Now/here no/where woman

There are at least two reasons this book is important: 1.      It’s about time, and, 2.      It’s about time. First, it’s about time such a book is published: a collection of recipes gathered from the hearths of the Cordillera region. For what does the act of publishing do? Beyond documentation, the act of publishing is to declare that a thing exists and to announce it to the world: “This is our food, our knowledge, our heritage.” It is to make a thing available to readers. We need more books like this. A question we are regularly asked in Mt. Cloud Bookshop is, “Do you have new books on the Cordillera?” Sadly, more often than not the answer is no. Not yet. In the past eight years of our existence, we can count on my fingers and toes the number of new titles on the region. This is just a drop in the bucket, compared to the volume of books being published in Manila today. This may seem surprising, but people want m...

I was asked to speak today about body language and indigenous expressions, but I can’t talk about dance and I can’t talk about tattoos. My friend, Irene Bawer-Bimuyag dances and weaves so beautifully, she takes away words. She has a traditional Kalinga tattoo on her arm and it is rightfully hers. She is Lubuagan-born. I can’t talk about performance or performativity. When my friend, Dumay Solinggay takes the stage she brings all her ancestors with her. She is Cervantes-born. I can’t “speak in tongues” --much less read or write in indigenous languages. My friend, Chatelyne Wansi walks for hours to visit kailian, to sit with them, convince them, and guide them in writing about themselves in their own language. She publishes their writings in a magazine entirely in Kankanaey, and refuses to translate their work into English. She is Kibungan-born. I wish they could have been here in my place. I wish you could meet them. But I’m going to take a side step around body languages...

My sister and the Artist-in-Residence and I follow an heirloom recipe for polvoron so rich in butter that if you drop one from a height of 2-feet, it won't crumble. We arrived at this figure through repeated tests. Shaping polvoron could well have been my first experience of entering a meditative state of mind. But I never enjoyed wrapping them individually. In our house the polvoron is stacked in a pyramid on a cheese plate and consumed on-the-spot. I also used to get blisters from packing the heavenly powder in so tightly. We need a good pair of molds. Not the cheap, tinsel-like stuff you can get these days. When I was a kid we had an old pair of polvoron shapers made of copper. I wonder if we'll ever find polvoron molds like that again. Wishful thinking on a Monday morning.

A fish tail addresses my favorite Tito, who loves to cook: “I see you have fine knives here. Quite a kitchen you’ve got, sir, quite a kitchen. And those scissors – so strong! If I were you, I’d use them to cut off that ponytail. Doesn’t it bother you, the way it swings around while you move from pot to pot, seasoning, stirring, and tasting? A ponytail is not like a fish tail, sir. A man or a woman is perfectly fine without one but a fish without a tail is a dead fish and I don’t say that just because I wound up here with a dead fish – my dead fish, that is to say. Sniff. “Imagine a fish swimming in the sea without its tail. It wouldn’t even be swimming. It would be flapping about gracelessly, towards a slow and painful death. Can’t imagine what that’s like? Well I can tell you sir, it’s a far uglier sight than a splintered sailboat in rough waters. And to fish, a sailboat is an ugly thing to begin with, but not as ugly as boats with engines. Not only are boats with engines monstrous...

Home-baked bread fresh out of the oven never fails to arouse my maternal instincts. It takes all my self-control to keep from snatching up a warm loaf of bread, cradling it like a baby in my arms, resting my cheek against its delicious-smelling skin, and inhaling deeply. This never fails to disgust people who want to eat the bread. I want to first love the bread and then eat it. So I'm weird that way, but these moments of consummated food-love are a little bit of heaven on earth.

After lunch, three authors who have written extensively about food sat down together onstage to talk about food and their books on food. The moderator was Mita Kapur who launched her book The F-Word in Lit Out Loud , the first Manila International Literary Festival held last year. Her literary agency Siyahi is the principal organizer of Mountain Echoes . Kunzang Choden spoke of the food of Bumthang, Central Bhutan. In her book, Chili and Cheese: Food and Society in Bhutan, she combines the history and culture of Bhutan with traditional recipes and her own experience of growing up in Bumthang. She told of how, when she was a child, she would go into the blue pine forests with her family and friends where they would cut off the bark of the trees and eat the white, jelly-like sap just underneath the bark. She said it was sweet, like sugar. Nowadays the government has prohibited collecting the sap because stripping the bark kills the trees so this "taste of home" r...

Stellar , to say the least.

A litson rice review with the discerning Dawgs .

How does the lechon rice at Ayuyang Bar and Feliz Restaurant rate on the two seestars' and Fritson's snout system?

I have two questions. 1) If you by these Dole Cavendish bananas in 7-11... are you buying into the use of poison rain in corporate banana plantations in Mindanao? "In May 2009, the Department of Health released its study (“Health and Environmental Assessment of Sitio Camocaan, Hagonoy, Davao del Sur”) which showed that residents exposed to the spray were found to have pesticide traces in their blood. Air and soil outside plantation boundaries were also found to be contaminated. The study recommended banning aerial spraying and a shift to organic methods... "'We are not bananas. We are not pests.' This is the cry of communities near banana plantations in Mindanao who have to suffer the adverse effects of regular toxic aerial spraying. Imagine yourself sipping coffee under the open sky when suddenly something lands in your cup. Imagine yourself a child on your way to school and getting sprayed with pesticides. Farmers working on their small farms and people doing their ...

