Even if it’s not the best version I’ve tried, I still delight whenever I eat halo-halo.
justkalinaw
An adventure in peacebuilding
Category Archives: Food Experiments
The Balut Adventure
“It’s just soup, it’s just soup, it’s just soup.”
“It’s just a hardboiled egg…well, with a taste of chicken…”
“Just don’t look…” “But you’re putting vinegar on your hands!” “I’m not looking!!”
(hover on pictures for explanatory captions – not that much explanation is needed)
Unpretentious killer delicacy station
It’s better if you add salt…
It’s just soup, it’s just soup
Cracking up at the craziness of Ketty’s gung-ho approach
I’m actually doing this?
DON’T remind me what I’m eating!
slowly but surely
I’m not looking at it!
In for the last
Pinakbet
One of the dishes I really enjo
y here is Pinakbet. Probably because it includes green beans and squash, two great vegetables. It was also the main veggie-heavy dish I had at my first restaurant experience on my second day in Davao, so that may be part of the reason also. I haven’t been trying specific recipes very much, but last night I tried this one. It uses shrimp paste, something I bought because I noticed it was in a lot of Filipino dishes. As you can see from the coloring in the photo, I put quite a bit in it. But surprisingly, once I could get past the color (most pinakbet does NOT look pink), it actually was pretty good and tasted remarkably (relatively) similar to pinakbet. I’ll call it a success, and nonetheless, I still very much enjoy my green beans and squash. 🙂 (This version I also added tofu. Traditional pinakbet also includes other vegetables like okra. Seasoning ingredients I used were onions, garlic, ginger, shrimp paste, tomatoes.)
An Ode to Creamy Fruits
Today I tasted fresh Guyabano for the first time, which reminded me of the fabulous new genre of fruits in the Philippines – what I call “creamy fruits.” These are fruits I’ve NEVER had before in my life, and which are all, well, creamy!
They include: Durian, Mangosteen, Marang, Guyabano, Jackfruit (perhaps semi-creamy) … they’re all delicious!
Jackfruit images: [fruits] courtesy of SOMMAI / FreeDigitalPhotos.net [on tree] courtesy of scottchan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Recent Food Adventures
I discovered coconut cream! I had picked some up at the store in my search for regular cream for the mango float I wanted to make from my freshly chosen mangoes, and decided to throw it in a dish. (picture right) Delicious!
Mango float, a layered dessert of mangos, cream/condensed milk mixture, and graham crackers … pictured far left. A dessert I can make without an oven!
Here’s a photo of some rambutans – a lychee type fruit that’s quite tasty on the inside (white fruit around a seed) and quite hairy on the outside (as can be seen)
On my recent trip “to the field” I learned that these adventures also include picking up favorite treats and cheap fruits/veg. We stopped at Mers, a favorite pastry shop and I dutifully bought a number of things I’d never eaten before: (clockwise from top, skipping the fresh food) rice cakes (Mers’ specialty), mango rolls, ube oatmeal bar, Jo-Ann’s (yes this came from elsewhere) famous cakes (forget the name – had mung beans inside I think), pooh cakes (chinese-style red bean cakes), and bukayo (coconut sweet snack). We obviously also picked up some fresh things: mangoes (we tried 3 kilos for 100p but only got them at 110p), unripe avocados at 10 or 15p/kilo (still have to learn how to eat this best), camote (sweet potatoes – this one was a purple sweet potato, also got yellow ones, still have yet to see my favorite orange ones).
New foods!
Unfortunately this was a slideshow but I have yet to figure out how best to embed things. For now, just click the link and view it yourself as a slideshow if you like.
Lots of new foods!
Salsa Surprise
For our housewarming party, my contribution, beyond red rice, was Salsa. I’ve made salsa a handful of times in the US and have felt it has generally come out quite tasty. I had seen tomatoes, onions, and peppers in the markets, so figured I could whip up some of this for others to enjoy. I ended up calling it Sharon’s American-Mexican-Filipino Mango Salsa Surprise. It was a continual experiment of amendments as I discovered the local ingredient options.
- No coriander or cilantro meant I substituted cumin.
- Super small tomatoes meant I didn’t want to chop all day, so supplemented with an old large can of chopped tomatoes (canned tomatoes aren’t easily found).
- I had already decided it’d be a mango salsa, and thought that perhaps adding bamboo and coconut shoots (which I had bought that week at the market to experiment with) would be a good asset.
- I bought six small cans of black beans…only to later discover that the canned black bean variety here is seriously fermented and super salty. Thankfully I tasted before adding, so they were left out of the mix.
