Stephanie's Seafood Buffet

I bet nowhere in the Philippines, and probably even across the globe, can one find a seafood buffet spread of baked fresh scallops on the shell, fresh blue crabs done three ways plus crispy crablets, grilled tuna panga (yellowfin maw, or jaw), fried shrimps, plus a host of meat dishes including a goat stew, all in unlimited servings for the measly price of Php200 (roughly US$4).



But such a buffet exists, tucked in the nooks of the calm and quiet city of Tacloban. The area’s congressman may have received much flak recently for paying about a million pesos (US$20,000) for a dinner in Le Cirque New York for the Philippine presidential delegation on a US trip. But in Tacloban City, no such distasteful overspending is required.


Seafood is abundant, freshly caught and cheap. That’s why Stephanie’s Smoke Haus can afford to offer such a buffet. I believe it is a family enterprise, with spouses and children and the househelp succeeding one another in bringing out trays of newly cooked food from the kitchen to unendingly replenish the spread.

I was in Tacloban to attend the regional managers’ conference of the agency I work for. It is customary for such conferences to end in a dinner featuring the best the region has to offer, with post-dinner socials afterward. The regional head took the group to Stephanie’s, and it became the highlight of my trip.

Stephanie's had the ideal provincial ambience – it felt like eating in a welcoming home, buffet traffic interspersed with bumps with the owners refilling food, who encourage diners to keep on eating with typical Filipino generosity. There’s much more food being cooked in the kitchen, try this, try that!

This was kept up even though the place was packed, all tables occupied, on a Thursday evening. During our almost two-hour stay there we witnessed about two turnovers of tables, yet the food kept coming, the jovial and relaxed atmosphere maintained throughout.

It was an amazing experience. It boggles me no end how the owners recoup their costs. Upon a visit to the wet market the following morning I learned that fresh scallops cost Php180 a kilo, and I believe I had eaten scallops worth more than the price per head of the buffet. And this goes without saying that I had eaten many other things besides.

Of course there was nothing fancy in there. The seafood was cooked simply, with very few ingredients (just the way it should be). The scallops were just laced with melted butter and fried minced garlic. The crabs were steamed, stewed in coconut milk, plus there were crab cakes for those who couldn’t be bothered with breaking shells. The grilled tuna was served hot off the grill and came directly to our table. A fish soup was refreshing with the addition of halved batwan.

But everything was fresh, and newly and impeccably cooked, home-style. And this is all that matters when it comes to seafood.

There were fried chicken, lumpiang shanghai (seasoned ground pork rolled in paper thin flour wrappers and fried), chicken adobo, meat loaf, and other dishes I can’t remember, because I chose to overlook them, concentrating instead on the seafood.

The desserts were simple, as well. The typical gelatin desserts, canned fruits. But there was this viscous mashed kamote (sweet potato) pudding sprinkled with chopped peanuts that was over the top. It was so delicious that it surprised me. I had to ask the strapping man (looked like the family head) refilling the scallop tray, and I was told it was just boiled kamote, milk and sugar.

I hope Stephanie’s will continue to delight visitors and locals alike with such generosity for a long time. For I learned that on Fridays, lechon de leche (roasted suckling pig) is added to the buffet, with a mere Php20 increase in the buffet price per head. I wasn’t in Tacloban long enough to partake of this. But in the words of Gen. Douglas McArthur right in the middle of WWII, I shall return.

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Stephanie Smoke Haus
452 Avenida Veteranos
Tacloban City, Leyte

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Tola

I was in Tacloban City, in the province of Leyte, for two days, and I found it strange to be imbibing soup for breakfast.

I commonly have soup for breakfast, yes, but my breakfast soups are mainly meat soups - broths made from boiling bony meats, added with macaroni pasta (for chicken soup) or noodles. These are usually thick or thickish and carbohydrate-laden, a meal in itself.

The soup I had in Tacloban is made by briefly boiling fish head or belly in water seasoned with ginger, leeks, salt, with choice young leaves. It is eaten with rice. I found it strange because I am not used to having fish soup for breakfast, though I certainly have fish soup for lunch or dinner almost every day.

