Underneath the carrot and capsicum strips is a tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) navigating its way towards the list of IMBB entries. This month’s host of the very successful meme, courtesy of Alberto’s original idea, is Ladygoat at Foodgoat… with the theme Orange you hungry?

Since busy days are upon us (my blog friends would have noticed by now how I didn’t pester them to join this month’s IMBB and I’ve neglected to bloghop :blooms:) and summer brings days which make spending time before a stove oppressive, I opted for an easy but classic recipe. This is one of several versions of escabeche, a dish common to many Hispanised regions in the Philippines.
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I wonder if Carlo at my latest supper was thinking of the adage “one man’s meat is another’s poison” when he chose the theme of this month’s Is My Blog Burning? What a way to celebrate the 12th instalment and 1st anniversary of Alberto’s original idea! Something taboo or disgusting – in our part of the world, what could that be short of cannibalism? I didn’t want to argue, or be legalistic around the rules yet I also didn’t want to break the Philippine Animal Welfare law.

It took me a long time to finally decide on this month’s entry. For a while I thought of skipping it but my friend Catsudon, who is the genie of my blogs, admonished me not to chicken out. So, back to the rules. I’ll just pick bits and pieces from Carlo’s stipulations since taken as a whole, they seem to eliminate everything from this side of the world. And because I work on my food entries from Pampanga, a province known for many exotic delicacies even for Philippine standards, close to nothing qualifies as taboo or forbidden.

But as for sharing our unusual food and recording the reactions of those who try it, I had a lot of pictures! I found one taken in December and shows May-May, a four-year old who ate tâgiló like oatmeal where others cringe. However, she wasn’t a “willing victim” but practically begged to have a taste. Does that qualify? Perhaps I should then go back through time, not limited with this IMBB’s timeframe.

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Perhaps I’ve come close to solving the puzzle why we call sitaw (also spelled sitao in Tagalog, câmangyáng in Kapampangan, utong in Ilocano, Badiriya in Lebanese Arabic and die Fisolen in Austrian German) stringbeans while to many parts of the English-speaking world, they’re yard-long beans. I came across a paper from the American colonial period where they were most probably writing the English translations for our native vegetables and what did they call sitaw but “long stringbeans” (trust the Americans to leave us confused, hehehe!). Perhaps through time the adjective was dropped and so we are now left with just “stringbeans”. Now I’d like to pinch my own ears because I forgot to write down the source of the paper and have no idea where I read it. Pardon my negligence this time.

In any case, here is another recipe which makes use of these beans. I was a bit hesitant to post this recipe as it is quite common, most probably found in all Filipino food websites. However, I am a bit amused at requests for me to post a Kapampangan pinakbet recipe. What recipe? Pinakbet is unmistakably Ilocano. The way it is properly cooked, according to my mom and aunties who lived in Baguio, is by stewing without oil until the vegetables have dried up and shrivelled. But since requests persist and I promised Renee on Shiokadelicious! sometime back, I will post how Kapampangans cook it, which I’m certain would make hardcore Ilocanos cringe.
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