The Pilgrim’s Pots and Pans

Post-Thanksgiving, I am very glad to welcome Genevieve, my friend from way back. She is today’s guest blogger from North America.

In all my years in the United States, despite having become a naturalised citizen not too long ago, I have never felt solidarity with, the need for or the desire to celebrate ‘American’ feast holidays. These would be Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and more noteably, Thanksgiving Day. These holidays symbolised events which hold no sentimental value to me whatsoever. In all the years past, whenever these days came, the only highlight for me would be that they spelled major discounts and some serious shopping, specially on the day after Thanksgiving.

This year was different. We had family from the Philippines who recently immigrated and wanted to experience what holidays were like in their adoptive country. They chose the wrong company to witness this American tradition.

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A preview of what is to come…

The picture on the left is of regular lowland irrigated palé which will become abias and then nasi.

In English this time: Palé is Kapampangan for standing rice stalks and the unhusked rice grains. Milling would turn it into abias and when cooked is called nasi. In Tagalog, those terms would be palay, bigas and kanin respectively.

On the right is the rainfed lacatan malutu or red-husked glutinous rice used for duman. I took the palé picture on a cool afternoon sometime in the summer (April-May) while the lacatan was photographed at mid-morning Sunday, 30 October, last week but both sheafs of grain are approximately of the same age, based on how they bow to the sun.

by Manny Soriano

For this month’s Lasang Pinoy, I am glad to once again host an entry 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.

If the movable feast aspect of our streets spoiled you, swelled your head and made you think streetfood is uniquely ours, think again. Walk along the cobbled streets of Salvador de Bahia and you will find rows of immaculately dressed ladies selling shrimp flavoured red fritters that once tasted transports you back a world away to Aleng Asyang’s okoy from just around the bend. Don’t even get me started with Mexico. In fact you can find streetfood just about anywhere the rational, sanitizing, regulatory mindset has not yet imposed its will upon people’s native sensibilities. In neighbouring countries justly celebrated for their streetfood, totalitarian obsession for civic tidyness has now began to rear its head, this time to compel hawkers to toe the line and gather under the watched-over roof of food courts. A really foolish if not impoverished trade-off for the freedom, surprise and serendipity of traditional streetfood scenes, if you ask me. Besides, the allure of streetfood is discovering it right there and consuming it right then, with as little delay as possible and certainly without having to detour first to an officially designated concentration centre. You see, we are all impulsive four-year-olds when it comes to food. We want it when we want it. Satisfying this urgent need is streetfood’s primal appeal.
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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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By Cora Castellvi

(Below is an entry sent in by a Filipina-Canadian reader of her encounter with Sen. Aquino as they ate and talked about what else but food!)

Ontario, Canada – IT WAS FALL, 1981. Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino was the guest speaker at a symposium organized by a group of young Filipino-Canadian professionals in Toronto. I just wish I had something with me at that time to record the event and the next 24 hours when Ninoy was in town before he went back to Boston, where he was in exile with his family.

The evening was charged with so much energy. Ninoy spoke with so much passion and fire, for about 3 hours, non-stop – and only glanced at his notes, every once in a while to start a new topic.

He did not complain about the discomfort he was feeling right then. It was roughly a few weeks before when he hurt his ankle and he was walking with a little limp and was using a cane.
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