Hong Kong: Hotel Breakfast

Because there were a lot of interesting things to eat around the area where my hotel was located, I had been tempted to forego the free breakfast included in my hotel package. But I inspected the spread on my first morning, and found it equally interesting so I had breakfast there. And I got hooked that I ate breakfast there for all the days of my stay in Hong Kong. 

It had the usual hotel breakfast features, but it had distinct Chinese accents. I always started with a plate of fresh fruits - there was  my favorite Hami melon, and bananas probably from Davao down south in my home country, sweet pineapples, and braised plums redolent of masala. 

Then there was congee, the bland Chinese rice porridge that was a perfect canvass for the contrasting textures and flavors of the various toppings on offer - fried salted peanuts, pickled vegetables, meat floss, fried wonton wrappers. The excellent chili paste did wonders in spicing things several levels up.   

The congee metal container sat on a warmer side by side with another container filled with warm and sweet soy milk. All around them were bowls and saucers, but no single mug or cup was visible. This perplexed me, for naturally I wanted to drink the soy milk from a cup. 

So I again consulted my Chinese classmate, who gave me the heads up on Tim Ho Wan, and it was explained to me that yes, soy milk was drunk from a bowl. But here's another interesting thing - he further explained that congee and soy milk were usually eaten together for breakfast.  

So from then on I had congee and soy milk together, and yes, I had them both from bowls. 

There was always pancit, or stir-fried noodles, in one form or another. I  noticed mainly Chinese males eating them. I am a noodle-lover, always was, but the noodles didn't appeal to me much - mainly because I was so used to the Philippine version that feature a heap of various toppings from meats to balls to vegetables and even deli meats, that I thought I didn't know how to eat this kind of noodles. For it was just stir-fried noodles, and not much else. 

Not wanting to miss an opportunity to learn, I ate the pancit, of course. I tried all there was to try, every single morning. There was bihon - thin stick noodles - one day, and there was a thicker glass noodles another day. They came slick with sesame oil and soy sauce, but every single day they came unadorned. 

There was always dim sum - which couldn't compare with the ones I had at Tim Ho Wan or Lin Heung Kui - so I mixed them in with the noodles. Sometimes I got fried chicken or fish fillet or deli meats to mix in, too. Maybe this was how noodles was made to be, to be a side for viands, while pancit  in the Philippines evolved to become a one-pot dish. 

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Casa San Pablo - Breakfast

There’s something about Sunday mornings that just begs one to laze around, take it easy, stretch out each activity as if to make it last the day. It’s the last day of the weekend, after all, and the day after it’s back to the reality of tolling for your bread. So you savor each moment, loathe to hurry, wishing to draw out every second and every minute.  

Casa San Pablo is the perfect place to spend a Sunday morning. You wake up to a silent, expansive yet cosseted green space heavy with dew, hammocks below sheltering pine trees a silent invitation to lie down again and just be. Secluded corners are waiting to be claimed. Multi-level grounds encouraging slow walks.

After the unhurried pace, when the sun is high, breakfast beckons. The spread tempts of a leisurely lingering meal, enciting a rambling conversation going nowhere in particular. Perhaps start with a hot cup of native tsokolate, topped with a sprinkling of toasted pinipig There was also a thermos of brewed coffee. The thick pan de sal wanted to be torn to bits and dunked in the bright-colored mugs of hot drinks.

But I sliced the pan de sal, and they became the perfect vessels for the excellent palaman arrayed on the table – kalamay-hati (coco jam), mango jam, kalamansi jam, guava jelly – suitably thick but not overly sweet.  

When appetites are sufficiently whetted, there are platters of breakfast staples on the main dining table. 

Long thin rolls of San Pablo longganisa, garlicky, slightly sweet, and hamonado (smoked).

Butterflied fish that were faultlessly fried, and tasted almost unsalted. Crunchy and flavorful, it provided a counterpoint in texture and taste to the longganisa and the kamatis-itlog-maalat-pulang sibuyas (chopped tomatoes, salted duck eggs, red onions) salad. 

Large picture windows surrounding our assigned dining area provide a picturesque backdrop of the lush environment outside, and it felt like breakfast in the garden. Our focus was on the rambutan trees, whose laden branches must have fallen from the heavy rains the day before, and are now being divested of fruit. About time they were harvested, anyway.

They were so red their sweetness was so obvious. And they were bigger than the fruits being sold every kilometer or so along the highways leading to Quezon. Succulence in the flesh, with small pits that willingly let go of their juicy abundance.

