by Manny Soriano

The following entry is contributed by a Filipino-Canadian food and music enthusiast. He was born and educated in the Philippines and migrated to Canada in 1971. His mother was an excellent and practical pastry and savoury cook who operated a hotel with his father who was a coffee and cigar connoisseur. Manny started baking in highschool and worked as an accountant till 1999. He took baking courses since 1990 and opened a Filipino pastry shop in the west end of Toronto in 2000.

The hurricane that recently submerged the American gulf region has a particular vivid resonance for us Filipinos because the majority of us who have not left home live through the same fear and threat year in and year out. It seems that political leaderships everywhere are all alike in being blind, deaf and dumb to this never ever unforseeable disasters. In the coastal area of Tondo, the project that was designed to lessen the problem ended up aggravating it through corruption and bungling. Now they have flood all year round. How do our resilient people cope and survive, go on with their lives and rebuild? The only patch left to them for refuge is dangerously sloped and rather slippery at that.

You hear talk of the ruinous effects of global warming getting louder each year. That there is going to be stronger hurricanes, that more frequent floods will marinate more low-lying areas. But shall we claim that we have already been living through all these grim conditions in the last two centuries for which we have written account? The Spaniards summed up our climate as “cuatro meses de polvo, cuatro meses de lodo, cuatro meses de todo.” That adds up to two-thirds of the year being wet season. So apt then of Bino Realuyo to call his coming-of-age novel “Umbrella Country” or of our great painters invariably depicting Habagat (Monsoon) as a dark and sullen giant.
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Vinegar-stewed catfish
Today we post our entries for the second edition of Lasang Pinoy, the Filipino food blogging event. Our month’s host is Celia Kusinera at English Patis with the theme Cooking Up a Storm! It’s a very fitting topic since normally, September is towards the end of the monsoon season. With drastic climatic shifts however, it seems like typhoons are now intermittent occurences, unlike in recent years when we were able to distinguish a period when they were most frequent.Time was when the opening of classes coincided with the rainy season. A few weeks into the school year, chances were classes would be called off due to typhoons. The storms would range from mild to very strong, from Signal No. 1-3, before Signal No. 4 was added to the system very recently.

I loved the onset of the rainy season. Not too long after the showers started, the stream beside our house would be flowing more rapidly and we’d float our paper boats. Rains also meant playing and taking a bath in the rain, watching the mamadúas on the bridge over the stream. A padúas is a short bamboo fishing pole, mamadúas is both the verb, act of fishing, and the noun the person(s) fishing.
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Premna odorata Blanco
Tanglé (Premna odorata Blanco syn. Premna vestita Schauer ) or alagaw in Tagalog and fragrant premna in English is indigenous to the Philippines. Its tender leaves are employed in Kapampangan cuisine in a variety of ways. In our family, tanglé is indispensable in ningnang bangus (inihaw na bangus - broiled milkfish) and in some vinegared stews.

From childhood, I don’t remember not having a tanglé tree in our backyard. It’s a wonder how the plants just grow, most probably propagated by birds, because they are difficult to plant. Seedlings sprout in the most unlikely places and transplanting them to a better location is a hit and miss affair but not extremely difficult. One of my uncles successfully brought a seedling to the city and reaped its benefits for years.

The tree needs to be pruned every now and then to be manageable, since it grows very tall. It also bears flowers that look like tiny green berries when they’re still buds (picture below). Tanglé is also reputed to have medicinal properties, almost always with leaves boiled as for a tisane. Although I haven’t seen lab results (unlike lagundi, which has been well-researched and is now packaged into capsules), I know it is proven to relieve coughs and colds.

For me however, the most important use of tanglé is as an aromatic herb. I am not sure how to approximate the scent but it has notes of musky lemongrass. Hmmm… not a very accurate description but I thought if scents had voices, this would somehow be a baritone lemongrass but not quite. Hahaha! Sorry, I’ll try to sniff it more and describe it later.