maximine and minerva’s owl

and maruyang saging are my favorite street food. There was a woman who sold delicious maruya (all kinds: kamoteng kahoy, tungo, ubag - these are all root crops) at the corner of Guadalupe and Edsa, on one same spot right by the gate to the village where we used to live; I must have been 11 or 12 then. Everyday after school we would stop by there on the way home to get my maruya fix. Everyday.

I never liked to eat (by this I mean substantial food) when I was in my prepubescent years, it’s not that I was suffering from anorexia or anything like that, it’s just that I was really “pihikan” and “mapili”, as my dad put it. I ate very little of whatever they would put on my plate except if the ulam was pritong galunggong or tilapya or bangus and my mom’s ratatouille. I never liked the taste of meat either (kaya siguro arrested ang development ng utak ko dahil protein deficient..hahaha). But I loved junk food and I would eat more of it than I would the usual lunch or dinner. Of course my mother never allowed this kind of eating habit but she also knew there was nothing she could really do about it and had sort of resigned to the thought that she’d just let me eat maruya everyday which I did for about three months. Maybe at some point mom realized that since maruya was made from banana, at least it’s healthy just like what the food experts say about it time and again, and, a tad better than my almost daily staple source of nourishment such as clover chips, nagaraya crackers, curly tops, rocky road ice cream, egg cracklets, shing-a-ling and those very very purple and flaky little bread the size of a pack of gum coated in mixture of sugar and dessicated coconut.

Mom then developed her own recipe for maruya for the stubborn and finicky little twit me. Into the batter she would toss lots of healthy stuff like different kinds of nuts chopped into tiny weeny bits, dried fruits such as raisins or prunes and dates, grated carrots and minced sweet red bell peppers, even.

This recipe I just copied from The FilipinoVegetarianRecipe.com , just add your favorite dried fruits and/or nuts and voila! you have a tastier and healthier Maru-ya :)

Maruyang Saba

1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
1 tsp melted fat or vegetable lard
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp cooking oil
1 tsp. salt
2 eggs
bananas ( saba), sliced lengthwise
oil for deep frying
1/2 cup milk
sugar
Sift dry ingredients then set aside. Combine eggs, milk, fat and oil.
Mix well. Add mixture to dry ingredients and beat until smooth.
Dip saba in batter. Deep fry.
Drain in absorbent paper then coat in sugar.

Ampao

was also a street food that I ate a lot of. I was surprised when I saw them here in Japan, sold in every grocery store and Okashi Yasan (shops that sell sweets and snack foods).

I studied ballet from ages 5 to 13, to which I was always accompanied by one of our helps who is a distant relative of my dad’s. On the street where the ballet school was located, there was a small carinderia-on-wheels that sold ampao, piyaya, lohwa and pinasugbo, binusang mais and butong pakwan, too. Nana M would always buy them to munch on as she read her Liwayway or Reader’s Digest to while away the time until I got done with my lesson, and she would share with me one or two pieces of ampao during our break.

I had classmates then who were super ‘arte and sosyal’ who considered anything was ‘kadiri’ (yucky) if they were not bought in Rustan’s or Unimart or any store counted as ‘classy’ and expensive. Sometimes they would look at me with disgust as I ate ampao with gusto licking the sticky caramel sugar off my fingers. And I took fiendish delight in doing it in exaggerated fashion to disgust them even more. I just loved annoying them that way :)

* Thanks Kai for hosting Lasang Pinoy 3

During my sister’s struggle with this dreadful disease, this book became my only friend; my constant companion in bed, in long train rides, in the park, at lunch breaks. For months I’d read no any other book but this one. I know it from the first page to the last and I have even memorized the chapters that pertained to breast cancer. I wanted to arm myself with knowledge (however book-ish) about this disease because I knew it is tricky and difficult to fight the least I can do is get to know it as much as I can.

One night last month I had a horrible dream: there is this hideous old woman giving me injection in my left breast using a big dreadful syringe. There is a faint voice in the background that says the hag’s name is ‘Lady Cancer’ and she visits the house of the woman of her choice with the purpose of either to give the said woman the disease by injecting her breast with cancer serum or heal her by suctioning the cancer virus out of her breast using the big syringe. It was not clear (to me) what the purpose of her visit to me was.
I should first say that I have been a hypochondriac lately and I cannot stop pondering my metaphysical ek-ek. The dream, I guess, is to remind me of fear and mortality and incomplacency.