We were very much unwilling to leave Casa San Pablo, ourselves, but friends were waiting in Lucena City, and the bounty of that area is another dimension waiting to be experienced. We were three vehicles in all, and we left with at least  8 kilos of rambutan per vehicle in an attempt to bring a part of an unforgettable weekend experience with us.


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Berrrrr Time

 It's September and the malls have started playing Christmas songs. I hate that it's so early, but I've gone and visited that mother of all shopping meccas, the venerable Divisoria. I went with another Divi-veteran, who introduced me to the food pleasures of 168 Mall.

We had miki-bihon pancit guisado at Chopsticks and Spoons at the 5th level food court, with a humongous special siopao, which had asado filling half of the interior of the soft dough. and bola-bola with salted egg filling the other half. The pancit was full of sahog, and was cooked to order so we got it fresh and piping hot.

 The fruit selection is more interesting, with several pear varieties. No hami, but there were carts full of cherry-looking things that vendors said were cherry apples that were being sold for Php100/kilo. 

It turns out these were a kind of Asian crab apples, and the moniker is correct. They look like cherries, but they have the flesh of apples. Tart apples, that is, like green ones. Very firm flesh, crunchy and juicy, with the same uneatable core. 

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Kamoteng Kahoy

Also known as balinghoy, and cassava in Anglicized form. The term kahoy, local term for tree, was probably annexed due to the thick, brown skin that makes the roots, or humongous tubers, look like small, blown-up tree trunks.

Kamoteng kahoy are available year-round, at stable, very accessible prices. But when it has started raining, carts and carts piled heavy with tubers still sporting clumps of dark wet earth arrive at the markets. These are submerged in basins of water to remove the soil, and some get to be peeled down to their white, smooth flesh.

Capt. Jack Sparrow hard at work peeling cassava

I buy when I chance upon those tubers just out of their underground wombs, for the risk of cyanide poisoning gets higher the more time the cassava spends out of the soil. I don't buy the peeled ones, though, as I prefer that I have control over the rinsing water used.

I've never eaten cassava leaves, but they are sold as vegetables at the Cavite City public market. I don't know how to cook them, naturally, and I'm even more afraid, because cyanide concentrations occur the highest in the leaves. Those red stems look beautiful, though, and remind me of the stems of the madre de cacao which we used to curl our hair with when we were children.

Kamoteng kahoy is more popularly known made into cassava cake, or more like cassava pudding - a gelatinous thick disc baked in an oven then layered with a rich topping of eggs, milk, sugar and coconut cream and broiled. It's a pain in the butt - and the arms, both arms - to make, as it involves grating the peeled cassava to a fine consistency. And then it takes so long to bake - about an hour - that the power consumption - both manual and electrical - is not worth it if making just one pan of pudding for personal satisfaction.  

Of course I know I'm demeaning home-cooking and the philosophy of doing everything from scratch, etc., etc. I know that the expressions on my kids' faces are priceless when they realize what we're eating has been made by their mother in our own house. 

But it's a relative observation. One can buy excellently made cassava pudding/cake almost anywhere, at Php100-150 for a piece that's good for a dozen people. I don't think the power consumption from an hour of baking your own cassava pudding can match that price - it's probably double, still not counting my grating and mixing efforts and my scratched fingers. 

So I buy when I can - commercially made cassava pudding, that is. We have our favorites, like Ralo's from the time my husband stayed in Lipa City for two years. The one sold at the kiosk before the toll exit to SLEX from Binan is not so sweet but so maligit and malagkit. Our new discoveries are the ones sold by the Catholic church in Bacoor (photo after the cassava leaves), and one made by Bon Aliment (photo above), which I'm not sure is commercially available. 

In Pangasinan we have cassava suman, called pinais, grated and wrapped in banana leaves and steamed. In Tagalog country they like nilupak, also grated but cooked in a pan. Photo above is a version from Batangas, which embraces a soft log of ube halaya and smeared with margarine.

Cassava becomes premium when made into pichi-pichi, small round balls of gelatinous ecstacy that melt at the slightest flick of the tongue. They are sold smothered in grated coconut so are good only for the day. Some versions are flavored with pandan so are dyed green. In Western Visayas they have puto lanson, grated cassava shaped into fat balls and steamed.  