How does the lechon rice of Cathy's Fastfood fare on the two seesters' and Fritson's scale of pig snouts? Click here to find out!

Litson Rice Atbp! Featuring Fritson the multilingual pig. Yeeey!

It's cold and dark and when water isn't raining down on us in sheets, it hangs suspended in the air in heavy mist, the kind that gets you soaked and wets the insides of your nostrils if you stand out there for two minutes. I'm getting cabin fever but there is no way I'm stepping out into that weather. I'll teleport myself back to Dumaguete instead. So much to choose from! Need more stomach space! Excuse me po, are you Virgilio Adanza? On that third and last day of my wonderful visit, I woke up at seven in the morning and jumped into a tricycle. I headed for the Dumaguete market for breakfast. Already it was so warm. I was greeted by rows and rows of small food stalls, all offering kakanins and bread of all kinds with hot chocolate made from tableas -- the real thing! I chose a stall that was fronted by a table laden with budbud. I sat down and asked for tsokolate and budbud. The man selling the budbud, let's call him Mang Virgilio, plopped two bundles down on my...

Martin Masadao's 5-bean chili. P65 for a hefty serving topped with Hungarian sausage and Parmesan cheese. YUMMY! You have until Sunday to enjoy this hot stuff outside the Rumours window on Session Road. (That's my lucky crock pot on the right hehe. I hope it brings Martin good luck throughout the week!)

If not for the menu of poetry and food being served up at the Cafe by the Ruins on Valentine's Day/Night, I would totally boycott VD for all the obvious reasons: it's a hallmark greeting card holiday, it's the wrong definition of 'romance', everybody just wants to get laid but won't say it upfront and won't do it safely, roses are loaded with toxic chemicals, and there's more but before I get carried away on an anti-VD rant, check out the Cafe's passion-filled menu for the evening: Poet's Dinner Thai Soup with Rice Wine Pandan Chicken with Turmeric Rice Shrimp Sotanghon Salad or Green and yellow Mango salad with fish For vegetarians: Vegetable Quiche Organic Greens Salad Squash Flower and Baby Corn Tempura Photo by Rudi Tabora DESSERT: Cream of Hearts or Chocolate-covered strawberries!!! Poems on Presence and Absence will be read by members of the Baguio Writers Group and Ubbog. Then we will have an open mic session and possibly the first ever ...

I mustn't be selfish. Besides, anybody who has the time to comb through the market, and the curiosity to probe it's inner alleys, and the eternal itch of an explorer would eventually find JMJ Marketing. All one has to do to get to this little unassuming store packed with all manner of spices and goodies from Assad's (Manila's favorite Indian grocery) is to walk past the Garcia and Umali coffee sellers, along the edge of the Hangar Market, past the beauty parlors, look out for a cramped eatery with motley green walls, and you come to a store front crammed with plastic bags for sale. Don't be fooled. On their shelves you will find this: But there's the rub, this breaks rule of thumb number two for choosing food: The less distance it had to travel to get to your table, the better. For an occasional dish of fresh greens sauteed in ghee and garlic and onions, I would turn a blind eye to this rule.

Goodbye, White Rabbit . In the last decade we have witnessed the surfacing of previously invisible dangers in the food we eat. Some of these things were dangers that the industry put into the food to make plants and animals unnnaturally highly-productive, to prolong shelf-life, to make products that are stripped bare of essential vitamins and minerals appear healthier or "fortified", and to make it cheaper for transnational companies to sell processed food all over the world. Now is a good time to rediscover fresh, locally grown food in your palengke or neighborhood talipapa. Over yesterday's lunch of chicken curry cooked in kakang gata with a salad of winged beans, tomatoes, and sili, my nanay and I started drawing up some rules of thumb for choosing food. So yesterday's thoughts on food were: 1. Don't buy it if your lola would not recognize it as food. 2. The less distance the food had to travel to get to your table, the better. 3. If it's known n...

The book we've all been waiting for is here at last!!! I'm so happy for my Big Little Sister, BFF Lia, and my Nanay!

Mushrooms allegedly have no nutritional value. I find this hard to believe but then there are a lot of delicious things out there that have no nutritional value. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of delicious things out there that are BAD for you! As far as I know, edible mushrooms aren’t bad for you. On any given day in the market you can buy at least one variety of mushrooms. On a good mushroom day in the market you can find three or four varieties! The most common mushrooms are oyster mushrooms or button mushrooms. For a few months in 2007 the people of Baguio (who buy their food in the market and not in SuperMarkets or groceries where the choices in fresh produce are so limited and where the chain from producer to consumer is way too long to really support small community farmers and fishers phew!) enjoyed The Portake (pronounced por-ta-kE) -- a cross between the portobello and the shitake (pronounced shi-ta-kE) mushroom. Thank goodness they didn’t call it the shitobello. But th...