I had heard of kaningag before I laid eyes on it. The tree’s most salient feature is supposedly its aromatic bark, collected for use in folk medicine as remedy for abdominal pain. But it was mention of the leaves’ use as a spice that caught my attention. In fact, the plant is a species of cinnamon endemic to Cebu and perhaps other neighboring islands, hence its English name, Cebu cinnamon.
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.
In the first quarter of 2013, two foreign vessels ran aground on Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park in the middle of the Sulu Sea. First was the minesweeper USS Guardian, which had to be removed piece by piece to save the corals from further harm. The other incident involved a fishing boat operated by Chinese poachers, much smaller but causing almost twice the damage. Together, they destroyed over six thousand square meters of corals, including some that were half a millennium old.
Ryota spends a lot of time at the office. The way he sees it, he is a good provider: his family lives comfortably and his son goes to a private school. A staunch believer in the virtue of hard work, he is intent on instilling the same in the boy. When his wife suggests he should give Keita some slack, he cuts her off. “It’s enough that one of us pampers him.”
I can always rely on my father not to grouse when a dish is oversalted. In fact, his constant complaint is that my cooking is never salted enough, so much so that I have taken to placing a bottle of Knorr liquid seasoning next to his plate to spare myself the snark.
My friends love balbacua (ox-tail soup (stew?)). I always counter that if I have to go to the trouble of tenderizing ox tail, I might as well go the extra mile and make kare-kare, with vegetables in creamy peanut sauce, served alongside sautéed fermented shrimp paste. There just isn’t much flavor in ox tail — texture, yes, but I find it terribly one-dimensional.