Say NO to breast cancer. Get tested REGULARLY ! Please.

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month
[The third Friday in October each year is National Mammography Day]

If You Approve, Say *************** If You Disapprove, Say

thrifty ************************************ cheap

traditional ******************************** old-fashioned

extrovert ******************************** loudmouth

cautious ******************************** coward

progressive ******************************* radical

information ******************************* propaganda

determined ******************************* stubborn

slender ******************************* skinny

*source: looking out looking in (5th ed.)

The problems crop up when we start talking about other types of deviant behavior. We say of a person who drinks too much that “he” is an alcoholic, and we say of people who think bizarre thoughts that they are schizophrenic. This person is a drug addict and that person is a homosexual. Others are sadomasochists, pedophiliacs, juvenile delinquents. The English language is constructed in such a way that we speak of people being (certain things) when all we know is that they do certain things…

- Edward Sagarian

“Oh! My fur and whiskers, I’m late! I’m late! I’m late!” said White Rabbit. “Pero, mas vale tarde que nunca,” sabi naman ni Atinna (huli man daw kahit di magaling pwedeng humabol pa rin :))

Many years ago while waiting for the construction of our house in QC to be completed, we temporarily resided in my maternal grandmother’s house in Makati for a few months during which typhoons and monsoons came. The backyard was spacious with a kidney bean shaped swimming pool plunked right down in the middle and there were plenty of fruit-bearing trees around it. There were avocado, caimito, mabolo, santol , and narra too (and even macopa I think, this I have to confirm with my mom though). One particular day in September, a strong typhoon that had been hovering over Luzon had made the trees shake like crazy and the fruits fell off their branches, scattered all over the place and many found their way into the pool.

I and my brothers and sisters would dive into the water to fish out the fallen fruits most of which were avocados because they are usually in peak season around the months of August and September. My mom would make the most delicious avocado ice cream (well, for me it was the most delicious avocado ice cream even though the only avocado ice cream I had eaten then was the one she would make). Her recipe was very easy: after the halving, destoning and peeling she would simply mash and mix them with condensed milk, evaporated milk and Nido (or Klim) powdered milk and then she would stick the creamy mixture in the freezer for a good 20 minutes. Everyone in my family loved it. Nowadays I use avocado as a facial pack but sans the milk of course. I also eat it with a dash of toyo and I swear it tastes like a high grade maguro (otoro) only if eaten with toyo.

So, that’s the food (?) I associate Philippine typhoons with, AND, one of the best memories I have of my childhood. But there’s also one more thing that I still remember happened then.

On the afternoon of the day after the typhoon, my younger sister (who was our bunso she was about 6 yrs. old at the time) and I were sitting at the table with our mom and grandma eating the left over avocado ice cream from the previous day. The “bunso” suddenly got up, walked to the kitchen and came back with a platito; and asked for another serving of the ice cream. “But you haven’t finished what you have on your plate, why would you want more and why a new plate? “, mom asked. “It’s ‘not for me, I want to give some to the little old man who sits under the avocado tree,” said bunso. “What little old man??!!” mom said as her eyes dilated with flustered amazement.
Bunso said she saw a duende (elf) eating an avocado under the tree yesterday in the late afternoon after the typhoon left. My grandmother asked her what did the little old man look like. “He’s as big as Chimmy (my 2 year old cousin), with white hair and wrinkly face but not scary,” she answered nonchalantly.

I told her she was just imagining things and couldn’t tell what’s real and what’s not from watching too much Lola Basyang fantasy series (at the time they were showing Mga Kwento ni Lola Basyang on TV every Saturday night on channel 13 starring Luz Fernandez as the lola sitting in the tumba-tumba). “No, I’m not making it up I saw him yesterday, I always see him sitting there when I play in the backyard , ask Nadja she sees him too!” Nadja is a daughter of a cultural attache at the Luxembourg Embassy and her family lived in the same village and they were next door neighbor of my grandmother. The same age as bunso, Nadja would often come to the house to play with my sister after school and when there was no school.

They sold the house 3 years after my lola G died in 1990. I don’t know what has become of it now; I hope the trees are still there.

* Ms. Host, you don’t need to include this in the round-up kasi di naman talaga masasabing “food” eh :)