Adventures In Philippine Cookery - Episode Transcript

Find the transcript of my interview with Bryan Koh below.

INTRO

Welcome to Exploring Filipino Kitchens. I’m your host, Nastasha Alli.

Today we’re talking with Bryan Koh, author of the book “Milk Pigs and Violet Gold,” a hardcover book from a Philippine university press, first published in 2013 and then re-issued three years later to the rest of Southeast Asia.

The illustrations, artwork and photos in Bryan’s books are BEAUTIFUL. I got to say that off the top. Turning the pages, I’m driven by the narrative, the structure, and the immediacy of his stories – like I feel like I’m there – and I constantly think, because I’m reading the recipes… I mean, “really, that’s all it takes to make that?”

But of course, it’s never just that! It isn’t just gathering ingredients in a bowl, and not even just knowing the right technique – whether you’re making handmade noodles or one of the dozens of kakanin, or rice cakes – that are in the book. What I really love about Milk Pigs is that there’s the sense of discovery, of excitement, like how the food he talks about sounds totally familiar, but at the same time, also really new.

Come along with us for this month’s adventures in Philippine cookery.

INTERVIEW

BK: My name’s Bryan Koh. I’m a food writer. I’m based in Singapore. I’ve written two books so far, well of course, there’s ‘Milk Pigs,’ and ‘Milkier Pigs’...

NA: That’s ‘Milk Pigs and Violet Gold,’ his ode Philippine cuisine, and its second edition, playfully titled ‘Milkier Pigs and Violet Gold,’ with a few more recipes, extended chapters, and a new layout…

BK: And there’s another one called ‘0451 Mornings Are For Mont Hin Gar,’ and that one is a book on Burmese food.

NA: Bryan completed his bachelors in mathematics at the University of Singapore, then went on to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York for his masters degree. After deciding that life as an academic wasn’t necessarily for him, Bryan went back to school for hospitality.

BK: And right now, when I’m not writing, I’m running a bakery in Singapore called ‘Chalk Farm.’

NA: So how did his book ‘Milk Pigs and Violet Gold’ come about, I asked?

02:46 How the book started

BK: Well, it kind of happened during the interim between my university days and my master’s program. I did a couple of things, Chalk Farm was one of them, that’s why I started it. What else I did? I was a freelance journalist. It was quite interesting because during that time, I’m a bit of a food book junkie, so I did collect quite a bit. I was reading excessively, and I realized there weren’t very many food books – Asian food books, I should qualify – that had this kind of narrative to them. Most of the books you get here anyway, usually are like an instruction manual, or it’s almost encyclopedic.

NA: That is totally true. Every time I go back to Southeast Asia, I always stop into as many bookstores as possible, to check out what kinds of cookbooks they have, and that I can add to my collection. There are definitely some notable books, but for the most part – as Bryan says – this stuff is pretty dry; it can be boring. Informative, but not like the long, winding travelogues of writers like Alan Davidson, who lived in Laos in the 1950s, or even Fuchsia Dunlop, whose memoir about Sichuan food is easily one of my favorites.

BK: So I was trying to have a book that engaged the reader in a really different way. Something I was looking for, from a very personal standpoint. So that’s how it happened. For some reason I thought back then to do Philippine cuisine because it was actually – back then anyway, this was nearly 10 years ago – there wasn’t really much literature about it. There is more now. There’s much more now, but back then that really wasn’t the case, it wasn’t this “hot” subject that it is now. Now we have so many articles, so many bloggers, so many food magazines talking about it as the next big Asian cuisine.

NA: So all this excitement surrounding Filipino food, it isn’t just tipping over in North America and the West, it’s happening in the actual region it’s from. With so much more publicity given to Philippine ingredients and flavor profiles, restaurants in the city that host visiting chefs from Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Spain, Filipino food is legitimately a hot commodity.

05:31 Why write about Philippine cuisine?

BK: The reason why that cuisine floated into my head to begin with was that I had a yaya, she was from La Union and she cooked exceedingly well. I realized very much later on that quite a few people didn't really has that similarly good experience as with Philippine cuisine, and that quite a few of my friends had pretty horrific ones. As I went along, I began telling people what I was doing. I got quite a few raised eyebrows. That didn't really discourage me. If anything, I think it kind of it fortified my stand that I really have to do this.

BK: Around 2009, I was briefly sent on a freelance assignment to the Philippines. This was my first time on Philippine soil. It was in Lipa, Batangas and it was ironic because it was a detox facility that I went to. After my writing stint, I was taken around to eat, and it was an amazing experience. Until then, there were a lot of things I hadn’t know about, and to me that entire trip was an eye-opener. That’s when I kind of realized that this was something I really wanted to do. The very seed was sown during that trip.

07:04 Getting by with a little help from friends

BK: Later that year, I went to Cornell where I did my masters and I met two wonderful friends, Bianca and Susanne. They were the ones who actually encouraged me and provided the network for the book to happen. I made it quite plain in the preface of the book that without their assistance, this would have not come to fruition.

NA: And this is an important thing to note; something Bryan and I, and many other people I’ve met while traveling, can confirm about the Philippines. While it’s relatively easy to get around, and really easy to talk to locals – because pretty much everyone speaks English – your chances of “stumbling” onto the best roadside restaurant, or having consistently good bowls of soups and stews, aren’t really guaranteed without someone’s recommendation. Granted, this is so much easier these days with everything being online, but with that comes another problem: how do you trust what’s good? And, you got to keep in mind that this doesn’t really apply out in the provinces where the best cooking often is. For that, for those really regional specialties that aren’t served in restaurants because people don’t even think of preparing it for anyone outside their homes – because it’s either an everyday dish or pegged as the lowly peasant fare that folks in the countryside wouldn’t even think of serving – you got to have the right connections to find that kind of food, the food that you travel for.

