decide what it is he likes — little wonder Ma gave up cooking for him a long time ago — making the rare pronouncement like this music to my ears.
“Bell pepper,” a friend once lamented. “I see people push it to the side of their plate and I break out in dandruff.”
“Try the California Wonder,” I said.
“Eh, have you been listening? Local is expensive enough.”
Every culture has its own idea how to nourish a woman who has just given birth. Here at home, the traditionally prescribed dish is soup of lean white fish. Contrast this with the Cambodian post-partum diet of hot and spicy (also salty) food, plus alcohol — no fruit of any kind, since fruit cools the body, hence supposedly bad.
Mention garlic and everybody knows what it is: a bulb, with individual cloves, pungent, and oh-so-good (for those into it, anyway, because I know some who can not abide this spice).
For the last leg of a recent three-country Southeast Asian cruise, our ship anchored off Patong in Phuket, Thailand. Stepping ashore, I instantly regretted having signed up for the guided tour: I could have spent the time making the rounds of the food stands, restaurants, and bars along the beachfront and nearby Soi Bangla. Alas, our guide promptly whisked our group onto a bus and off we went.
The one item that keeps me coming back to the local barbecue plaza is grilled pork cheeks. For ₱5 a stick, you get three or four flimsy slices of fatty jowl generously basted with sweet banana ketchup. I can easily finish ten sticks in one sitting and call that a happy meal. Too happy, in fact, that at times I can not wait for the barbecue plaza to open and so make my own at home.
What Cebuanos call pochero most other Filipinos call bulaló. This, if you ask me, is pochero (beef stew), though it actually started out as bulaló (beef soup) at the previous day’s lunch.
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.
Ma cancelled the parties she had scheduled over Christmas save one, ostensibly because she did not want me stressed, although I suspect it was more because she was in no mood to entertain. At least she made good on her proffered reason, because that one occasion was a potluck dinner with her high-school friends.
I stand corrected. Just last week I pointed out to a restaurant server that their “baby” green beans were, in fact, haricots verts or French green beans. I had imagined they would be baby Baguio beans, which is how we call the more common green beans. Now I’m glad that the waitress did not know any better.
