Kitchen Kwento

Butanding and Bicol Express

Mount Mayon rises like a dream in Donsol. 

Bicol is my father’s childhood region. It is coconut country. It is sili country. It is an alchemy of flavors, with dishes of smoky coconut milk laced with birdseye chilis. But while I dreamt of laing and pinanggat and chili-rich Bicol Express, my father dreamt of swimming next to the world’s largest fish known to haunt the waters off Donsol. So our family did it all, spending a week retracing hometowns, tracking the butanding, and tasting some of the Philippine's best food along the way.

Daet. My father grew up in the town of Daet among the movie reels and folding seats of his family's business and the first theaters in town, the Cine Sol and Venus Theater. While the theaters no longer stand, Daet's somber coastline comes alive with surfers and fishermen with their nets cast wide to the sea. I remember that town in snapshots - dinner with my first and second cousins at the beachside restaurant, Kusina Ni Angel, the heavy nighttime rains, a golden afternoon where an old man passed by on his bicycle, his hands clutching heart-shaped gabi (taro) leaves like a quivering edible bouquet. 

Rice paddies along the roadside

Okra reigns supreme at Kusina Ni Angel.

Apuao Island. It seems there is always one more island dubbed "the next Boracay" after that tiny and overdeveloped slice of heaven, blessed (or cursed?) by powder-fine white sand. Apuao was eyed by developers as a potential tourist mecca to rival Boracay, but the foreign-built resort was abandoned and its private airstrip overgrown and now grazed upon by a dozen or so cattle and sheep.

With just 700 residents, Apuao is still its own world and home to a rare silence. There are no cars, no tricycles, no jeepneys, and little electricity, just the wash of ocean waves and put-put of bangkas occasionally coming and going. Drinking water is collected from a neighbor island. I don't think I even heard a single karaoke bar in the village. 

We stayed in a home where a feisty 92-year-old-lola and a handful of local women prepared meals from the land and sea - simple and delicious boiled kamote, malunggay with fresh crabs, native chicken and green papaya tinola, and tiny clams so fresh the living creatures squirted water in my eyes before they were turned into soup.

 My first time seeing kamote, or cassava root, before harvest.

Fresh boiled kamote. 

Laing, gabi leaves cooked down to softness with coconut milk.

The Road to Donsol. There is no use stopping for Doritos or Coca-Cola when an abundance of small vendors selling fresh delicacies line the road. We passed by steaming hot boiled corn, yellow watermelons, pili nuts, salted eggs, jackfruit and lanzones...I fell in love with Belle's stall of fresh puto (steamed rice cakes) just outside the entrance to the town of Guinobatan. And lucky for us, our family friends in Legaspi city run a spot called Colonial Cafe and invited us in to sample their innovative take on Bicol's bold flavors, building off a palette of pili nuts, hot sili, coconut, and malunggay.      

Belle preparing a fresh batch of puto. She stuffs ground rice into coconut shells, fills them with caramelized macapuno (baby coconut) and steams them in banana leaves.

Don't be fooled by the neopolitan ice cream appearance - this is Colonial Cafe's very own pili nut, burnt rice, and sili ice cream.

Donsol. The beautiful, sleepy town of Donsol now has throngs of curious whaleshark pilgrims come from all over the world, filling the tiny roads with blundering SUVs and the waves with butanding-sighting boats. We first made it to the "interaction center," where we watched videos on how to safely meet with the gentle fish, then jumped onto a bangka headed into deeper waters.

It was like searching for unicorns. Nothing was sighted for over 3 hours. We began to take naps. Then a spotter called out that a whaleshark was approaching. And then another. And then another. I'm sorry to say all the eco-tourism precautions were thrown out the window - 6 people per fish quickly grew into 15 people leaping wildly into the water - but yes, being in the presence of a big-as-a-bus fish was breathtaking. 

How to talk about a creature that is a living superlative? I remember watery silence and how my entire range of vision became the silver blue, wildly patterned back of a fish. I remember feeling the most subtle current cross my skin as we came close enough to touch (but I wouldn't touch). The tiny eyes and wide, stretching mouth. The long silver fish flanking its gills. When the butanding returned to depths to deep for us to follow, we all surfaced, gasping in 4 different languages about what we had just witnessed and all unable to describe it. Maybe my dad's smile can.

Dragon Year, Dragon Fruit

The Year of the Water Dragon is here. In the Philippines, January is thick with fiestas and areas such as Binondo in Manila are in full festival mode. But the place where my parents live is quiet, and just a few lonely firecrackers popped into the night. I suddenly missed the festivities of years past and remembered the golden and scarlet dragon dancers dazzling the streets of Oakland Chinatown.