In Tacloban, and I gather in most places around the Visayas and Mindanao, it is available from morning til night. This soup is called tola in the local language, probably the Waray equivalent of towa in Cebuano/Bisaya, a contracted form of tinola/tinowa. Tinola/tinowa is the middle syllable "to" in the holy trinity of Visayan cuisine - sutokil, or STK, short for sugba-towa-kilawin. Sugba is grilled, tinola/tinowa is boiled, kilawin is marinated in a ceviche.

This triumvirate is fare that best represents the food landscape in the archipelago - the freshest marine catch prepared simply, cooked with very few other ingredients and minimally seasoned, just to enhance the subtle flavors of the bounty of the sea.

But tola/towa, actually, would be found quite, uh, uncommon by people who grew up in the island of Luzon, as I did. It is described as a cross between a tinola and a sinigang, the former being chicken boiled with ginger and salt, while the latter is soured soup. Towa is somewhere in the middle because it is not sour enough to be considered a sinigang, but it cannot be considered a "regular" tinola either because of the tomatoes, which imparts a hint, though, very mildly, of sourness.

The first time I actually had towa was in the island of Lubang, where I ended up after a tumultous overnight crossing of the shark-infested Batangas Strait in a lantsa (a big outriggered boat). It was the worst trip ever for me, on land or water, but I forgot about it with a hot sip of towa - made with small danggit (rabbitfish), fished a few minutes before, and kamote tops - that welcomed me.

But we landlubbers are used to soups that are either just gingery, or a soup whose sourness is pronounced. In Pangasinan we use tomatoes as the sole souring ingredient in a sinigang when cooking small, delicately flavored fish, but the tomatoes are boiled to the point where they have turned quite soft and almost mushy, so that they have infused the soup and sourness is very much present.

In Tacloban, though, the tola is just gingery, boiled without the tomatoes. And I found it addicting. Tola is refreshing and envigorating, light enough for morning fare. Now I understand why office colleagues in the Visayas who spent three months in Makati always felt overjoyed every time they found a restaurant serving hot soups.

I think there is an equivalent soup in the Tagalog region/area, called pinatisan, which is fish boiled in broth flavored with ginger and patis (the Filipino equivalent of the Vietnamese nuoc mam or the Thai fish sauce). We cook tilapia this way.

But the Tacloban version uses the deep sea giant fish momsa or mamsa (talakitok, trevally jack), which has enough fat to make the soup flavorful. Healthy fat, that is. A large kaldero of tola would be be perennially atop a stove by the entrance to the restaurant we frequented, and lifting the lid the smell of ginger mingled with the hissing steam that escaped from the pot.

An accompanying dip is a dollop of soy sauce, a squeeze of kalamansi, a splash of vinegar, mixed all together with the well-known fiery Waray tiny green chili pepper halang-halang, crushed to your preferred level of heat. This is spooned over the fish as it is eaten with rice.

I love mamsa tola, and it is now the tola for me. The restaurant in Tacloban, Ambo's Place, occupying the ground floor of the Comelec regional office, is actually enamored of mamsa, serving only the fish. Besides the tola, I got to try mamsa cooked variously - fried, en tocho (seared and stewed in tomatoes and salted black beans), curried, sweet and sour, coated in mayonnaise and red bell pepper.

Again it was the tola that made a lasting impression, so that on my way to that airport going back to Manila I had to ask to be dropped by the wet market, and bought an entire mamsa to take home to cook.

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Ceriles, Local "Cherries"

My family was served these fruits in Mangaldan, Pangasinan some four years ago, the first time I encountered them. They were called ceriles or siriles, or, strangely enough, "cherries."

Fast forward to the present, and my favorite organic vendor at the public market in Cavite City is selling these fruits, in a heaping pile on a big bilao at Php20 a kilo, and calls them cherries. I purchase half a kilo, and when I get home the househelp point to the tree in front of our residence, where I always espy teens and matrons looking it up, sometimes picking a fruit from its tiny branches, or inspecting the fallen ones on the pavement.