All these are regional treats that require a lot of manpower. I don't have the manpower right now, though I'm starting to train the kids. When they stop complaining after just a few minutes' pass at the grater, I'll start getting ambitious. But for now, I'll be happy with a peeled kamoteng kahoy boiled til soft but still with bite. Sprinkled with brown sugar, it's a heavy snack that is up there at the top of the glycemic index. Its sentimental value is incalculable, too, as it recalls childhood afternoons of a much simpler, and more grounded to the earth, time.

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We have vegetables most meals. But for breakfast it kind of doesn't fit, like it's too serious so early in the day. Though I know it doesn't have to be, and it's just psychological. 

But we do have fresh fruit, first thing in the morning, so our empty stomachs get to absorb most of the beneficial natural vitamins. And because tomatoes are supposedly fruits, they usually accompany  rice breakfasts. The sour-sweet juiciness greatly complements smoked and other deli meats, and pairs perfectly with fried marinated fish, or smoked or salted and dried,  that are normal Filipino breakfast fare. 

Tomatoes pair even better with vinegar stews adobo and paksiw. Their mild sweetness plays with the intense sourness (plus saltiness in case of the adobo) of the dishes, and provide a layer of flavor that teases the palate. 

We usually just slice fresh tomatoes and mix them with bagoong alamang, or salt if that's not available, in a salad. If there's salted duck eggs that's sliced and mixed in, too, but in place of the bagoong or salt. But they say that unlike other fruits, tomatoes are much more beneficial cooked than fresh. And one simple step takes the tomatoes to another level, at the same time maximizing their potential. 

There's nothing simpler than sauteing tomatoes. It's the first thing I learned how to cook. It's just peeling garlic and crushing them to release flavor, then putting them in hot oil to stir fry. Then slice onions and mix them in. I slice the tomatoes and separate the seeds, but other people like the seeds, so it's optional. The tomatoes are stir-fried along with the garlic and onions, then seasoned with salt and pepper. Cooking time depends on how you like the tomatoes - whole, wilted, melting or disintegrated - taking from a minute to ten. 

This is already good to eat, but to make the dish richer beaten eggs are added in and incorporated. Now this can go two ways. Either just an egg or two is mixed in, just to enrich, the tomatoes retaining dominance in taste and visuals. Or add four or more to make an omelet. For the latter the sauteed tomatoes is mixed into  beaten eggs before it is poured in a frying pan and allowed to set, or stirred around to get large soft curds. 

Adding other ingredients to this egg-tomato dish can take it along many different directions. Herbs, perhaps, or leeks, or green leafy vegetables like pechay or cabbage. Maybe even sardines. For us, though, in Pangasinan, we add a thumb of ginger peeled and sliced thinly, which goes into the frying pan before the garlic. It brings a  bit of heat, and spice, and a sort of comforting angle to the dish. For you see, it evokes home-cooking, that which was made by lolas and mamas and yayas who evoke the nurturing zone of childhood.

So I never forget to buy tomatoes during my weekly market jaunts all through out the year, that I have a line graph of its price per kilo year-round here in my head. It's at rock-bottom now, so I've been buying more than we need for a week, which we saute and freeze for the time when the price escalates, which is when the typhoons hit. 

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Atis

One afternoon my son called me using a cellphone and asked if my reception was clear. It was loud and clear, alright, and he explained that it should be because he was atop the atis tree in front of our house. I almost didn't believe him, since how could he be atop the atis tree when its stems - note stem, not trunk - were so puny. It isn't even a tree but a thin shrub.

And then my maternal instinct kicked in and told him to get off the atis immediately. An atis is good for eating, not climbing.

Right now our atis is laden with light green fruit. When small they were almost invisible, as they had the same color as the stems and leaves. So we were a bit surprised when suddenly large ones were hanging from the tips of twigs.

Most had bulging rind all around and looked ready to burst, like a collection of small round yeasted dough that had undergone proofing, a good indication that they're mature and almost ready to eat. We've harvested quite a few, with many more still plumping up hanging from the shrub's spare canopy.

The fruits are not kid-friendly, though, being riddled with hard, obsidian seeds. I like the tangy-custard flesh, like custard mixed with home-made yogurt, sweet enough to attract black ants to come in droves. A bit sandy in texture.

The English name - custard apple - is apt, but the more common names are sugar apple  or sweetsop (Annona squamosa).

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Buttermilk Maruya with Langka

Sultry afternoons are forever slick with the grease of fried meryenda crowding a bilao carried on the head of a tia, who sashayed along sidewalks accompanied by tireless, endless hollering that starts as a bass and ends in a clarinet.

