DAY 55: Community Quarantine

    BLURRED-  I woke up early today, 4:30. This is early becuase this passed few days since the quarantine, my waking hours have slowly crept up to 6-7 in the morning. But on schooldays, 4:30 is my usual waking hour. 

    I have been looking for my glasses for 15 minutes now and I have given up. I am not going to work, or doing anything might as well relax and avoid being stressed by it. A lot of times I forget where I put my glasses. I am nearsighted and I wear prescription glasses with -450 grade. I have to find my glasses first in order to find my glasses. Weird.

 

     

Everything is blurred but it's not that bad in the morning. The eyes is not stressed yet, it still relaxed so I can still see a little better than usual. 

   My wife is good at finding it, so I'll just wait for her to wake up. Also, the curfew is still up and I am not going anywhere.

   SAP AT NIGHT- There is not much going on here and there are very little ECQ related stuff I could talk about. Two months into the lockdown and I think the my neighbors have adapted well in to it. No one has died of starvation, as feared.

    Though here and there I hear complaints about the distribution of the SAP, the selection process, the clandestine distribution of forms and food stubs, and the allegations of nepotism in the selection and distribution of aids.  

   There must be reasons why DSWD is distributing SAP forms at night. I think they do this for their safety. The president announced that all will be given aid but when the allotment and the money came down, not even half of the households in every barangay was granted the financial assistance, not even a quarter.

  Here in our sitio,  I heard that only 30 slots were given. I have no idea what our population but  I estimated it could be go as high as 500 house holds.  

   DSWD could be overwhelmed, even physically attacked by disappointed head of families for not including them in the program.

   Our social workers are being put in the bad light but they are also victims here. Victims of local politican who pressure them to favor their kins, victims of old and unreliable census, and victims of promises made by the national government that did not materialize.

   COOKING- Here's how I cook laing.   

Boil the ground pork in a cup of water. I don't sautee, and as much as possible I avoid using cooking oil. It saves money and good for the health too. 

    Drain the water out.

    Pour the pure coconut milk. Add salt, onion, garlic, pepper and ginger, lots of ginger. Chili is a must in laing but I skip it becuase it gives me acid and it worsens my hemorrhoids.

    Allow to boil for a couple of minutes to release the flavors in to the liquid. Put the dried Gabi leaves. 

   Press the gabi leaves to soak it in coconut milk. It is very important not stir or mix. I dont  know what chemical compound is in the gabi leaves that causes itchiness on the throat when ingested. That is why the leaves are sun dried before cooking. Stirring causes it to release this itch-causing chemical compounds (what ever it is).

   Cook slowly in low heat to avoid burning. Check to see that it has not dried out or else the bottom will be burned bitter.

   After 20 minute or so, or longer, add more coconut milk. I don't measure the ingredients, i just estimate and pour them.

   Slow cook for additional 15 or more minutes. I don't sweat in the details, really. 

  That's it.

  You can make your laing special by adding toppings like chicharon, ground pork, anchovies, sausage, meatloaf, leche flan etc. Anything you can think of, the laing will not complain.

   This is one food where reheating again and again improves the flavor.

   It's easy, really.

Hot rich Chocolate drinks and conversations

Hot chocolate

Baguio has been my second home since my sisters and nephews have been based there for about two decades now. I have been there on a regular basis but I have toured the place about twice when my wife and daughter first went there in the 90's and when we had our family reunion in 2010. 

My daughter and my nephews have gone the round of some of the coffee shops and restos around the summer capital but my wife and I have never really spent the time touring the city's attractions. I'm too lazy (or too poor) to move around. 

I guess being familiar with the place, I have lost the curiosity and the excitement of a tourist. I have gone there just to relax and decompress in the serenity of the Philippine Baptist Theology Seminary's campus at my sister's faculty house.

My idea of a chocolate drink.

Chocolate de Batirol. 

I have never even heard of the place until it was mentioned with the conversations inside the van. My good friend Engr. Aris Borja and his wife Jenny invited my family for a cup of chocolate. My experience of chocolate drink is limited to Ovaltine and Milo or Alvin's Cocoa and Ricoa which my parents used to cook champurado. So, my idea of a chocolate drink is limited to the diluted and over sweetened instant chocolate drink.

The shop offered a variety of chocolate drink and food but since I am not that familiar with the coco-cocktail they serve, my wife and I settled for the traditional coco drink. When the cups arrived, the aroma was so good and powerful that it overcame my active rhinitis, which desensitizes, to a degree, my olfactory sense. The aroma brings back childhood memories of my cooking mother champurado and monsoon rains.

Hot choco and converstions. Jolo, my friends son, forgot his
Iphone there and the crew was honest enough to make
 sure the phone was returned. This gotta count for something.

Anyway, the first sip was confusing, being a virgin, I guess. I was expecting sweetness, which is the primary taste that I got used to, but instead my palate was treated to a grainy, thick bitter-sweet chocolate that it took me some time to process the conflicting thoughts my head was going through reconciling what I have been used to to what is being introduced now. I had to overcome my Milo and Ovaltine conditioning. I had to update my taste buds, so to speak. 