08:44 The reality of travel

BK: I think for me it’s more than just the recipes. I quite like the context, knowing a bit about their background – the recipes I mean. The first trip I made for Milk Pigs happened in May 2010. Way back then I thought I could probably complete this in around four trips. I really remember sitting down with my friend – Susanne – she was the one with whom I ventured to the Cordillera and Ilocos. That was the very, very first trip up. I was going to Manila, going to Baguio, going all the way up north to Laoag, and then flying back down. So at first we thought, okay it will be Luzon. Or it will be Luzon covered in two parts, and then Visayas, and then Mindanao. Three round trips around two to three weeks each. So that’s how it started. Very, very naive. Extremely ignorant, because I have never gone that far north. So I knew nothing about road conditions, I knew nothing about weather conditions, and the thing about Central and North Luzon is that some parts are inaccessible. Now it’s getting better, but definitely wasn’t that easy to make travel plans. Just traveling between two towns could take you three to four hours.

10:06 Why guides are crucial

BK: Susanne knew someone who could take care of us, so that’s how we arranged the trips. For the whole of the Philippines, I had a contact in every town that I went to, or at least I knew someone having gone to that town before, so I have some form of guidance, which I think is crucial, especially in the Philippines because I wouldn’t have known any better. Sometimes you need people to direct your attention to certain things. So for every trip, I cross out little towns, I list the regions I wanted to visit along with the local dishes or delicacies from each part of the region. So that was how we planned it out because there were certain things I had to cover.

BK: I still remember that breakfast/lunch meeting. We flew in to Manila and we met with our contact and he starts talking about a few things and I start taking notes, taking quite a lot of those. I was so preoccupied with my own little checklist that I now feel I probably didn’t pay as much attention as I should have. There were a lot of juicy morsels that I actually kind of ignored, I took for granted. I only realized this during my second and third trips.

11:24 “Research is ongoing”

BK: Many people say research is preliminary, but the thing is, research is ongoing. You don’t do research, go to a destination, and it’s as though what you see and what you have read before, it’s not as if they click so easily. You don’t travel to confirm and corroborate and go, “Okay, that’s it. Done!” Actually in this region it’s nothing like that. It’s quite an untidy process where, as you go along, the more you uncover, and the more you travel, the more you’re reading up as well. It’s almost like two tasks that run parallel to one another, and you got to make sure your eyes are on both.

NA: That’s totally right. So I asked Bryan if he could tell us more, give an example to show what he means...and we ended up talking about a place I had also recently visited, the provinces of Ilocos.

12:19 Foods of the Ilocos Region

BK: I do love the north quite a lot and people who ask me about what was my favorite time, it was actually that trip. I knew I wanted to cover pinikpikan in the Cordillera. I knew that I wanted to look at pinakbet in the Ilocos to see how it was done traditionally. Pinapaitan. If you ask any Ilocano what they miss from home, I think dinengdeng is probably one of the first few things they mention. For those who don’t know what dinengdeng is, it’s basically a very light, almost soupy vegetable braise with bagoong being the main source of umami, although sometimes grilled fish is slipped in to give it a little bit of lovely smokiness and savoriness. It has all kinds of vegetables. Very unique dish, it has no oil because everything is simply being simmered. It’s what many an Ilocano has come to love. It’s what many of them miss when they’re overseas, especially when prepared with bamboo shoots and saluyot.

13:31 “You never really know until you travel”

NA: Man, all that stuff just sounds AMAZING! And that’s why, as Bryan says…

BK: You never really know until you start traveling. The first time you set foot on a country – not for a holiday – but with the intention of writing about something in the country, in that place, for me the mood is completely different.

NA: Again, I totally agree.

13:57 On locals’ generosity

BK: I was actually very, very fortunate that people were so generous with their time. The first market I went to outside of Manila was Tarlac, and then we went to Cordillera. So that entire leg for me was a huge eye-opener, and I do recall coming away from it quite overwhelmed. There were so many things I had to take note of, I mean smells, tastes, sights, and in addition to everything that you are experiencing yourself in terms of the senses, you also have to bear in mind that you have to record information about the food and about the recipes of course.

BK: I did worry that people would be a bit thorny with me in giving their recipes away, but I was quite fortunate in the Philippines because I didn’t really have that. People were mostly very, very generous. There’s this joy, really, and it was overwhelming, peoples’ warm generosity. And of course the information they shared with me, to me that’s a gift.

15:05 A Filipino approach to cooking

BK: Sometimes you can kind of tell people’s personality based on how they cook. So to me it’s more of like a window into their psyche. There are some people who take up the pains of making something simple into quite something quite complex by giving you a whole list of steps and there’s some people who’ve taken that same recipe and they just put everything in the same pot and boil the thing up.

NA: I asked Bryan how, exactly, he went about writing recipes for the book. Were they strictly recreations of dishes that people shared with him? Or were they more of a springboard to create versions that most people – in Southeast Asia at least – could make at home with ingredients from a local grocery store?

BK: Well, I obtained a lot of them through very, very casual conversation. Just talking to people where I didn’t really expect to get recipes. But these cooks often insisted that I take note of how they did it. So, with that amount of pride, I felt that I had a lot to answer for, simply because I was a strange Singaporean boy that’s collecting recipes. At the end of it, these recipes do belong to other people, and I wanted to make sure I took good care of them. I guess that, for me, there was a sense of accountability that I wanted to explain myself and I wanted to tell people why I made some changes.

