Shrimp ceviche

Gaiety and spontaneity are trademarks of most Filipino societies. Being very sociable, camaraderie is at the heart of many relationships. Perhaps it also comes from the nature of our traditional occupations - farming and fishing. Our ways of living rely on being with others, helping and sharing in the labour and the harvests.

This camaraderie is even more apparent when unwinding after a day or night’s toil. It is then when beverages come out. And when there are spirits, of course there is pulutan!

For January, Ting Aling at World Class Cuiscene is graciously hosting Lasang Pinoy with the theme Let’s Wash it Down with Booze!! That, dear friends, is another way of saying you don’t have to be a drinker to indulge in drinking food.

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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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Note: revising still but comments welcome

We chose to launch Lasang Pinoy, a Filipino food blogging event, on Ninoy Aquino Day to commemorate the death of our most well-known modern-day hero. Today, Filipino food bloggers and friends in many parts of the world will post their thoughts on being Filipino and the food that go with them.

Try as I might, I cannot recall what I was doing on 21 August 1983. Perhaps it was my typical child’s day of play, homework, raiding bookshelves, piano lessons, cartoons and whatever a nine-year old third grader would do. The day after is what I vividly remember.

My mother was reading the papers early in the evening, and in a tense and troubled voice confirmed: “Mete ne pin y Ninoy” which is Kapampangan for “Ninoy is really dead”. I had no idea who Ninoy was but it seemed that he was someone my mom knew very well. Could he be a relative or a very close friend? I was sure he was either one.
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