I'm gonna apologize in advance for the
length of this post, but hey, it's about food. So how can I not have
a million things to say about it? One thing I've learned here, food
can either make or break your day, as I've experienced many times.
I have now been in the Philippines for
about 11 months. During this time I have grown very accustomed to the
local cuisine and don't even raise an eyebrow when told that the meal
was cooked in pig's blood or contains liver bits. I have also come to
crave very simple things that I took completely for granted in the
States. I'm trying to decide which I should write about first because
I know when I start talking about the American food I'll work myself
up and then be forced to come back down to Earth again. So should I
get all emotional about food now or later??? Hmmm....this is a real
dilemma.......oh whatever! I'm already getting all worked up about it
so I may as well just continue! (Disclaimer: I could probably write a
10 volume novel on all the food I've been craving but I won't put you
through that, so I'll just go with the highlights.)
First off, you'd be surprised how many
time the topic of peanut butter comes up in conversations
among volunteers. One time I was having dinner with some of the other
volunteers and we had a 20 minute conversation about peanut butter,
no joke. We talked about the best brand, creamy vs. crunchy, the best
way to eat it, what we would give to have some peanut butter right
now...you get the picture. I mean, I liked peanut butter in the
States as much as the next PB&J fan, but it's a down-right
obsession here. A single jar of peanut butter is sacred to the
average volunteer (I say average because there are some crazy
volunteers that don't even like peanut butter...go figure). My
parents sent me a box with 10 jars of peanut butter (there may have
been more, I forget) and in the States that could probably last me
almost a year, or at least 6 months. But after 3 months, I'm on my
2nd to last jar. That stuff's addicting! Especially when
it's the only munchy available when watching tv shows.
Next, sandwiches!!!!
It's pretty much impossible to find good sandwich bread,
cheese, and cold
cuts in this country, believe
it or not. You never realize how much of a staple in the American
diet sandwiches are until you have to go without them for what seems
like a lifetime. And those three ingredients (bread, cheese, and cold
cuts) go into way more meals than you would imagine (okay, maybe not
the cold cuts too much, but definitely the bread and cheese). So
you're just forced to go without those, which can just kill a girl.
I've
been able to find decent substitutes for American pizzas
and burgers
here, but let's just say it'll feel so nice to be able to sink my
teeth into the real deal. One of the most painful experiences here
food-wise occurred a couple of months after coming to site. I was
with the other volunteers in the area and we decided to splurge on a
pizza while watching a fiesta's parade. We ordered our veggie pizza,
completely stoked for what was in store for our ravenous stomachs. We
opened the pizza box and were a little puzzled by the appearance of
the pizza. The crust looked like a dense pita bread, there were
carrots on top, the cheese was a weird color, the sauce didn't quite
look right, and they'd given us tubes of banana ketchup as a
condiment. We all had our reservations, but we're Peace Corps
volunteers, gosh-darn-it! If we order a pizza, we're going to eat it
and enjoy it!! So we all grabbed a piece and began to eat. Now, it's
been a few months since this happened so I can't remember the exact
taste, but I'll just say that not one of us (the guys included)
finished a second piece. We counted our loses, gave the remainder of
the pizza to some street kids, and to this day cringe when we talk of
that pizza.
Back
to the happy side of food! Salads!!!
I always took those for granted in the States, but it is surprisingly
hard to find any kind of salad here and decent dressing to go with
it. The concept seems strangely foreign to Filipinos living in such a
tropical environment, surrounded by greens. I had my aunt and uncle
send me some good ol' ranch dressing though, and I've managed to make
it last quite a while, eating it with cucumbers and carrots (and
Filipinos would consider that a salad, just two veggies). The first
time I did this my host family gave me quite a few stares, but I've
trained them to accept my sometime weird food habits, even if they
can't understand them.
Breakfast foods!!
To Filipinos, breakfast includes the same kind of foods as lunch and
dinner. They eat the left over fish and rice from the night before
for breakfast. I quickly taught my family that I could not do this. I
will succumb to many of their different cultural tendencies, but that
is one that I will insist on holding strong to my American
upbringing. One breakfast food I hadn't realized I missed so much was
granola. I'd never
been a huge granola eater in the States, enjoying it every now and
then but never going out of my way to get my hands on it. Well I
asked a volunteer who was visiting the States to bring me back a box
of it. It was vanilla almond flavored. Up to this point I had been
eating corn flakes cereal for breakfast every day – a Filipino
brand of cereal that really has no flavor or sweetness (and I usually
go for the sugary cereal or add a cup of sugar to each bowl) – and
had gotten used to the non-flavor of it. When I got my first bowl of
granola, I wasn't expecting anything ground breaking, just a nice
break from the monotonous corn flakes. The second the granola touched
my tongue, however, my taste buds went crazy! I had tingles all over
my body and I felt like I had just entered another dimension in the
world of food!! I'd never had such a strong reaction to food. Even
now as I'm typing my mouth is watering just remember it. I was very
proud that I made the box of granola last a week. And then the other
breakfast foods we find so common (eggs, pancakes, toast, french
toast, waffles, etc) are almost unheard of here except in the cities
or within the homes of the more westernized families. Filipinos have
lots of eggs, but they only do hard boiled eggs. So many
opportunities with eggs that they simply don't take advantage of, it
breaks my heart.
So like I said
earlier, I could go on for pages and pages about food I miss, but
I'll make myself stop here and go on to Filipino food stuff.
Fish.
