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.

Would anyone happen to know a Mexican food blogger I can contact? Why? Here’s another long-winded explanation and my way of asking for suggestions.

I don’t intend to make it an event in the tradition of the Is My Blog Burning? spin-offs but the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that IMBB? is the perfect venue for this project, especially with the theme on the portal masthead “recipes of the people, by the people and for the people”.

It is interesting how we relate to each other through food. Sometimes a few ingredients are universally familiar and at times some are quite exotic to many. There are times when we use different names for the same ingredients or use the same name for different ones. I’ve noticed this when I started reading food blogs, even before I had a first-hand experience.

Then one day a college friend, who is now in the US, and I were talking about our lowly singkamas which we take for granted in the Philippines. All along I thought this was an indigenous root crop since it can be found all over the country and is eaten in many ways - as a snack dipped in shrimp paste, vinegar or salt, sautéed as a vegetable, pickled, fried and included in spring rolls. When Catsudon pointed out that our singkamas looks and tastes exactly like the Mexican jicama, I realised that it could be a migrant food. Singkamas doesn’t sound much different from jicama and in Pampanga, whose food culture is heavily Hispanised, it is even sicamas. Perhaps it came to the country through the galleons. After all, Spain ruled us through Mexico for 250 years. Obviously, neither of us read any of Doreen Fernandez’ Filipino food anthropology books for when I finally got Tikim, she does mention it as a Mexican root crop.
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Mangifera indica L.

Summer is in the air! And that means the fruits of the season will soon be making their appearance, one of which is the mango. April and May are the months when the ripened fruits are at the height of their glory although we now enjoy them all year-round. Before they are at their sweetest, we snack on green mangoes to satisfy our sour cravings.

My blogging relative, Santos, has opened the season with her smokin’ mangoes post last week. And what shall I do? Finish what I started by thinking of my mango memories before adding on to them another sweet summer. And sorry I’m late for my own deadline (technical trouble).

I never would have thought Philippine mangoes had such an excellent reputation as far as fruits are concerned. A few years ago, in the dead of winter in Bonn, I was in a workshop where the heat of the discussions was inversely proportional to the cold outside. I was then a relative novice at such meetings but I had with me a secret weapon. Every time tempers flared, I took out a bag of dried mangoes and had it passed around the table. The trick never failed to douse a potential conflagration.
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