I let the liquid roll around my mouth. I had the same experience with brewed coffee. The first time I drank brewed coffee I almost threw up because I was so used to weak, over-sweetened instant coffee that when I drank my first sip of brewed sugarless coffee, the strong bitter taste triggered my gag reflex. But now, I like brewed coffee (but I could live without it, I mean, I knew people who could not survive without a dose of it.) 

But the rich chocolate drink unsettled some nerves in my stomach. I guess with the pizza and hot sauce, donut, coffee, and an earlier heavy lunch in near successions, the menagerie of food stuff in the digestive sac sort of declared war against each other. 

But I survived for the next stop, live music,  a bottle of light beer and sisig. Another story...

Filipino Cooking Terms Explained (A little bit)

I was teaching cooking terms and techniques to my grade six home economics class and my stomach grumbling especially with graphic pictures of yummy food flashing on the screen. I asked my pupils if they were beginning to feel hunger pang and they shouted, "Yes, sir!"

Anyway, I am sharing some of the Filipino cooking terms and style of cooking for those who are interested: (Please forgive my translation I lack the culinary vocabulary to accurately translate these things and this may make some of the translations  sound unpalatable.)

1.   Banlian—this style of cooking is taught best in the Philippine National Police Academy. This is done by throwing scalding hot water on foodstuff, suspects and prisoners.

2.    Malasaduhin—halfhearted cooking.

3.   Salagapan—removing the scum formed when cooking or boiling meat (or other stuffs like sugar or soy).

4.     Kadluin—slowly stirring while cooking to prevent coagulation.

5.   Atay-atay na pagpapakulo—slowly and painfully boiling the meat, chicken and other food stuff until they lost their spirit and essence.

6.    Sangkutsahin--to boil in salt. This is a traditional way of preserving meat before the invention of the ref. Some senators are good at this, cooking resource persons. 

7.     Pinagmamantika—to heat until the oils are extracted. Also, to dehydrate the meat.

8.     Tunawin—to melt in heat. The AFP is good at this, they melt documents.

9.     Pasingawan—to steambath the food.

10. Pakuluan—is to boil foodstuffs. It could also mean political cooking.

  

If you're wondering why a guy like me is teaching home economics, don't.  Some of the teachers are making fun of my subjects, to tell the truth I am enjoying them because they are not that stressful to teach. 

I am excited about the practicum. I'm going to make my pupils cook delicious food. I hope.

.

Hototay story/Rain again

I was reading Ambeth Ocampo’s 101 Stories on the Revolution when I came upon an interesting trivia about the origin of the word Hototay.

I knew Hototay during my drinking days. Hototay was a soup that looked like nilaga except that it contained (as I remembered it) vegetables, pork, octopus, shrimp and other ingredients that I could not recall. I knew, from the drinking stories, that the name came from a Chinese word—Hototay, sounds Chinese and the soup even looked Chinese.

Ocampo’s book explained where the Hototay came from. Here was the excerpt:

Combat drill was regular, and so were the Sousa tunes played by the Military band for the crew on deck. “There’ll be a Hot time in the Old Town Tonight” was a favorite that Filipinos later corrupt into a name of a soup—Hototay.

On the preceding page:

Hototai sometimes spelled Hototay, is a noodle-and-soup dish often offered in Panciterias. It is the favorite dish of National Artist for Literature N.V.M. Gonzales. WE would not normally associate hototay with the Philippine Centennial, but under the innocent Chinese sounding name is actually the title of the hit song of the Sapnish AmericanWar, “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Compress the whole title into one word and you get Hototay, one of the songs the American sang when they occupied Manila in 1898.

There are those who are not in favor with Ocampo’s style of writing history, as is obvious; one tends to remember the trivia rather than the “history.” But I can not imagine reading history without these bits of trivgia—it’s like eating sinigang without the soup.

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It was still raining hard when I woke up at 5 o’clock this morning. It was cold, damp and difficult to get out of bed.  If it was possible, I would just stay in bed enjoying the warmth of my wife’s arms around me, but I got to work or else we would not eat.

I was watching the news expecting that the Department of Education would suspend classes, but the news anchor announced that classes at all levels would resume today.

There were many absent pupils in my classes today. Some of the pupils might still have the “classes suspension” hang over, hearing the rain pounding on their tin roofs, seeing that the sky was still dark,  expecting heavy rains to pour all day that they did not even bother to get up from bed.

Their parents might have thought that it was better to keep their children safe at home absent from classes than waiting for the department to suspend classes. The problem with the department, like what happened yesterday, was that they suspend classes when the pupils were already in school, when the streets and roads were already flooded. The delays in the announcement of the suspension of classes was understandable because floods were localized hence DepEd could not issue a blanket order suspending the classes. Anyway…the local government and the principals had the authority to suspend classes as the situation warranted.

But teachers would rather not have the classes suspended because we would have to conduct make up classes on weekends.