Food, Food, Food!!!!

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 2^nd 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!!