I've had buchi, holed donuts, green bean lumpia, turon. And of course maruya, banana fritters dredged in sugar, eaten hot, the cooking oil from which it had recently been spluttering slowly tracing jaw and neck and the insides of my hand and arm.

Immense, rotund, odoriferous ripe jackfruits squat on pavements of market stalls in various stances - whole, slashed, sectioned, quartered, flayed and bagged - their pungent sweetness sitting heavily in the idle air. 

I stand inert, breathing in the scent that paints pictures of kineler (ginataang bilo-bilo) and turon. 

Turon, and maruya, don't seem to be popular in Cavite. I have yet to come across vendors carrying them, while native kakanin are present year-round. Not that I would buy, of course. There are always bunches of small saba on sale that boil into large thumbs of sweetness, and are particularly dulcet fried. What's more, the ratio of banana-to-langka in the innumerable turon I've eaten I've always found to be unfairly favorable to the saba.

So my home-made turon is pungently aromatic and sweet. And because a friend handed me a section of the sweetest tree-ripened langka from her backyard, I put langka in my maruya, too.  

I hear that in the Bicol region maruya is made with rice flour, which makes the snack unbeatably crispy. So I use rice flour in my maruya, too, but not all the time, because a few hours would irreversibly harden them. 

We make maruya as early as breakfast time, and we make a big batch so the kids, who are home the whole day now with the summer school break, can snack on them anytime they want. So it's imperative that the maruya remain softly chewy until sundown.

I like my maruya in a thick batter, cooking into discs that are like dense, chewy pancakes.  Filled with slices of saba and strips of langka, creamy with a splash of buttermilk and some butter. When cooked, they are sprinkled with brown sugar for a touch of caramel sweetness. A smear of condensed milk  brings in a new creamier level.

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Avocado-Guyabano Pandan Tea

It is All Souls' Day today, the Philippines' nationwide remembrance of the dead. It is a good one this year, with four days off from work, as the first two days of November fell just before the weekend. But we had been raised to pay our respects to our ancestors on these days, so we never schedule a trip out of town around these dates to take advantage of the holidays.

So we are home in Pangasinan, and what a day to face our own mortality. I've reached the age when my elders are now senior citizen card holders, naturally afflicted with aging complaints. It's Undas and we talk about cholesterol levels and uric acid and kidney problems, and the various natural ways to maintain them at healthy levels, to delay, infinitely if possible, the time when we have to join our dead elders and take our final repose at the town cemetery. 

So now, instead of iced Pop on the table, we are served avocado-guyabano tea, made with seven leaves each from the fruit trees, steeped in boiling water til the liquid has turned amber. It is a folk remedy to aid in easing cholesterol (the bad one) levels, and many other things besides. 

There have been reported studies abroad proving this concoction's efficacy, though I'm not sure if they are supported scientifically. But the folks in my hometown reportedly swear by it, and my aunt-in-law tells me she has become a sort of "supplier," giving leaves to a lot of her acquaintances downtown (baley, in the dialect). 

avocado leaves

Sounds a bit like Mexico? And if I remember correctly, the fruit trees came from Latin America, too. But the aunt-in-law hasn't gotten rich all of a sudden. She gives the leaves gratis, for she has a very green thumb (makatanem, my husband likes to joke*), and she has several younglings growing in the backyard.

guyabano leaves

We have the tea from morning til night, squeezing in it some lemon juice to accompany dinner. I let the kids drink up, too, as my elder daughter has become attached to dishes made with internal organs, and my son daydreams about junk food. 

I found the tea to be bland, and very near tasting like boiled water, so for the next batch I added several blades of pandan. I remembered the pandan-avocado tea served at Earth-Haven in San Mateo, Rizal, which I had been wanting to recreate but didn't have access to an avocado tree.  

I found the previously lush pandan by the twa-to (manually-operated water pump) made panot by chickens and ducks. That was a revelation - I wonder if their eggs taste differently?

The pandan elevated the drink, which had become aromatic and flavorsome. Mixed with a little sugar and served cold, it tasted like sago't gulaman. Without the sago and gulaman, but with the cleansing power of avocado and guyabano. But who says we can't have a little fun? Guess what I'm thinking of adding to the next batch.... 

As further proof of the aunt's makatanem status, vegetables are available for the picking for today's lunch. Near the bamboo groves katuray flowers are flapping like opaque moths in the gentle wind. 

And right beside the kamote and kangkong carpeting a large swath of soil is a young baeg with flowers suspended vertically like pupae waiting for their metamorphosis.