BK: Also, the ingredients here are quite different. For example, even the vinegar you get in the Philippines is so different. You’ve got nipa palm vinegar. In Ilocos, you got the beautiful mahogany colored vinegar from the sugarcane. We don’t have that here. If you go to Lucky Plaza, which is where most people get their Philippine ingredients, you’ll be met with the most basic, which is sugarcane vinegar, just a very clear solution, very clean solution. It’s very good to use but it lacks a lot of nuance that you get from a vinegar you probably would get in the Philippines in a market. You can even pick your bagoong and your fish sauce. So, while people have the luxury of saying, “I want this kind of vinegar for my adobo. I don’t want to use the run-off-the-mill sugarcane vinegar. I want to use something from beneath the palm.” To be able to make that choice is a luxury!

NA: Oh I know Bryan, pretty much everyone outside the Philippines has the same problem! It’s one of the things we totally miss about home.

17:49 How much rests on the quality of ingredients

BK: When you look at a cookbook on Philippine food, it doesn’t take a lot to realize that a lot of the dishes are very, very simple. I mean Philippine cooking on the whole is extremely simple. Very, very few things are complicated and for me, going to the market and seeing the variety, of course vinegar is just one of them. Bagoong, patis, rice. The variety of rice you have over there, and full of fresh produce, vegetables, is amazing! Amazing stuff. For me everything just clicked. You realize how the quality of these dishes, how much of that rests on the quality of the ingredients.

NA: This is one of the great things about Bryan, and one of the best parts of talking with him. Remembering that he is – as he calls himself – this strange Singaporean boy - as much as I cannot wait to explore Singapore’s hawker stalls, and much as many Filipinos would jump at the opportunity to visit, it’s worth remembering that for all the culinary delights of Singapore, we have so much to be proud of in the Philippines, for the rich history and variety of our foodways. As he describes, there’s so much to see and eat and sample here! Singapore may have flourished with so many food traditions from Southeast Asia mingling in the heat of their woks – contributing to an exquisite, greatly, greatly delicious cuisine that is uniquely Singaporean – but in the Philippines, with the variations in our topography and landscape – these dense, mountainous areas jutting out of endless fields; the seas with species of fish too many to count – we got a lot to be proud of.

NA: This is why I feel, kind of like a bit of a broken record saying that to TRULY appreciate Filipino food – stripped of any pretension or fusion or adaptiveness – to understand why our palates have developed in such a way, and evolved to accommodate all these shortcuts that many contemporary cooks turn to, you’ve got to go back to the source and taste what those different types of vinegar, those fresh vegetables from the market, and loads of live seafood taste like. I know, it can be a lot to plan a trip to the Philippines, but I assure you that for someone who is anywhere near interested in those nuances and the real flavors of Philippine cuisine? It’s totally worth it!

20:29 “No wonder people feel so strongly!”

BK: And so when you see things in such variety, for me it makes a lot of sense. How people can be so bubblingly enthusiastic about it, or how they could feel so strongly about it. Because – this is what I could perceive anyway – a lot about Philippine cuisine, even on the palate, it isn’t extraordinarily complicated. It’s not like Thai where you necessarily have sweet, sour, salty, at those volumes, because the thing about Thai food – glorious as it is – it’s also quite loud in that sense. I mean, some of it in the flavor profile, it’s quite loud. You have a taste of a papaya salad and you know what’s there, you know the sweet is there, everything hits you.

BK: In the Philippines, if we’re talking about a lot of soups, a lot of it comes down to nuance, and this delicateness is in quite a lot of the food. So something like vinegar, I couldn’t begin to understand why just simply changing the vinegar will result in a very different dish. I might not have understood it before, just reading a recipe book, or why changing an ingredient, just one or two ingredients in a dish, would produce something that deserves a different name. Just seeing how much variety there is over there. It really made me really quite appreciative of it. For me, it simply made more sense after seeing everything like that.

22:16 On food terminology

NA: On the subject of food terminology...

BK: The real bug me was having to explain it to people. I mean even something like suman, for example. God the sleepless nights, because we used to make a lot of nonya kueh at home, “kueh” being local rice cakes, if you like, or snacks. We would always have an excess of glutinous rice.

NA: And Bryan shares that their housekeeper – who was Filipina – would always find a use for this glutinous rice.

BK: I do know that this is not the traditional way of doing it, but what she would do is that she sort of resuscitates this cold rice in a bit of gata or in some coconut milk or coconut cream, and she would swaddle them up in a banana leaf, these tapering locks, and then she would steam them. That was my first encounter with suman. She called them suman anyway, I think most people would.

BK: Even something like that, how do you explain to people how suman is... on one hand, it’s the name of something very specific and something very, very generic, because suman is simply a rice cake. And to also explain to people that, “Well you know, in some ways the bibingka can also be called a similar rice cake.” So, for example, suman in the Visayas is budbud. If you spoke to any Visayan, they would do well to tell you that, “No! You don’t call it suman here!” and the difference is that budbud has got ginger inside, and maybe a bit of pandan. I find that quite fascinating, only because of where I come from in Singapore and of course, in Malaysia, how most times you won’t even bother with it with a different name. Of course people probably will say it’s a language difference, blah blah blah, and I get all of that. I completely get it. But for me it’s fascinating because I have to explain why this particular item wants a completely new name, and it’s just one small ingredient change.

NA: I love this and find it really interesting as well. Honestly, people can be FIERCE when it comes to what regional foods are named. And you don’t even have to wait until visiting the Philippines to see that. All you gotta do is lurk around a couple of Facebook groups, I’ll have some links in the show notes, about regional Philippine cuisine and you’ll see people argue – or at the very least – have some really animated discussions about what certain foods, ingredients or snacks from their respective hometowns are called. Like upwards of 83 comments worth.

24:58 Feedback from readers

BK: One thing a lot of people told me was, “Oh I did not know that it’s something in this region,” that there’s some delicacy in another town, in another region, on a different island, that’s quite similar to something they have at home. I mean, I don’t really see myself as an authority. I see myself as someone who’s learning as he goes along. Something else is that, people often say, “I did not know that there’s so much to explore, there’s so much to eat.” For people to say that after reading the book that’s written by a foreigner, I find it quite moving and I’m grateful.