It would be nice to have something dragon-like today, I thought. That's why a pile of vibrantly-hued dragonfruit caught my eye while picking up vegetables for dinner at a roadside palengke. 

Magkano ang dragonfruit? (How much is the dragonfruit?) I asked in my twangy excuse for Tagalog. The woman named her price, but instead of calling it dragonfruit, she called it pitaya. 

With its evocative name, dragonfruit is a minor celebrity gracing labels in the US, from mineral water to vodkas ("with essence of dragonfruit"), although who could really say what it tasted like, just as it was? This was the first time I had ever heard it by the name pitaya. We took one home, and while it chilled in the fridge, I sought background on this lovely fruit.

It turns out the pitaya, or pitahaya, has traveled far. Originating in the Americas, it is a vine-like cactus that became popular in East and Southeast Asia just over a century ago. The aromatic flowers bloom one night alone, on the full moon, and must be pollinated by nocturnal pollinators to produce a proper fruit. Its lifecycle alone sounds like a fantasy.

It was time to open the dragonfruit. The knife cut through easily. With its bold fuschia and lime green scales it promised heat and spice and explosion. Inside, though, the white flesh was a surprise - subtly sweet and refreshing, reminiscent of melons and cucumbers and studded with edible black seeds. 

What a little dragon, I wanted to say. You are colored like fire but cool like water. Appropriate, it seems, for a water dragon year. 

2012 Is In the Details

Happy New Year. I spent the first day of 2012 in the sky, waking and dozing over the restless Pacific. Hours of darkened skies transformed into dawn just as the plane shouldered into Manila. Now I write from my parent's quiet home, awake with jetlag yet soothed by the night song of crickets.

2011 was a year as full of movement as the ocean itself. So many changes touched all corners, from the personal to global, the tiny to the immense, the political to the ecological. The winds of change are blowing and the earth is rumbling. I don't believe in doomsday but how I do believe in transformation. 2012, the year of the dragon, promises to be a year of even greater movement.

In the Kitchen Kwento universe, I look back with gratitude for events like the Kulinarya competitions, a Filipino farm and food gathering, sharing stories with The Filipino Channel. Within all of them, the lessons I've learned are that the simple act of food and gathering are among the most essential in the world we live in. I hold fast to these as an anchor to stay grounded, sane and optimistic.

So for 2012, I want to add another resolution that is more of a reminder than a to-do. I want to remember that it's ok to slow down at times even as the world speeds up, and take notice of the details. I don't want to forget to savor, and allow time to reveal those slow honeyed moments.

And what are these? To stop and smell the fragrance of fried garlic rice. To take joy in the pleasure of ink-and-paper letters. To halve dragonfruits and watermelon radishes and chiogga beets for their hot pink astonishment. To see for the first time there are hearts in the papaya bark of my parent's garden. 

I wish you a 2012 of beautiful details, happiness, and peace.

More:
N is for New Year's Abundance
Support Mindanao's Families Affected by Typhoon Sendong
Ground Theory's Travelogue from the Philippines 

Filipino Soups for the Soul

Soup makes my soul sing. Sharing soup with company is, well, even better. As the winter has slowly crept in I have been dreaming of a time to bring together family stories, warming soups, and many cooks in the kitchen. Last Saturday was the chance to do just that. Thanks to support from the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, I organized a workshop with the theme of "Filipino Soups for the Soul" (The wonderful Jo Boston has a writeup here!)

All smiles with the lovely cooks of the day.

Ginger-inflected tinola is a soup so familiar to the tongue that I based our class recipe on taste. It belongs to that universal lineage of delicious chicken soups fit for bodies on the mend. And, its even a traditional nourishing food for post-partum mamas. Like many Filipino dishes, tinola is resilient in nature. The vegetables can be switched up depending on what's in season and what's on hand.  Folks in the class shared memories of tinola with green papayas, chayote, or even summer squash. We made ours with tender-fleshed upo and the tiniest bok choi.

Waiting for tinola. Lemongrass, green onions, ginger, tatsoi, upo, and bok choi.

The soul of sinigang is its sour broth, whether using sampaloc (tamarind), fruits like guava or green mango, or citrus. Variations include chicken, bangus, and pork, and Jo Boston even mentioned short ribs. I got some salmon inspiration after a trip to the Pacific Northwest and the piers where Filipino Alaskeros began their watery voyage to Alaska's salmon canneries. The legacy of the Alaskeros and its imprints on Filipino/American history led to a unique twist on an essential dish. What was once a "substitute" for tropical fish, and a byproduct of the industry, is now a delicacy in its own right. In fact, my father, who grew up in Bicol province, favors salmon heads to any other fish even though the fish does not even swim in Philippine waters. 