The tree certainly looks like a cherry blossom tree, with a spreading crown, similar to the acacia on our own front lawn, tiny leaves not too tightly packed. The trunk is slim, the bark pale. It started bearing fruit by the end of summer, little green globes slightly bigger than a marble, or an aratiles. Twigs and branches are covered with a row of tiny, star-shaped white flowers.


The leaves are waxy and look so much like agdaw (alagaw, fragrant pemna) leaves, though on a very much smaller scale. The green fruits sprout in singles, so definitely they're not real cherries. I once tried biting into a green one, before knowing it was the same fruit we ate in Mangaldan, and it was hard and bitter.

The ripe fruits are soft but unyielding, with the color variation of caimitos - olive green to reddish to violet. I found them too sour in the past, but this time around I got the flavor of ripe plums. Definitively plums, even the texture of the flesh, with a very sweet aftertaste.


The flesh is the color of butter, though, and there are small, squash-like seeds in undefined segments. Which makes them not really pleasurable to eat, though if you're whiling away the afternoon roaming around and you pick these from the tree, and you munch on them while you inspect the other parts of the neighborhood, they could be a passable sweet chichirya.

I imagine riding a bike with the baby on a basket in front, and we pick these, and we proceed to spit out the seeds while chewing on the fruit, and we help in propagating the species. I noticed an alagaw-looking plant growing in my front lawn while tending to an ambitious garden project last weekend. Maybe I should re-inspect it.

rusting upon contact with air

But this discovery had me searching sites for possible clues as to what kind of fruit it is. I remain clueless. So I'm doing the next best thing - thinking where I could use it. Cook it into a jam, perhaps? Or maybe in baked desserts, substituting it for plums. Maybe dry them into prunes. I certainly would like them in a cake, or in a sweet pastry bar, as they are very sweet.

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Update 8/25/09 : Antonio Medina kindly pointed out that the tree in front of my house (2nd photo above, showing a green globe and flowers on a twig) is actually mansanitas, not seriles (so that's how it's spelled?). Another intriguing fruit, mansanitas, which translates as "little apples." I'm excited waiting for the fruit to ripen so I could taste them!

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Puting Mais

For the entire summer we gorged on sweet corn the color of sunshine. Freshly harvested corn from the fields of Pampanga were trucked to Kawit in Cavite, and many stalls set up shop along the centennial road selling fresh or boiled sweet corn to motorists.

My baby learned to scrape her baby teeth on the kernels on the cob, and we incorporated the corn in many dishes, mostly sweet, like ginataang mais, or maja con mais (coconut cream pudding with corn). Or with chopped carrots in butter. But mostly we ate the corn boiled, on the cob, on hot afternoons by the shade of the acacia tree, or while driving on an errand or on our way to a picnic.

Summer has passed, and the corn has disappeared, the fields now being tilled in preparation for planting palay (rice). But there is still corn - the corn touted as native, though of course corn came to the Philippines from Mexico during the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade.

The corn now flooding the markets is white and smaller. It is not so sweet as the yellow corn, and the kernels not as perfectly lined up, tightly packed like an orthodontic masterpiece. The kernels sometimes have big gaps between them, like the teeth of old men. Sometimes an entire row goes missing.

But this is the corn I like, and remember, the corn boiled in big cans over a woodfire at the backyard of my grandparents' house. Cooked, the kernels are moistly sticky, and produce a faint, reserved sweetness after chewing on them. Not sugary sweet, but starchy, bespeaking of newly harvested young rice, the scent of cut stalks wafting in the air.

It is eaten simply, boiled, on the cob. And because of its subtle sweetness it is almost sacrilege to put anything on it, like a sprinkle of salt, or a brush of melted butter. It is creamy and soft, the skin totally edible, unlike the yellow sweet corn's propensity for inserting thick skins in between front teeth.

