Pomelo Salad with Honey-Patis Dressing

The cooking and eating frenzy is far from over for me at this time, with the foundation anniversary of the agency I work for, the impending arrival of a balikbayan relative who will be staying here until Valentine's week (meaning five weeks of touring Manila's restaurants), and an ongoing despedida for my Flynn, who will be out of town for about a month on a maiden voyage of sorts.

I'm about fed up with eating, excuse the pun, particularly since the debauchery started upon the entry of December, what with many different groups of friends holding parties and binge-out events spread out over the month, and in all of these, the main course always, as in always, centered around meat.

The scene did not change in Pangasinan, where we spent Christmas. The traffic along the road to the daungan in Dagupan City, where I was planning to scout for Lingayen Gulf's bounty like fat-laden crabs, prawns, lapu-lapu, malaga, was so horrendous that we bypassed it and ended up in the grocery. And a grocery is only good for meat, canned goods and processed food, if not much else.

We spent New Year in Cavite, but by the time we arrived it was already too late to buy seafood - there was not much else to buy, actually.

I don't know if the tingling and numbness I'm experiencing in my upper extremities is due to too much meat consumption, but whether or not this is the case, I'm near to sprouting wings and growing a snout and some hooves.

I find that the most refreshing treat for umay is a bowl of maarat, bitter-tart, lukban (suha, pomelo), thankfully still in season, so much so that I sometimes crave for the juice (in pink powder form). The arat and the bitter hints serve well to erase the grease on one's lips, better than the other citrus fruits in season nowadays, like oranges which prove too sweet.

More than that, lukban is a good neutralizing agent for blood sugar, which would serve well with the sugar-laden desserts of the holidays.

Lukban is good to munch on anytime, anyhow. My friends open up a whole globe - good enough for sharing, since the native lukban is so large - then dip the juicy segments in a mix of vinegar, salt and sili. I love best the peeled and segmented lukban vended along the streets of Baguio City towards the last quarter of the year, in a plastic bag seasoned with salt spiked by dried chili flakes, and accompanied by a stick for convenient eating while sauntering along the hilly roads.

The most common lukban is the pink pomelo, in large, 2-kilo globes, the bigger and more bitter-tart version of the Davao suha, but I prefer the white variety whenever I can find it. The small white ones in Pangasinan - smaller than their Davao counterparts - are so, soo sweet, yet still with the characteristic tart-/bitterness.

People say the arat - bitterness - is due to the wounding of the fruit when the pulp is not skillfully peeled. But I have eaten enough bitter pristine-skinned lukban to believe otherwise.

Pomelo salad, yam som-o - pomelo segments with greens, peanuts and sugar, with shrimps or chicken - is common in Thai cuisine. This pomelo salad is the concoction of a friend, and consists of pomelo segments, julienned carrots and lakamas (jicamas) on a bed of lettuce and drizzled with a honey-patis mixture. It may be a deconstruction of the Thai salad.

This salad is heftier with the maximum crunch due to the carrots and the jicamas (the salad in the photo contains grated carrots and jicamas for the kids, which was fine, but it made the salad a little too watery), but without meat. It is what I like eating these days with my meat fatigue, but it is also an excellent side dish to any meat, or seafood dish, especially if grilled.

The patis dressing is perfect for the sweetness of the carrots and the jicamas and the tartness of the pomelo, with the honey (just a little bit) tempering the saltiness. Nice blending of flavors, and so refreshing. Great colors, too - it livens up any table.

White Tropicale Salad

I first made this buko salad many years ago, I've already forgotten where I got the inspiration for it. I'm sure it wasn't something I ate somewhere, whether at a party or at a restaurant - I've never encountered something like it before, and until now I've never seen it anywhere.

I think I made it with the idea of creating something purely white, for the holidays in this tropical country. The ingredients assembled themselves before my eyes, since they are all readily available and used in any occasion. Fast forward to about a decade later, and I'm hearing strains of the ad jingle "Mayo (sic) have a white Christmas" over and over on TV.

My daddy's ideal buko salad is an assembly of fruit cocktail, buko, whole sweet corn kernels, kaong, nata de coco and fried peanuts, caressed by cream and sweetened even more by condensed milk, served almost frozen. It has become, and still is, my standard buko salad.

My white tropical salad is a simplification of that buko salad, and, needless to say, tropicalisation. So I did away with the fruit cocktail, and the corn and peanuts were also removed for their color. What's left is an absolute buko salad - coconut in all its forms and variations - fresh buko strips, kaong, nata de coco, swimming in evaporated and condensed milk, which are also forms of coconut cream/milk.

The evaporated milk component here is more suited to buko, and because I like this salad almost soupy - it should be served with small individual bowls and a serving ladle. Less fat, too.

I also like to add lots of small sago because I love the mouth feel, plus it adds to the presentation effect, and diffuses the over-all sweetness, too. Sometimes I add almond jelly, too - still white - to add to the textural contrasts, but in keeping with the coconut "theme" it is more appropriate to use coconut-flavored jelly, or use coconut cream (gata) in flavoring clear gelatin.

Besides serving this at Christmas (good for fiestas and birthdays, and almost any other big occasion - very economical), it is great for New Year feast, too. It is a good (or better) alternative to the omnipresent buko-pandan salad, and for me it symbolizes purity - approaching the new year with a clean slate and pureness of heart. The sago, being round, and the almond jelly, are believed to be harbingers of good luck, although of course I don't practice such things. It is just nice to play along.

White Tropicale Salad

Ingredients
meat strips from 4 buko
1 big bottle white nata de coco, drained well
1 big bottle white kaong, drained well
1/4 kg small sago, boiled and drained
2 packets almond jelly, cooked and set according to instructions, and cubed (or clear gelatin using kakang gata in lieu of water, and sweetened with sugar)
1 big can evaporated milk
1 big can condensed milk

• Mix all ingredients, and refrigerate at least 6 hours. Serve chilled.

Still on the subject of salads, I used to find it weird that in some areas in my province, particularly in my husband's barrio and in other rural areas, fruit salad - which I am used to eating just with frozen cream, and perhaps a hint of condensed milk - is spiked with mayonnaise. I couldn't understand the logic behind it (to foil the cloying sweetness?), and I didn't like the taste.

But what was more weird is the fact that boiled elbow macaroni is added to fruit cocktail in making fruit salad. I had only been exposed to macaroni in savory dishes, so if it were a salad it was chicken-macaroni salad, in its many variations, with mayonnaise.

Over the years I met Ilocanos and Chavacanos who ate fruit salad with mayonnaise, and this season that white Christmas TV ad confirmed for me that these two salads - fruit salad with mayonnaise and fruit salad with macaroni - is a Filipino phenomenon.

Perhaps because we are so enamored with the taste of mayonanise (where else can you find somebody enjoying a sandwich with just mayonnaise as palaman?), so we like it in our fruit salad. And yes, to add a different dimension to the sweetness, although I might say it is also adding to the fat content. I think the pasta addition to fruit salad is our own way of economizing - as a form of extender to the very costly fruit cocktail, which contains fruits not found in the country. This practice, after all, goes way back before our canned fruit cocktails were tropicalised into almost nothing but papayas, pineapples and nata.

Anyway, I have found that it grows on you, and I have become addicted to pasta-fruit salad. I have discovered that angel hair pasta broken into short stumps is better than elbow macaroni in a fruit salad, although of course it is much more expensive. Gives quite a nice touch in terms of presentation, though. Almost surprising. Even magical.

Happy New Year and wishing you all what I would like the new year to bring - more food adventures the whole year round!