NA: Well, we’re pretty thankful too that Filipino food has made such an impression and become such a significant part of Bryan’s life. Even if many of us never actually get to go to the towns he’s visited, or ask the empanada makers of Ilocos what exactly goes into that beyond-tasty sausage and papaya filling in the famous Vigan empanadas, reading about it gets my taste buds going, and piques my interest to find out more about those delicious foods that I can attempt to make at home. With the recipes, photographs and kitchen notes in Bryan’s book and many others, this definitely counts toward my own journey of Exploring Filipino Kitchens.

WRAP-UP

Many thanks to Bryan Koh for recording this interview with me last year, and if you find yourself in Singapore, head over to “Chalk Farm,” Bryan’s cake shop on Orchard Road. I’ve been drooling over this pandan and adzuki bean cake they make and wish I could have one shipped over to me!

Also coming up this year is Bryan’s third book called “Bekwoh: Stories and Recipes from Peninsula Malaysia’s East Coast.” That’s coming up in August and I can’t wait to get my copy.

Our theme music is by David Szesztay, segment music is by Eric and Magill and Squire Tuck, which you’ll find on fma.org.Visit exploringfilipinokitchens.com for past episodes, and if you’re listening to this through a podcast app, please go ahead and click that subscribe button, so we can continue Exploring Filipino Kitchens together!

Maraming salamat, and thank you for listening.

This is a transcript of “Episode 10: Adventures In Philippine Cookery With Bryan Koh” (Click the episode link for the audio!)

On Travel With Purpose To Manila, A Farm And Ancestral Lands - Episode Transcript

Find the transcript to my episode "On Travel With Purpose To Manila, A Farm And Ancestral Lands" below.

INTRO

Welcome to Exploring Filipino Kitchens. I’m your host, Nastasha Alli.

This episode, we’re going off the usual path - actually, quite a ways off from my studio in Toronto, back to where it all begins - the Philippines.

We can’t really explore Filipino kitchens, without going to the motherland, right?

So today, no interviews - just some raw thoughts from my trip, instead - and you’ll hear horns rise above the traffic of Manila, tricycles speeding by, the calm of the countryside and horses on the cobbled streets of Vigan, Ilocos Sur.

Let’s go!

ON TRAVEL WITH PURPOSE

Hello everyone! It is now Friday. I’ve been in Manila for about a week now. I landed on Sunday morning and, to be honest, everything is a bit of a whirlwind. It’s such a barrage on the senses to be back here amidst the traffic and noise you could probably hear just outside the window. I’m staying in Makati City which is the central business district of Manila.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been meeting with people for interviews for the podcast and to reconnect with some friends I’m so glad to have been able to meet.

01:54 A walk through the old walled city

The city can swallow you up, and that’s the case for any big city, whether you grew up in it or moved there for school or for work. Yesterday, I went on a tour of Intramuros, which is the old walled city of Manila. I took a tour of Intramuros that’s run by a friend of mine, and it was really interesting because we talked about Philippine history in a completely different context than what we were taught in schools, from grade school all the way up to high school, and even college.

There’s such a big gap in all of this. How food, culture and traditions to be specific, is communicated to young people. I really hope that at some point, the educational curriculum in high schools and all the way through college, and especially if you go to a culinary institution like I did... it would just make such a big difference to have that type of content where you talk about the history of Philippine cuisines, providing context around the culture of how and why our food traditions have developed in this particular way. It’s something that just doesn’t exist right now.

It’s not to say the people aren’t doing something about it. They definitely are. And the big part of the reason I’m here is because I wanna talk to these people, and try in my little way, to bring these stories to life a bit more. To show people all over the world, whether you’re local or somebody who’s just visiting the Philippines - one of the many backpackers who are traveling through this area I’m in right now - that the Philippines has such a unique food culture and heritage and traditions that are kind of buried under the surface, they’re hidden. They’re there but they definitely need a bit of explanation. Telling those stories through a local’s perspective is necessary, because foreign food writers coming into the city and talking about the latest Filipino heritage restaurant that’s opened is important, but it doesn’t paint the right picture. Filipino people have such a deep story to tell. Their experiences are what you can’t really replicate, and telling those stories in our voices, I think, is something that’s really lacking.

05:12 Why “the middles” matter

How it affects me is that, growing up here I always think about why would I spend several thousand pesos on a meal, when I could go down the road and not have the same ambiance or the same quality of food, but... [it’s] still sinigang, still adobo, still lumpia, all that stuff that you want in a Filipino restaurant.

I really, really wanna be able to find a way to bridge that gap between what people see, what people understand of Philippine cuisine and culture because that story of “the middles,” they need to be told.

But what exactly do I mean by “the middles?” Well, from a food perspective - I mean, stories about what the hundred thousand people who work at night in call centers around the country, eat for “lunch” at four in the morning. Or the history of street food staples like fish balls, kikiam (made with tofu skins), “adidas” and “PAL” that are honestly my favorite examples of odd bits and ends transformed into truly Filipino foods by their taste, preparation, affordability and name. Who else shouts, “Adidas please!” when they want some grilled chicken feet?

Probably not the handful of tycoons who basically run the Philippines, but people like those call center workers, who spend hours in traffic on the way home during the morning rush.

Those are people who I grew up with. Many of my friends worked and have built their careers and their adult lives around that industry. It’s a big driver of the Philippine economy now to be sure. Walking around the city, driving through the major highways, I see these large condo towers that are very similar to the way the condo boom in Toronto is happening and in many centers around the world, where you have people who were coming in from the provinces...and finding that prosperity and financial stability they didn’t have. That means a lot to them.

