Sunday Supper at Marketman’s…

Chicken, AGAIN?! Folks who have frequented this blog for the past 9+ years are probably wondering why the number of Filipino dishes featured on the blog have declined in recent months. The truth is, many of our house favorites have already been featured here before, in the archives with over 3,600 posts and counting… So while we eat just as much of the classics like adobo, sinigang, tinola, etc. in our home, I tend to highlight meals with dishes that are a bit less frequent “blog post” material… If you search Marketmanila’s archives (best done by googling say “Tinola Marketmanila” or “Adobo Marketmanila” and think I have skipped a critical Filipino dish or two, leave me a comment and perhaps I will experiment a bit more…

As for this Sunday Supper, featuring western dishes made with mostly locally available produce, it was anchored on a simple roast chicken, a 2.5 kilo jumbo Magnolia bird, stuffed with thyme and rosemary, salt and pepper, a whole lemon, and butter and herbs tucked in between the skin and meat. Roasted until the skin was crisp was light golden brown, it was done in roughly 75-80 minutes, while I walked briskly for 3-4 kilometers burn off some calories and sweat a bit…

With the chicken, I served some braised locally grown fennel, each bulb cut into 4 and placed in a pan with sautéed onions, fennel seeds, olive oil, until lightly browned, then added garlic, saffron, tomato paste and chicken stock and simmered until tender. Season with salt and pepper and garnish with fennel fronds or thyme or flat-leaf parsley. This was so incredibly simple to make, and had such complex flavors for say a 20-25 minute effort. I was concerned about cooking with tomatoes in cast iron (the acidity can strip the iron), but this is how the dish was photographed in Deborah Madison’s book Vegetable Literacy — the recipe is hers.

Flush with market produce from a Saturday foray to the FTI market, I made a dish of blanched and peeled patani, olive oil, some red onions and sliced jamon serrano garnished last minute with ripped up mint leaves just as we sat down to the dinner table. Season with a bit of salt and some freshly cracked black pepper. If I had remembered, some shavings of parmigiano reggiano would have been a welcome addition. The patani had been blanched earlier in the day and were waiting in the fridge, so this dish didn’t take more than 5 minutes to prepare.

A somewhat unusual list of dishes, all with nice flavors, seemingly more complicated than they really were to make, on the table in about 1.5 hours of total elapsed time, including my 4 kilometer brisk walk. I encourage you to hit the weekend markets and buy some unusual produce to add variety to your meals and to help farmers out there who are nice enough to toil the soil to bring us all of this wonderful agricultural bounty.