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.
With no one to cook for last week, I decided on takeout pork sinigang (sour soup) from Andok’s. I had a dim recollection of liking their version of the dish at a Tacloban branch many years ago.
In the previous post, I mentioned a recipe for ukoy by the late gourmet chef, restaurateur, cookbook writer, and TV host Nora V. Daza. It was from A Culinary Life: Personal Recipe Collection (with Michaela Fenix, 1992), which I have only now started to read in earnest despite the fact that we have had the book for at least 20 years.
I try to keep an open mind about ingredients that normally don’t appeal to me. Litób (blood cockles), okra, alugbati (Malabar/vine spinach): they’re slimy, a texture I am averse to. Still, I try to find ways of cooking them that minimizes that undesirable aspect. Failing that, as with litób — eh, too bad; at least I gave it a shot.
I have on occasion been chided for cooking with ingredients that are not available locally (or even in the broader domestic market). The implication being that I have no business sharing recipes with “ordinary” cooks here at home whose kitchens are not as well stocked.
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.
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.
When it comes to hot and sour soup, I much prefer the Southeast Asian versions, in which the sour component derives from fruits (often unripe), over the Chinese, which uses vinegar. There is simply no contest between the more rounded tartness of tamarind, kamias, or lime, and the one-note acidity of vinegar.
Last Christmas a friend gave me a bag of salted egg-coated potato chips. I liked it a lot, to the extent of looking it up online, which was how I discovered it had been some sort of craze in Manila a while back.