It is also incorporated in dishes, vegetable soups mainly. It is the main ingredient in sinuwam na mais, where the kernels are scraped and boiled in a pot of water with a thumb of peeled ginger, with or without meats. When the kernels have cooked and the soup has thickened, young sili (chili pepper) leaves are added, providing peppery notes and sweet hints. The soup, best eaten hot, is seasoned with salt or patis.

Sinuwam is a traditional dish in Bulacan and Pampanga. In Lipa, Batangas, I and my friends were served a soup of corn kernels boiled with chopped squash, topped with malunggay leaves and seasoned with bagoong Balayan.

The soup was multi-textural - sticky starchy corn, soft sweet squash, and pungently peppery horseradish leaves. It was the perfect accompaniment to grilled liempo (pork belly) dipped in spiced vinegar.

Bagbagkong

A trip back to the market I inhabited for five years before the family moved to Cavite yielded a cup of bagbagkong (I'm more inclined to spell it as bagbagcong, but using the "k" would be a more Filipino practice, even though the letter "c" is now included in the expanded Filipino alphabet).

This was at the peripherals of the Guadalupe Nuevo public market in Makati City. For a time I had happily sourced my vegetables there because we had lived near the area, and I had found several Ilokano, as well as Batangueno, vendors selling vegetables from my childhood.

I had actually finished my marketing for Ilocano/Pangasinan vegetables that day, but as I turned to leave I was stopped dead by the sight of these tiny flowers, just a handful of them left, inside a plastic bag with the rim turned out. I almost screamed, but in all restraint I just pointed to them wordlessly, my eyes big, to the amusement of the vendor's son. The vendor promptly packed the bagbagkong and handed them to me. I went home feverish, clutching my prize.

It had been five years since I last saw, and bought, and ate, bagbagkong, and it also came from the same vendor. So it was a lucky day that I chose to revisit my old haunt. Previous to this, I think I last tasted this highly seasonal plant in my early teens, before I relocated to Metro Manila for college, and, eventually, work.

But this year is bagbagkong year, it seems. Some weeks after I found the vegetable in Guadalupe we went home to Pangasinan, and bagbagkong inhabited each and every corner of the vegetable section of the public market in my hometown.

Not everybody in my hometown knows about it, though. That first time I found bagbagkong in Makati, the first nanny who cared for my eldest child from infancy and who also came from my hometown, had no idea what it was. This time around the other nanny currently in my household had not encountered it before, too.

Bagbagkong is an Ilokano term, for the plant that looks like a weed, sprouting at the onset of the rainy season. It could be mistaken for grass, if not for the tiny bell-like flowers with a pale green to almost white hue. Some have pinkish to lavender streaks along the edges of the blooms, which sprout in clumps.

I don't know if it is known, much less eaten, outside the Ilocos region. There are many internet sites referring to this vegetable, but most are forums talking about rare vegetables, and many are in the Ilocano language, which I don't understand much.


Bagbagkong is typically mixed with squash, boiled with a thin slice of peeled ginger and flavored with bagoong. I find that the squash' natural sweetness is too strong for the subtle flavor of the bagbagkong to shine through.

I like better the other way of cooking bagbagkong - in a stew of balatong or mongo (mung beans), in which any leafy vegetable of preference can actually be added.


But I like bagbagkong best cooked with apayas tan agayep (hilaw na papaya at sitaw, green papaya slices and yard-long beans), which is how it was cooked in our house while I was growing up. The green papaya, sliced thinly, is actually the base vegetable, and any other, greener, vegetable can be paired with it, like the beans, or cabuey, or saluyot. And the bagbagkong.

In the photo above chunks of chewy luko (gabi, taro root) was added to the stew for textural contrast. The green papaya, sappy, with just a hint of sweetness, tastes mild enough to encourage the shy flavor of the bagbagkong to bloom in the stew. It is akin to sitaw, but lighter, milder. The vegetable's pale hue turns deeper - approximating olive green - when cooked, which also contrasts nicely with the green papaya slices.

Pastillas De Leche

What to do when your infant has become a toddler, but she rejects the new toddler formula you just bought?