This is why the story of the middles matter. Because we now have the technology and the ability to reach so many people with stories of the food the sustains us – like, a fried chicken rice meal from the corner store, and the food that we celebrate with, like the sizzling sisig at spots like Manam or Sarsa in Manila that your Instagram-loving friend just has to have for their birthday.

This stuff is popular for a reason. It’s not just because we love fatty, salty foods. But, because it’s within reach and embedded in everyday Filipino’s definition of “comfort food,” and it’s been that way for decades, which is not a long time, actually. Coming from mass marketing that’s pushed American deep fried chicken into the cores of our hearts, and of economic conditions that turned chopped up pig’s cheeks, ears and skin, from leftovers into a restaurant specialty. That’s Filipino ingenuity.

But it’s not all rosy. If you look at things a little deeper - like I tend to do - you’ll notice class distinctions arise even when we talk about food. Like, for example, how certain kinds of food are so closely associated with the people who tend to make and eat them.

While I was in Manila, I stayed at this little bed and breakfast, a restored heritage house with a really cozy, kind of Spanish-era feel. The front desk got my request for a room with a balcony, adding that the neighbor next door made steamed rice cakes, called puto, every morning. “It might get a little loud,” she said, “when he starts grinding the rice.”

And then she goes, “Ma’am, you know they do that at four in the morning. We asked them if they could be quiet, but they said that they also have their business to run.” My first instinct was, I don’t want these people to have to change what they’re doing. That’s their way of life, that’s their living! That disparity is jarring sometimes.

It took me awhile to understand why this particular thing stuck with me. On a base level, it’s because I felt uneasy that as a guest at this boutique hotel - I’m awarded this kind of superiority, some kind of outward power over the puto maker. The guy who wakes up at three a.m. every morning to grind rice, make batches of batter, steam the cakes, wrap them in banana leaves, load them onto his cart, and then actually walk around the neighborhood for several hours in the hot sun hawking the rice cakes he’s made. That takes so much work, and an artisanship on the maker’s behalf. This guy doesn’t measure, and somehow the rice cakes turn out consistently fluffy even when the weather’s crazy humid and there’s a torrential downpour.

In place of apologies that a maker of native delicacies may possibly wake guests with the sound of their work, I hope that someday the front desk says something like, “By the way, you’re in the best part of town. There’s a native rice cake maker right next door, and if you want freshly steamed rice cakes with some butter or salted eggs for breakfast, all you have to do is ask.”

11:38 At the Gawad Kalinga Enchanted Farm

Next, we’re off to the farm, because I love going to farms.

I’m at the Gawad Kalinga Enchanted Farm. It is someplace in Angat, Bulacan which is about two hours or so outside Manila, give or take. This place is amazing. It’s got a working farm and there’s a couple of other buildings down the road where a lot of the students who are part of a program here called SEED, which is the School for Experiential [and Entrepreneurial] Development. They have been so overwhelmingly amazing, and I can’t even begin to describe how floored I am by a lot of these kids and what they’re doing.

12:35 Growing SEED (The School for Experiential and Entrepreneurial Development)

This is not a regular school. According to Gawad Kalinga - the non-profit that houses this school - it’s “an education based solution to rural development.” I highly encourage you to visit gk1world.com/seed for more information.

In short, it stands for “School for Experiential and Entrepreneurial Development.” It’s a two-year program developed by a range of innovators in the education, social enterprise and agriculture industries. The school is positioned as an alternative to community college. Basically, instead of taking generic courses, students apply for SEED and get housing, food, and an education for free, covered by a scholarship at the farm.

The program covers character and community development, business management, communications, financial literacy and courses on agriculture. While all of this seems pretty standard, the important thing to remember is who applies to be a SEED scholar. Those students are 18-20 year olds from some of the most poverty-stricken areas of the Philippines, from slums in big cities to parts of Mindanao where armed conflict is a part of everyday life.

The goal is to show these students how and why they are “world-class Filipinos,” an idea that Gawad Kalinga’s founder, Tony Meloto, stands proudly behind. To develop the countryside and uplift millions of farming families who live way below the poverty line, they say the focus needs to go back to farming sustainably and to growing crops that thrive in Philippine soil.

SEED follows a holistic approach to solving these kinds of issues. By providing young people from poor communities - the only ones who understand their problems best - what they need to succeed, they become more than a social entrepreneur or business owner. They become people who live with dignity and have an immense pride in their work. That was something I could see from the titas who served us meals and the people who manned the corner store. They become community builders who organize weekly volleyball matches and who, like a cog in the machine of empowering other people, think of themselves as more than just “a poor person.”

And so, back to the farm…

15:36 Why I love the countryside

The place where I’m sitting at right now is at the top level of a spot that faces this:

“I’m sitting in front of a tranquil rice field, with plots of land stretching as far as the eye can see, through the hills and into the horizon. It was late afternoon and the sun looked like a Sunkist orange, with carabaos and farmers dotting the field. I imagine, for a second, this is what it might have felt like for a plantation owner.”

Just to give you a better rundown of the people I’ve met here so far. I have been at the farm by taking a week-long tour with a company called MAD Travel, which stands for “Make A Difference” Travel. They are a social enterprise that also started at the farm. People who come here say that it’s life-changing and I understand and see why...because coming here throws you into the deep end of things.

But what exactly do I mean by that? Well, when you arrive at the farm, you start with a tour of the grounds. That includes the main assembly halls, the dorms, the cafeteria, the pool and basketball court, and further on something called “The Bamboo Palace” which I quickly fell in love with. Depending the kind of tour you get, you either spend an afternoon, several days or a full week with different entrepreneurs at the farm - preparing things like peanut brittle or carabao milk cheese, locally made iced teas, chocolate pastries or vegetables for community dinners.