Salmon heads!

Keeping in the spirit of previous OACC culinary workshops, we aimed to blend seasonal produce into traditional recipes, and mix cooking with conversation on adapting foods into kitchens far from the homeland. I felt the question of "authenticity" bubble up as we took on two soups. Some of our soups used local ingredients, like kale and bok choi, but other, far-traveling ingredients such as tamarind pulp were chosen in favor of capturing a traditional flavor. With all the rapid changes that communities - and our environments - now face, how do we keep the soul of those foods alive? 

Preparing onions, tamarind, and garlic

Maybe sinigang captures that question most clearly. For those familiar with this soup, Mama Sita's instant soup base packet is so common that its mention draws a familiar laugh. I shared a story about a balikbayan reality check. A few years back, I visited my mother's province in Pangasinan and trailed the home cooks around hoping to witness real down-home sinigang. We woke in the dark to trek to the market and buy still-flopping fish and the crispest vegetables. But at the moment of truth, when vegetables and fish were to meet broth, it was to my dismay - and laugh - that the familiar package was whipped out and sprinkled in. Here we were, in the heart of the province, and The Packet still made an appearance! I thought we'd be laborously shelling tamarind by hand, but no. (Still, I had to admit the result was delicious).

This is not to say the soup is no longer made in traditional ways - far from it. But it goes to show that the push and pull of instant and processed with slow and homegrown isn't just a question we're facing in the US. We live in a faster-paced time, where globalization and corporations are reshaping relationships to food. As a generation, as individuals, families, and community, though, how do we want to define that relationship? We can all be thankful for folks like Dominic Ainza in SF, whose culinary repertoire includes outside-the-packet sinigang, and Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan, whose Memories of Philippine Kitchens captures and documents living food traditions.

Maybe we can't all take the time to shell tamarinds or have a yard to plant fresh sitaw. But there must be some ways to honor the soul of our foods, no matter where and how we live. I'm thinking of the future, something bigger than any bowl of soup. Because if food traditions become all but disappeared, when those who plant and sow and harvest our foods are displaced, and when the keepers of culinary knowledge are finally lost, we will never know the foods that are at the soul of culture. And with it we will lose those delicious textures - a language, really - telling a story of who we are and who we can be. 

More On Tinola:

Belen, Jun. “On Slaughtering Chickens and Making Tinola”
Chang, Momo. “Asian American Mothers and Post-Partum Traditions: A Recipe for Chicken Tinola” 
Chang, Momo. “Motherhood Rooted.” 

More On Sinigang:
Salaysay, Cynthia. “Singing the Praises of Sinigang”
Fernandez, Doreen. “Culture Ingested: Notes on the Indigenization of Filipino Food”
Gapultos, Marvin. “An Interview with Claude Tayag.”

The Hands That Harvest

This week, on Thanksgiving week, I want to pause in gratitude to hands and especially the hands of the farmer. There is no turkey dinner, no cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie, without someone's hands touching our food at each point in its nearly invisible journey - from the fields, the factory, the shipping truck, to the market, to the table. There is no Thanksgiving without acknowledging, too, how this federal holiday is steeped in the painful history of stolen lands and broken promises. So in giving thanks, there is also space to mourn and remember the true meaning of today. 

Corn and calendula

The hands that harvest are brown hands. They are black hands. They are hands in earthen hues from sand to silt. They are calloused hands. Grandfather's hands. Lola's hands. Old hands that know wet clay. Young hands that grow rougher with each season. 

These hands are Pilipino to Pomo. Chinese to Mexican. Korean to Puerto Rican. Hawaiian to Afro-diasporic. Japanese to Sikh. Irish to Guatemalan. These hands are cutting asparagus, pulling silver fish from the sea, praying into seeds. 

The hands that harvest are broken, bleeding, and torn. These hands are misunderstood and denied a share in the harvest many farmers cannot take to their own tables. The hands that harvest are nourishing, beautiful, and strong. They are life-giving hands. They are the ones that feed the world. I am grateful to those hands.

Amaranth and vaca beans

My hands are still soft and barely calloused urban hands. When I look into the palms, though, I see something else much older than myself. I see the lines that connect me to my parents, my grandparents, and ancestors that came before us. I see hands that tell the stories of their lives, their soil, their struggles and celebrations. I am grateful to harvest the richness of their history in my hands. 

 Sunflowers and sweet honey

More:
Brown Girl Farming on "A Woman's Hands" 
Tribute to a Lola's Hands, "Q if for Queen of Hearts" 
KPFA's coverage of Indigenous People's Sunrise Ceremony on Alcatraz and the original occupation