I mentioned fish in a previous blog, but I'll reiterate here: they
prepare fish differently. They don't clean the meat off the fish,
then cook it, then serve it. They gut the fish, cook it, then serve
it, with the head, eyes, fins, tails, and bones all there. If there
is fish on the table, it's assumed that you'll eat with your hands
(at least with my fish eating ability it is; some Filipinos eat the
fish with fork and spoon, using it to get the meat off the bone, but
I haven't mastered that technique yet, and frankly, it takes the fun
out of it). For me, I put the fish on my plate with some rice and a
side plate of soy sauce. I pull the meat off the fish with my hands,
remove the bones I find, dip the meat into the soy sauce, then mix
the fish with rice, using the soy sauce to help hold the rice
together, and then enjoy! I actually really like eating fish here.
It's an excuse to play with my food. There are other ways to prepare
the fish also. One of the most common ways (apart from frying the
fish) is drying the fish. To do this, you cut the fish in half along
the dorsal fin, open it up “hot dog style” (as we'd say in
preschool), and leave it in the sun for a few hours until it's all
dried up. I think they pour salt on it too to help with the drying
process. I generally don't eat the fish this way because it's really
really salty, and I prefer the fried method.
Mango Float!!!!!!!!
Sadly I haven't had this too often here, but it's by far my favorite
food that I've eaten. I guess it's more of a dessert, but I eat
enough of it to make it a meal when I get the chance. It's a layered
dessert with layers of graham crackers (pronounced grA-ham here),
sweet and condensed milk and cream mixed together, and slices of
mango. Put it in the fridge or freezer for a few hours and enjoy!! I
swear it is one of the best things I've ever tasted in my life. When
I was having a particularly rough week two of my volunteer lifeline
friends made it for me and it instantly improved my mood! It's the
best way to be cheered up!!
Buko Salad.
This is another dessert. Buko
is the Filipino word for coconut. It's a chilled dessert with coconut
meat, coconut juice, sweet and condensed milk, and these random fruit
flavored chunks. It's really good, although I have no idea what the
chunks are actually made of.
Halo-halo.
This is a traditional Filipino dessert. There's really no way to
describe it since they can contain different things depending on who
makes it (and probably the region of the Philippines you're in). Halo
in Tagalog means mix, so the literal translation of the name is
“mix-mix”. It's really just a random mixture of different things.
It's also chilled so it has crushed ice, sweet and condensed milk,
sometimes ice cream, the random fruit flavored chunks also found in
buko salad, sometimes corn flakes, sometimes beans, sometimes corn,
sometimes chunks of sugar, and sometimes other stuff. It's really
weird, but when you find a good mixture, it's really good. You'll
just have to come here and try one for yourself!
| This is just one version of the dessert but it shows the colors and some of the variety of the ingredients. |
Pansit.
This is a noodle dish that's a go-to for Filipinos. It's made with
rice noodles and has chunks of meat and some vegetables thrown in.
Like the halo-halo, this too can vary depending on who makes it.
Lechon.
Aka roast pig. They cook it over a fire pit with a piece of bamboo
going through it, mouth to butt. They roast it over fire and coals
for a few hours until it turns tan and the skin is nice and crispy.
Every major Filipino event has lechon. If lechon was eaten by
Americans on a regular basis, we wouldn't do it justice because we'd
only eat the meat and throw everything else out. But here they eat
EVERYTHING: the meat, the entrails, the blood, the hooves, the fat,
the ears, and the skin. The skin is by far my favorite part, even
more than the meat. It gets nice a crispy with a thin layer of fat
underneath with salty seasoning....'tis perfecto!! (cue terrible
Italian accent and kissing of finger tips).
Spaghetti.
Pretty similar to the States although they make is sweet here. I
don't know how they do it but they do. I prefer American spaghetti.
Adobo.
The name for a certain kind of preparation involving cooking the meat
or vegetables in soy sauce, vinegar, onions, and garlic. It's
delicious and you can cook pretty much any meat or vegetables
adobo-style (that I've noticed).
Rice.
Of course I had to mention rice. Within the first 2 months here I ate
more rice than I'd had in my entire life! Crazy! It's eaten for
breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No meal is complete without it. Even
after being here for almost a year with my host family getting to
know me and my eating habits, if there is a day I choose not to eat
rice with a meal they give me the strangest looks ever! The
proportion of rice to meat (or whatever else they're eating) doesn't
make sense to me either. They'll have a plate towering with rice and
one 5 inch long fish to go with it. It puzzles me. And Filipinos
are so creative with the different ways to prepare rice, too. It can
be made into a patty-like-consistency and made into a sweet dessert,
or made watery with chocolate and turned into a kind of soup, or so
many other ways. Simply put, Filipinos would die without their rice.
Fat.
When I say this I don't mean they'll eat the small pieces of fat
attached to meat unlike most Americans who cut around the fat (I'm
guilty of this). I mean they eat chunks of fat...only fat....no meat.
I was completely baffled when my host family during training told me
about this and they were in turn completely baffled when I told them
I don't eat fat. It was one of the instances where you just stare at
each other and cannot, for the life of you, fathom why the other
culture does something. My host family had a nice time teasing me
about it the rest of the time I was there though.
Banana Leaves.
This doesn't have to do with eating as much as food resourcefulness.
Banana leaves are used for everything here. They're used to cover the
food and protect it from flies, as table clothes/covers, and “paper”
plates. The leaves are huge so their purpose is pretty versatile. I
was told this was an interesting fact so decided to share.
Okay,
I think I've gone on for long enough about food. So I'm gonna end
this here. I'm planning on writing a post soon about what's going on
a work, so...Coming Soon to a Blog Near You!!