You will meet so many different kinds of people at the farm. I get emotional thinking how, even in my short visit, I learned so much from the people I met. There was Christine - shout out! - our MAD travel guide and all around awesomest 18-year-old I know, well, after my sisters. She arranged our dinners, hung out with us and talked about her community at the farm, and had the prettiest pixie outfit hands down at the Halloween party - and yes, it was the best Halloween party I’ve been to in ages. There was tita Jenny and tito Jun, a bit of a power couple and host family for a number of French interns throughout the years. We saw beautiful pictures of their kids and the kids who’ve lived them, and on more than one occasion, was treated to jokes like this from tito Jun:

18:34 “What song does a centipede hate?”

“Are you familiar with the centipede? You know centipede?”

“Yes, yes.”

“What is the most hated song by that centipede or millipede? You want a clue?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a nursery rhyme, children’s song. Imagine the centipede singing, I have two hands, the left and the right, the left and the right, the left and the right…”

I legit cannot stop laughing every time I’ve listen to this clip. It’s just such a really good reflection of what our week was like there at the farm.

19:29 “Walang iwanan,” or no one is left behind

The two girls I’m living with here, both from the UK. They’re traveling throughout Southeast Asia and they booked the tour without much background about what Gawad Kalinga is, what the farm is about, and even I had a little bit of difficulty explaining to them at the beginning, know what’s to expect, because frankly I had no idea either. Everyone I’ve talk to so far from the dozens of French interns were here – there’s a lot of them – people who live in the community and the Gawad Kalinga communities, that very simple concept of “walang iwanan,” which in English means that ‘no one is left behind,’ is really the driving force to everything here. It allows people to approach problems and challenges and really different ways. Everyone who’ve we met, it just shows you on a really basic level how accommodating, warm-hearted, hospitable, and humbling it can be to live in the Philippines.

21:05 The stories that get to the heart of me

Many people go through tons of different challenges. This afternoon I was speaking with a student from that school I was talking about earlier. Many students have had started all these amazing businesses. Throughout the course of the week that I’ve been here, I’ve cried several times just listening to the passion and drive these people have. People who work in fancy startups in the big cities could learn more than a thing or two from them.

The person who I was talking with this afternoon developed a brand of flavored sweet potato chips and banana chips. She’s funny, she’s telling me that she dropped out of school for a couple of years due to a number of things going on at home. Really did not think that she would have the confidence at all to do much more than that.

I just have to stop here for a second, because there’s a reason I’m telling this story. This girl, who just so gamely agreed to sit down with me and tell me about this vegetable chip business they started - she later tells me, in Tagalog, that she was adopted and up until high school, didn’t really have any problems with the family who took her in. She did very well and got top honors in her class, and that allowed her to attend a private school on scholarship. But when her adoptive dad lost his job, things started to go south. Money became scarce to the point that – although she received another scholarship to go to college – the adoptive parents chose to send her sibling, their own child, to higher education. What you need to remember is that along with tuition, there are a lot of other costs that come out of pocket with attending college in the Philippines, like daily living expenses, books, supplies, money for transportation, etc. They couldn’t afford to give two kids that, so they chose one.

Depression set in, and in the two years she lived at home, she was abused by a relative.

Her story isn’t singular, as I learned many kids have similar reasons for coming here. I say that I’m floored by them, because beyond of all this – that sheer determination, that will to succeed and make a difference for themselves – it drives these students to do more with the help of others. Everything is done together here, and repeatedly, she tells me that without her family here at Gawad Kalinga, there’s no way her business and her life would have turned out the way it has. It’s a support group and for these young adults, it’s the strongest, strongest kind. People who have already faced insurmountable difficulties in their lives find a home and an environment for them to grow in.

She’s talking about putting all her products through prototyping, spending so much time on product development marketing, learning the financial end of things. She mentioned that they used to take tricycles just around town and now they are going to Manila and Makati, places in the city where big corporations and big companies are based. One of their co-founders has gone to France and Australia. I met her briefly the other day. She said that she used to be a street vendor and after two years of the program – through very hard work, perseverance, dedication – has managed to put up her business, speak on behalf of her fellow students, to go places in France and Australia that they’ve gone to. As I’ve spoken to people over time, you just see that, coming here, if you expect this beautiful orchard – with organic vegetables and farm-fresh meals everyday – it’s not necessarily the case, but that’s not the point.

The point is that you have to come with open mind and heart as you possibly can because that is what’s most rewarding. You get to meet people from so many different backgrounds. People who come here for very different reasons, but have found their purpose and place by immersing themselves in the communities. I think the biggest takeaway from this is that, if the students who come into that SEED program are faced with so many things that would make so many people just falter and fall...it’s never a barrier for them, and they don’t even think of it as a reason to not do things and not keep going. That determination to succeed is driven by the fact that they want to make a difference for their family, then for themselves, as a secondary thing. It’s always the family first.

The great thing about traveling is that, you get all these opportunities to be exposed to other people and ideas that hopefully provide enough food for thought for you to learn from. If the only thing that I can do for now is to share these stories with you, and if you’re willing to listen, I hope you are inspired to learn more about it and realize that the Philippines is so rich in products that are really good. I’ve had some carabao milk butter that’s bloody fantastic and is served in Amanpulo, in some of the top restaurants in Manila right now by one of the city’s top pastry chefs. I’ve also tasted ice cream made from carabao milk, flavoured with ube.

There’s so much untapped potential in the Philippines, in general, and I truly, truly believe that.

28:59 A journey to ancestral lands

Finally, we head to Zambales, a coastal province also within a few hours’ drive of Manila. I found out about this trip called Tribes and Treks online, and the idea behind the tour just seemed totally up my alley.

Going through the ancestral lands of the Yangil tribe was such an experience; it was just why I travel. We met an amazing group of people who were there for something called “Life Stories,” which is what MAD Travel organizes in coordination with ‘Where To Next’ – a online group of people who want to travel with purpose, who are curious about the Philippines. It’s a group of people in their 20s and 30s – young professionals – who wanted to participate in the kind tour that allowed to see things a little bit differently and share a little bit about their life story, any challenges they’re facing, what things are on their mind that mean something to them.