In the summer looking up this tree would be heart-racing, in contemplation of the reward of sweet fruit. But it is not aratiles season now, though I heard the leaves are made also into tea. I didn't quite catch what  ailments it cures, I'll have to ask the elders.

This is the plant that supplied the leaves that were made into the tea which we drank when we suffered from stomach trouble when I was growing up. It sprouts tiny red berries, which are slightly bitter with sour edges. I had believed this was the tea plant, so I was unbelievably surprised to learn Ceylon tea comes from a plant that's entirely different. 

*Literally the word makatanem may mean plants thrive under her care, but figuratively it can also mean she has the capability of engaging in voodoo.

Lanzones

It's the height of lanzones season now, and the festival celebrating what's known to be the sweetest variety - grown in Camiguin, a small, enchanted volcanic island in Northeastern Mindanao - is just wrapping up. 

In Luzon the preferred variety comes from Laguna, and it's the selling point of vendors - matamis yan, galing sa Laguna yan - much like another vendor would say his mangoes came from Pangasinan, or his bangus from Dagupan, etc., to score more sales. 

Laguna lanzones is indeed sweet, but it'd be sour placed side by side with Camiguin. 

the black ants that rode in an A320

They say black ants ants crawling all over are a sure sign of sweetness, but then enterprising vendors have been reported to catch colonies of black ants to drop them over their carts of lanzones. 

What I have been seeing these past few weeks are big globules of fruit, and for me that's a sure sign of big, fat seeds that taste bitter. So I haven't been buying. Though I have an officemate from Laguna who brings bunches of lanzones from their backyard trees after weekends, and I make sure to get some. They're big, but they're sure to be sweet. 

In Mindanao, though, and I mean all over the island and not just in Camiguin, the medium-sized lanzones are so sweet they are a threat to Pangasinan mangoes. So, so sweet, it's almost not a lanzones. The segments are all juice and flesh, and that one seed in one segment is so little it's almost non-existent. Just pop and pop, no need to spit out a pesky seed, it's easy to swallow, no worries about a large lanzones tree developing in your nether regions.

But it's a sweet lanzones year. Even Luzon lanzones are satisfactorily sweet. Which is probably why the price has been steadily in the Php80-100 range with no sign of going down. Just pick out the small ones.

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Hami Melon

I have only discovered this melon very recently, though the vendor at the Cavite City public market says she's been selling the fruit for quite a while now, year-round. A website about China states that this variety has been in cultivation since the 13th century, in Hami, precisely, which is in Xinjiang.

The Cavite City vendor has the lowest price, at Php90 per kilo, while the Seaside Market and supermarkets around Metro Manila tag them for as high as Php145/kg. But the total price goes up, because the fruit is huge - the smallest won't go less than two kilos. 

Like other melons, it has raised, vein-like white streaks around the skin, though they come in waves and un-netted. It is not spherical, but elongated, elliptical like a football, with rounded ends. And unlike cantaloupes, with their pastel pink-orange hue, the rind of Hami melons ripen to a bright, deep yellow.

The flesh is cantaloupe-colored, like the common melon, and tastes like so. But the huge, huge, life-altering difference is the sweetness. Common melons cannot aspire to even come close. When I first tasted it - served on a bowl peeled and sliced, I thought the cubes had been steeped beforehand in some sugar syrup.

I had to buy the fruit to make myself believe they are naturally sweet. And they really are. Sometimes I get sore throat with the sweetness, but my kids beg me to keep buying it. They have bowls and bowls of it cold, and my youngest daughter brings cut-up slices to school for baon, proudly declaring afterwards that she had finished all of it. 

Hami is also a summer fruit, and since summer in the higher latitudes follows our own summer nearer the equator, it means we'll have two seasons of melons every year. Half the year! But I'm afraid by the time of our own summer next year I won't be very happy. I'll be eating cantaloupes and finding them wanting, and I'll be anticipating the coming of the Hamis. 

I'm buying what I can, this season. I'm expecting I'll find them cheaper at Binondo and Divisoria, which is now the more weighty reason for going to Chinatown today instead of the mooncakes. They keep well at the kitchen counter, and crawlies can't seem to bite through the skin. Despite the inner sweetness, Hami melons don't smell like the common ones even when ripe. So it's hard to tell when they're ready to eat - we just wait until they're yellow all over.

I hope I'm not tempting my diabetic genes. But life is short, and it's a waste to spend it worrying.