Market Manila

BettyQ is a marketmanila.com “regular” and has been commenting on this blog for the past year or so. She resides in the Pacific Northwest in the U.S. and has worked professionally in restaurant kitchens before. She had mentioned by email that she had a homemade version of X.O. sauce, a scallop and shrimp concoction, heady with flavor, that was originally invented in Hong Kong a couple of decades ago and its popularity in Chinese cooking has grown dramatically. You can now purchase the X.O. sauce in Chinese or Asian groceries and it is usually quite pricey. She very kindly sent Marketman not only the X.O. recipe but the main raw ingredients necessary to cook the dish. She has been most gracious with her recipes on the blog and with her permission, I am posting the recipe here for several readers who have clamored for it… It is delicious.

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A few days ago, I asked you what five dishes they would order if they went out to eat at a Filipino restaurant. Over 125 readers left a comment, and while not a huge sample, it is a pretty good one considering the trends I see from my previous poll questions (many times, the results after 200 votes, is very similar to the results at 600-800 total votes). Not surprisingly, a few dishes were clear favorites, with the most popular one appearing in nearly 60% of the comments left on that post. It was also quite interesting to see that the Top 10 or so dishes you order at restaurants differed noticeably from readers’ Top 10 Pinoy Dishes overall from a poll nearly two years ago… In fact, only five dishes appeared on both lists. I guess that means that folks tend to order things at restaurants that they can’t be bothered to make at home. So it isn’t a big surprise that the most ordered dish at a pinoy restaurant, didn’t even show up in the top 10 list of Pinoy dishes overall. Read on for the results of the recent poll:

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So, can YOU remember the words to that classic Filipino song, Bahay Kubo? Here are the lyrics to help you along; geez, I forgot how short that song was… And while I think I have featured most of the vegetables in that song, there was one, the last word, linga, that frankly I had no idea what it even was. Until a month or so ago, when I ran across a whole pile of small, dark khaki, sesame seeds at the Bogo market and asked what they called it and they said “lunga” or in tagalog “linga.” Aha! Who would have known? A lot of you, perhaps, but I was clueless. I didn’t even know we grew sesame seeds here. If I had to free associate, unfortunately, if one screamed “sesame seed” I would have screamed back “two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles on a SESAME seed bun.” That’s a Big Mac, to you. Hahaha. Sad.

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Actually, a cute kid, a baby boy, and two adult female goats, that is. :) The wild grass on an empty lot in Cebu was growing at a much faster pace than we could cut it so I was searching for an economical and environmentally friendly solution… And since early rains had hit Cebu and La Nina would likely result in an incredibly wet rainy season, the problem was only going to get worse. Even assigning folks with machetes every few weeks (to hack away like some gory murder scene in a low budget horror movie) didn’t seem to do the trick. So I had this brilliant idea that we should acquire several goats to keep the grass clipped short and neat. I asked a few people if goats liked to eat grass, and they nodded enthusiastically. So like a ding dong, without doing much further checking, I sent some crew to a goat dealer to buy two goats. They got two large or adult females and one baby boy (kid) thrown in for free. Total price was roughly PHP3,000, the equivalent of just 10 days of a human grass cutter, so I thought it was a good deal. But what did we know about goats, anyway???

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Don’t do this more than once a quarter! Don’t say I didn’t warn you. As I finished this bowl of goodness at lunch, I was silently singing “killing me softly with this adobo, killing me softly, with this adobo, spending my whole life, at Vicky Belo’s, killing me softly…” :) You know the song. Oh, and I don’t mean any harm to Ms. Belo’s business in any way, I just meant I would need her services to rid my mid-section of its unusually high fat content if I kept eating more of this! At any rate, what was I to do with about a third of a large garapon (jar) of slowly cooked, no soy sauce adobo, that I did a post on earlier, here? Adobo rice topped with shredded re-fried adobo, OF COURSE!

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Essentially brined lemons, these preserved lemons are used in all sorts of Moroccan tagines and other slow cooked stews. They add a salty, tangy hint of citrus to the dishes, but without the harshness and bitterness associated with fresh lemons. They keep for ages and you only use a teeny weeny bit each time so this recipe should be more than enough for a year’s worth of occasional cooking in the Moroccan style. The recipe is from Gourmet Magazine, and I made this batch with the intention of trying out a recipe they featured with crab meat, sambal oelek and preserved lemons on spaghettini pasta, link here.

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Apicio’s comment on the previous post regarding Gourmet magazine seemed so appropriate considering that I was just then writing about old, and I mean OLD issues of Gourmet. I started collecting various food magazines in the late 1980’s, however, with several moves across oceans, I had to throw out several years worth of magazines to lighten my luggage. In 1995, with a more permanent base in Manila, I started to save our food magazines once again. As such, there are some 500+ issues of various food magazines on our shelves, today. I was talking to a Canadian friend at dinner about this habit of saving food magazines and she jumped up, disappeared into a room and emerged with an incredible treasure trove… In one box folder, she had saved some very early Gourmet Magazines and she lent me three of them so I could browse through, photograph and do a post on them for Marketmanila’s readers…

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Happy Mother’s Day! I know a lot of folks head out to eat on Mother’s Day, mostly to give mom a day off from some kitchen work, but we tend to stay IN on holidays such as this one since the malls, restaurants, etc. are jampacked and you are more likely to get a mediocre, overpriced and somewhat stressful meal instead of a calm and enjoyable one. Of course there are exceptions, but today is a great day to enjoy food at home, as long as “mom” doesn’t have to prepare it. So here was Mother’s Day lunch at our place…

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