The ingredients therefore became a mix of: Onions, garlic, cumin, tomatoes (fresh- including red and green, and canned), chili peppers, red and green peppers (not sure the variety – they are small and sweet), chopped fresh mango, and bamboo and coconut shoots.
The chip hunt was the secondary challenge. The stores had tortilla chips – but being a rare find, they were very expensive, so I sought out cheap alternatives. I picked up some cheese-flavored small “tortilla” chips (there was no plain flavor), which turned out to be very small and round and SUPER cheesy, filled with the ever-present magic MSG. I supplemented (thank goodness) with a bunch of white butter crackers. Not quite my ideal for salsa accompaniments, but we survived.
Thankfully, some thought it was a hit! Only I was partially disturbed by the more-odd-than-usual conglomeration of ingredients.
My salsa surprise along with its (slightly sad) accompaniments
This week’s food adventures
Forget the name – an egg tart (I think) that you sprinkle coconut on top. Delicious!
Ostrich ice cream!! (made with ostrich eggs)
One of my favorite dishes so far! Bicol express, the coconut cream sauce is AMAZING with a lovely bite to it.
Santol – Had this fruit first in a juice and enjoyed it, so bought one to try and whew is it sour! Sounds like some people soak/dip it in vinegar and add salt. We’ll see…
I also had a warm seafood salad at the expat deli (delicious), and enjoyed my first avocado shake (also delicious – it’s made sweet). I also had crispy bananas, and several new pastry delights from the street-side sweet shops. From a street-side vendor, I also finally tried the Orange Ball. (Don’t yet know/recall its name) It’s a deep-fat fried hard-boiled egg, served with a cucumber/onion salsa base, extra salt to add (DOES NOT need it), and spicy sauce (didn’t try) – it was good, as most deep-fat-fried things are. 🙂 If I don’t cook, nearly every food adventure is new, so unfortunately not all get chronicled. But it’s all been quite tasty!
This week in food
Absolutely THE MOST refreshing, wonderful, tasty dish I’ve had since I arrived. Perhaps because it’s a fresh salad, but it was so tasty too. A pomelo salad, eaten at Jack’s Ridge. I was over the moon. Pomelo, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, perhaps a squeeze of some kind of juice (but maybe not), a few pieces of soggy but fried onions maybe (hard to decide what it was). Absolutely delicious.
First time cooking cassava, I made a curry dish with eggplant (long, slender type), banana (while there are many varieties, I finally chose the one that was closest in sweetness to what we have back home, even though for this dish it would’ve been better to have less sweet cooking bananas), mushrooms (straw mushrooms, or kabuteng saging according to wikipedia) and the spinach-like leaves that I like.
Other delights this week included new fresh juices, including watermelon, green mango, and santol served at the training. I also discovered “buko juice” is coconut juice. 🙂 Also unsurprisingly tasty.
No longer a Vegetarian City Girl
Fish
I felt like such a city girl as I squealed with the gross realities of a fish’s innards. And how when the fish’s eyeball popped out, I was a bit astounded. But I cooked it. And ate it. Fried fish and boiled fish. I had picked up some tilapia on request from Ketty, and while there realized there was salmon – even though I’ve been a basic vegetarian since 2002, I have had salmon and remembered enjoying it a lot. So I decided I’d try some. Well, it wasn’t quite the pink salmon I was used to from home. Not really sure what kind of salmon it’d be. But it tasted like fish. Anyway, I did it! Still haven’t figured out the sustainability practices of fishing here, but no doubt this stuff is local.
Suso sa gato
A new experience a bit more specific to the Philippines was “suso sa gato.” That’s what the sign said for the pan of small shells at the buffet — where by the way, I also tried some excellent crispy kangkong (some kind of deep fried greens). 
Having no idea what the “suso sa gato” was or how to eat it, I asked one of the waiters. As I expected, one was to suck it (whatever “it” was) out of the shell. So I did. Not as bad as I expected but the worm-like green creature/thing that emerged was a bit scary.
Internet research update: I’ve discovered, as expected, that what I ate was a snail. What the name translates to I’m still not sure, since “gato” is usually cat, and “kuhol” is snail… some mix of a different language perhaps, or local shorthand, who knows. And the kangkong = water spinach.
And for fun, here’s some usual-looking desserts:
*Papaya and pineapple
*rice-based cakes, the white one I’m sure was coconut-related, the purple ones were topped with ube (very yummy – purple yam I believe), and the yellow bottom part might have been mango flavored. The leaf covering the round ones was to be taken off. Those were more like sticky rice desserts whereas the ube-topped squares were more ground rice desserts.
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