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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Having spent my childhood in the province and in Pampanga at that, I took for granted that everyone knew how to cook. It seemed to me that it was something instinctive, something naturally learnt, like speaking. In our family, even those who were not considered excellent cooks had very passable culinary skills. And even then, they also had excellent taste in food. My grandfather was probably one of them.

My maternal grandmother would always tell us stories about our grandfather’s slapdash cooking skills albeit in jest. One incident was when he was left at home with their very young children. Lola laughingly related how she was still on the street in front of the house when her children regaled her with how Lolo dropped a live fish into a boiling pot of soup. Lolo was also extravagant with spices, and I probably took after him, based on the number of times I was reprimanded for using a lot of cloves, oregano and laurel. Fortunately for Lola, I was born after my grandfather passed away, otherwise she’d have run out of spices very often.

Aside from Lolo’s more down-to-earth cooking and his penchant for spices, he also loved to replicate dishes they had in expensive restaurants. He also experimented with original recipes. Below is one of them, which he called lutong Bombay, perhaps due to its curry-like flavour. Our clan never tires of this recipe. It is very simple to cook and most of the ingredients are usually available in any pantry.

Chicken, being the versatile meat that it is, soaks up the flavour of the spices. Garlic and ginger compliment each other, and gives it the decidedly Oriental aroma even from afar. The tomatoes lend some sourness that balance the hot-spicy flavour of ginger and garlic while the potato gives the sauce some body, even as it absorbs the flavours of the other ingredients.
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Note: I am in the process of refining this post. The original recipe was the shortcut version, which was meant for my friends abroad. Now and then I modify it to reflect the original recipe we use at home.

This week and most of next will be very busy for me. Since I’ll be offline, I’m leaving two recipes, those I owe Catsudon and Svelte Rogue. I’m amused at how I do this even on my blog, for this is also how I am in real life. If I have to go somewhere for at least three days, I try to fill up the refrigerator as much as I can for those I leave at home. Oh, the habits that mark our lives!

And so we proceed. Both are meat recipes. I’m not including a vegetable recipe here because both dishes are best served with a fresh green salad, or at least with slices of cucumber and carrots. When proportions are not written, it means you can use as much or as little as you want. So goes the sensual cook!

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