This whole process of learning about ancestral Philippine cultures, about indigenous tribes whose livelihoods are very close to the brink of disappearing, it just highlights the need for sustainable travel and supporting those types of communities. For the Yangil tribe, for example, their lands were nearly wiped off the map when Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991.

Lots of land was just covered in ash and sand. You have these pictures of churches where the only thing that’s left are tall belfries that are several stories off the ground. Trekking through that terrain where the sun is just punishingly hot, for the while you are walking though it...as a traveler from the city or even out of the country – you go, “who lives in these types of conditions?”

You trek through these rivers that just cut through the lands. You have the mountain ranges in your backdrop. You can see it if you look left or right, walking alongside carabaos and the chief of the tribe who has accompanied us from the drop-off point up to their village. The first thing we did when we got there was we planted seedlings. As they explained, much of this terrain really took a very long time to regenerate because, what once was fertile soil was just covered by sand and ash, and nothing grows there.

Just listening to their stories of how, after the first several years, life was very, very hard for them because it was a day-to-day struggle of surviving. What they were able to previously rely on – things as simple as root crops, fruit from trees – all gone. These ancestral lands are at the risk of losing their traditional food ways, their traditional ways of living. Younger people are more and more leaving their tribes and going off to the city.

One story that one of the elders shared was with regard to schooling. At the community they have a multi-purpose hall which serves as community center, a place where people gather to talk about any visitors who are coming to town, stuff that happens around. It also serves as the classroom for kids, basically up until first or second grade.

There’s about 30 kids there right now, and once you go past that, they basically have to make this 10-kilometer trek – the same trek we were on – up to the drop-off point where they would have to walk into town to attend school. Everybody does this. From when you’re eight or nine years old, in the second grade all the way up to high school if you make it there.

34:27 Planting black-eyed peas in a nursery in a valley

Going back to what we did, we planted some seedlings – black-eyed peas – called kadyos in the local dialect. We stuck them into little black bags where we had some potting soil. The goal is to just regenerate as much of it as possible. For some of the trees – mango trees, rattan trees – their eventual goal is to be able to plant these trees back into the slopes of the mountains, which, as beautiful as they were...you could totally see the contours of the mountain ranges, you realize they’re beautiful and you could see so much detail from them. But that’s because they’re completely empty of trees. It’s going to take many years and a lot of heroic effort on behalf of visitors and locals together, to begin that process of replanting. Being there just makes you realize how much of this is very much a big picture, but also very localized and concentrated.

35:49 The Yangil Tribe

After we planted the seedlings, we bathed in the river for a little while. By ‘bathe’, I mean, we just got in there with our trekking gear, little rocks everywhere in our clothing. And then we headed off into the village of the Yangil tribe. We were met by a small community of about 35-50 families. Lots of kids around with the biggest smiles on their faces. The elders of the tribe had prepared this beautiful feast for us with their version of tinola, a chicken soup with green papayas, chili leaves, ginger. And we had chicken adobo, which was very tasty, a salad with some locally grown tomatoes and onions – everything has to be locally grown because, again, really the only way to get into the village is through that trek and hauling stuff in, like actual groceries and whatnot, requires the use of a carabao and a cart.

They performed some traditional dances for us. We got to shoot bows and arrows. Just the openness of every person in that community that they shared with us, people in the city who were just coming in for an afternoon...to see a genuine appreciation from the kids who were there, is the kind of stuff that makes such an impression on you. It really does make for real travel with purpose. With MAD Travel, their mission is to promote sustainable social tourism, which means that, we go there to learn about traditional indigenous cultures and also to provide a form of income for the community where there previously was none.

37:46 The importance of a light switch

Just to give you a bit of the impact of this, one day before we got there, there was a group of guests who came with Globe Telecom, one of the two big mobile phone carriers in the Philippines. Someone from that team had visited or heard about the place and had a fundraiser to donate a solar panel to the community. The chief was proudly showing us that they now have electricity in their little town hall. Over time, people have donated books for kids, little sets of chairs and tables. Very simple stuff you need for a classroom.

And just that, bringing a solar panel to provide light and a charging station for their mobile phones, that in itself is a big thing for them because that’s their way of communicating with the outside world.

38:41 Tourism that gives back

In 2017, that is a very concrete example of the benefit that this type of income generation can sustain for communities because it’s the combination of being there and learning from other travelers that really, really gives me hope for the future of this type of tourism in the Philippines. Of tourism that gives back, bringing a livelihood into areas that have struggled through very long periods of time preserving the Aetas’ culture.

One way that made very much sense to me, as our guide from MAD Travel had put it, is that, in the past, with so much of the struggle of each person in the community put towards staying afloat, towards living, your focus gets shifted away from preserving the knowledge of what their ancestors have passed on to them through generations.

Another activity we did was just walking around the forest and having elders of the tribe point out different plants and how to use it. A lot of them only have native names. They’d pick something up, let us crush the leaves, and then they’d explain that “this is used if you have colds, if kids have a stomach ache, as a source of food, from different trees and root crops and plants.”

The important thing is that, we recognize at this point that this type of knowledge is something that has to be preserved. If we don’t provide communities a means of livelihood to take care of their basic necessities, they have no other choice but resort to instant noodle packets because that is what’s available to them, that’s what they can get from town. Doing that diminishes the knowledge and the pride that older folks in the community have, and it just doesn’t allow them to pass on that knowledge to younger people. Younger people then in turn, don’t see the value in preserving all this.

