My Kind of Food

I’ve recently returned from a holiday in the Philippines and what an amazing journey through a beautiful country it was.

In meeting in Manila with a Filipino friend who lives and works in the UK, I rather arrogantly offered my view of what I expected Filipino food to be like having prevously tasted hardly any of it! I opined that, as in the British Isles we have Scouse, Lancashire Hot Pot, Irish Stew and Casseroles various, they are all at the end of the day variations on a pot of meat and veg. and Filipino food would be similar; lots of differently named dishes, all looking remarkably the same and served, of course, with steamed rice.

How wrong I was!

During almost three weeks of traveling around I tasted a wide range of dishes and all in all experienced a cuisine that I’m very close to classifying as the best I’ve so-far discovered.

The cuisine of these 7,600 plus islands is the fruit of many different cultures, ranging from the indigenous roots of the islands, through Spanish, Malay, Chinese and of course the USA as well as what I might call the pan-Asian/Indochine style.

Regionality is a key component of Filippino food. When I told a Pinoy friend that I was going to visit Mabalacat, in the province of Pampanga, he immediately referenced the fact that Pampanga is famed for the dish Sisig.

Sisig is served hot and sizzling, usually on a cast iron skillet and is made from belly pork, pigs ears and pork jowl and livers, finished with freshly squeezed Calamansi, the tiny and ubiquitos Filipino Lime.

In many other dishes I tried, the protein, (pork, chicken, prawns of beef) is marinated in a variety of lovely things like soy sauce, vinegar and small amounts of chilli. This is adobo.

Lechon is roast whole pig, most typically suckling pig and in Cebu which is famous for it, it might be flavoured with lemongrass, herbs and spices. Lechon was one of the small number Pinoy dishes I had tried in London before making the trip, where it was served in a much less rustic way to satisfy the restaurant critics desire for symmetry and precision.

Of course there are more challenging things to eat while in the Philippines. I (quite easily) resisted tht invitation to try Balut for example. Balut is a fertilised egg (duck egg typically) where the growing chick inside has been allowed to develop to up to three weeks gestation before the egg is steamed and the whole thing eaten from the shell with salt and vinegar. It’s not for me. Neither was I willing to try Soup Number 5, famed for its aphrodisiac properties and made from the testes and penis of bulls. I might’ve given it a go, if I hadn’t first googled it and seen an image of a very large phallus floating in a bowl of dark broth. It is a comfort to me that some of my Filipino friends don’t eat these dishes either; I’m in good company.

When I travel and taste new dishes I am often inspired to cook something similar at home. I usually do this without following a recipe closely and adopt a free-style approach. When I tried this with Filipino food it didn’t quite work for me, so I’ve been trying to prepare dishes by closely following the recipes and disvovered that the deliciousness of what I tasted there can be repalcated at home. House guests who come to visit this year know what to expect!