I breastfeed my children for as long as they want. However, I cannot fully supply their milk requirement when I have to go back to work after the 60-day maternity leave mandated by law in the Philippines. The deficit is only a small amount, though, because I use a breastpump (the single, greatest aid to breastfeeding when you are a working mom) in the office. I have heard that regular formula intake of babies can average a can a week. My youngest, now at 17 months, only averaged a can per month for the entire first year of her life.

That being said, I didn't know that she'd be so loyal to the particular brand of milk formula that my breastmilk has been supplemented with. It was the same formula brand that my two older children were supplemented with, partly because of pedia recommendation, and mainly because it has a hypo-allergenic variant, which I'd given to all three children.

So she turned one year and we shifted her to another brand, because the infant formula brand does not have a formula for toddlers. She didn't like it. We kept offering it, thinking she'd eventually take to it. But she starved herself of milk formula, turning to breastmilk and semi-solid food to compensate. It took three formulas before she found the one she liked, made by the same food and beverage company that produces her infant formula.

So I have two cans of toddler formula sitting on the kitchen shelf that are proving to be difficult in getting themselves empty. I have offered them to the two older kids, since the formula is good for children 1-10 years of age, but they've said they don't taste as nice as their own milk.

The milk still have several months before expiry, but I don't like having cans of food opened but untouched sitting there, waiting to expire or for any spore to slip through the lid and begin a colony. Especially since the formulas are among the most expensives ones in the market today. So I thought I'd use the milk in desserts or snacks popular with children and adults alike.

The first I made with them is pastillas de leche, or milk candies, though the literal translation is candies with milk. The name indicates it has Spanish origins. This is a simple but extremely popular delicacy that can be snacked on, but is also served as a special dessert. There are only two main ingredients used - milk and sugar - and if these are of the finest quality, pastillas de leche can be quite impressively splendid.

The traditional pastillas is made by boiling carabao's milk with sugar, constantly stirring the mixture until thick. A few drops of dayap, the local lime, perfumes the candy and adds a touch of tang, so that the sweetness is not overpowering. Powdered milk is sometimes added for structure, then the mixture is shaped into cylinders with the thickness and length of an average pinky. These are then rolled on white sugar crystals, wrapped in paper, then dressed with colored japanese paper.

The most famous pastillas, produced in Bulacan and made to order, are wrapped in colored Japanese paper with cut-outs of festive settings serving as "skirts." Creamy and soft, they are truly fit for fiestas.

The base milk candies can be turned into flavored pastillas, by adding fruits (langka or jackfruit is a favorite) like durian, mangosteen, mangoes, etc., or other mixes, such as cheese, mocha, chocolate, ube, etc.

There is a lazy method, though, the shortcut way which I like to think came about during the American period of Philippine history (from the late 19th century to WWII), and went through with American surplus donations to the countryside. Up until my elementary grades we had whole wheat bulghur and skimmed milk as mid-morning sustenance for public school pupils.

The teachers cooked the bulghur into porridge, but it is the skimmed milk that confounded them. They didn't know what to do with it, as it was extremely difficult to dissolve in water. Solution? They brilliantly turned the milk into pastillas de leche.

Using powdered milk, the pastillas de leche needed no cooking. It was just mixed with condensed milk, rolled onto sugar, and wrapped. We ate this as is, or inserted into pan de sal, or, more commonly, nutribun, as sweet bread filling.

So this is how I used the milk that my baby rejected. Poured about half a can of milk formula, mixed in the zest and juice of a lemon, and dollops of condensed milk until I got the desired consistency (easy to roll). I then formed little balls out of it, coated the balls with sugar, then stuck toothpicks onto them. The left-overs I rolled onto the traditional cylinder shape and wrapped them. They kept at room temperature for a few days.

So did the baby eat them? Oh, yes, and so did the older children. And the adults, too, who were sneaking out pieces when the children weren't looking.

This is my entry to Got Milk?, a food-blogging event hosted by Linda at her blog, Make Life Sweeter!, in celebration of World Breastfeeding Week 2009.

Read other entries for Got Milk? in the round-up of the event here.

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