I think that’s a great effect of having visitors come into the community with a stated purpose. Not for us to bring in luxury facilities or whatnot...but to understand that all this is “for you” because, as much as we’re there to experience how people live there on a day-to-day basis, we go in with the knowledge that we want to do this to help preserve that heritage. It’s something that I would really like more people to experience, especially Filipinos who are living abroad or have not grown up in the Philippines.

If you travel any place with the mindset of just learning as much as you can from that area, I think you do walk away with so much more than that day’s experience.

WRAP-UP

Special thanks this episode to my friend Dustin of Manila for a Day Tours. Please check them out online at manilaforaday.com. I highly recommend his 3G or God, Gold and Glory tour, for an experience walking around the old city of Intramuros like no other.

Also my warmest thanks to the folks behind MAD Travel. You guys, you’ve got a place in my heart and I look forward to working with you on bringing more guests to experience what the Philippines has to offer! Visit madtravel.org for more information about upcoming trips and the amazing partners they work with, like the super chill Circle Hostel in Zambales where we stayed. Find them on Facebook and Instagram, where you can also follow Where to Next at wtn_wheretonext. You will love this feed.

Our theme music is by David Szestay, other music for this episode is by Eric and Magill, Komiku, JBlanked and Blue Dot Sessions. Visit fma.org to hear their music and more.

As always, you can find me online at exploringfilipinokitchens.com. We’ve got past episodes on this site and you can also find Exploring Filipino Kitchens on Facebook and Instagram. If you liked what you hear, I would really, really love it if you told a friend!

Maraming, maraming salamat, and thank you, for listening.

This is a transcript of “Episode 09: On Travel With Purpose To Manila, A Farm And Ancestral Lands” (Click the episode link for the audio!)

The Ancient Filipino Diet - Episode Transcript

Find the transcript of my interview with Dr. Ame Garong below.

INTRO

Welcome to Exploring Filipino Kitchens. I’m your host, Nastasha Alli.

I would like to start off this episode by saying that, there were a lots of times over the past couple months, where I’ve felt way in over my head. And that’s pretty common, right? I don’t always trust that I can figure stuff out, and when that happens, my confidence just tanks when things don’t go right.

But when they do, things can turn out really, really well. This summer I co-hosted a Filipino food tour in Toronto, where we visited three Filipino food spots in the city that were run by second-generation Filipino-Canadians. They’re really different from each other, and honestly, I loved getting to know this community!

It was fantastic getting to know these different business owners who were totally passionate about sharing Filipino food in ways they knew how to do best. The first place we visited was a fast-casual restaurant that used to be some place where you could buy groceries and send home a “Balikbayan Box.” The other was an artisan ice cream shop - you know, the kinds that sell those black ice cream cones - with lines out the door for creamy ube ice cream and polvoron pie. The third was a bar, and oh, I love bars! They make everything in-house, from noodles made with squid ink to longganisa sausages with this crazy good marbling, made with pasture-raised pigs just outside the city.

Talking to these really driven, super passionate people about the businesses that they’ve built their lives around made me realize a couple of things:

One, you really can’t take away this knack that Filipinos have for being hospitable people.

Another is that we really do want to cook this kind of food, the food we know best, for others because it is legitimately good and we want you to try it.

Third, we do what it takes to educate ourselves and our customers about the tastes and the food culture of the Philippines.

Those types of realizations, it’s pretty profound when you think about it - these guys are in their 20s and 30s, they’re people my age, and they’re doing what they can to bring that food culture forward.

All of this, in essence, drives the question that I want to answer this episode: Why do we need to know about the history of our foods, and going a little bit deeper into that, about the ancient Filipino diet?

That’s what we’re talking about this episode.

Thankfully, we’ve got the foremost authority on the subject as guest on our show today. Dr. Ame Garong, who’s a researcher of the Archeology Division at the National Museum of the Philippines, wrote a book in 2013 called “Ancient Filipino Diet.” It’s the first study of Filipino food in prehistory, before any colonizers or foreign influence arrived in the Philippines. It’s written to explore and understand the prehistoric diet of our ancestors.

Admittedly, the book itself is pretty technical, but its contents are outstanding. Today, we’re talking with Dr. Garong about her research and her experiences at the different places they visited, digging for clues to tell us what our ancestors ate. Also, kind of answering how much of this lines up with what we eat today as Filipinos both in the Philippines and outside the country.

I’ve been so excited to do this episode for some time now, so let’s get straight into it.

INTERVIEW

04:34 What it’s like to be a Philippine archeologist

NA: Dr. Ame Garong has worked at the National Museum of the Philippines for 21 years…

AG: So it’s quite a long time already that I’m working in the Archeology Division and eventually that became my career as an archaeologist. I’ve been doing lots of excavation, more on burials. My focus is more on zoological research that entails understanding food resources, subsistence of humans in general.

NA: She graduated with a zoology degree in one of the Philippines’ oldest universities, and…

AG: Originally, my intention is to be a doctor. However, I failed to achieve that ambition. Because of my frustration that I did not go to medical school, my father, who is a Methodist pastor, he suggested that why don’t I take a master course in anthropology. So I said, “why not?” Then my father said, “It’s about culture, it’s about humans, so you can know other people by studying them.” So I said, “Oh! That sounds interesting.”

05:55 How her career started

AG: And then along the way, I had a classmate who told me that the National Museum is in need of a zoologist. Since I had a zoology background, and I already had a year of anthropology courses, I decided to apply. However, at first I failed, because they only needed one, and they hired someone who had more experience.

So, again it’s another frustration. However, maybe I was destined to be an archaeologist. A month after, they called me back, informing me that there’s another position. They need a researcher, so I immediately did not think twice. I said, “Yes! I am available…”

NA: Even amongst the most accomplished people, frustration and failure can be pretty common. Despite being a subject that deals with a lot of ancient stuff, archeology in itself is a relatively new field in the Philippines.

AG: It’s like 20 years in the Philippines that we’ve had this. So, maybe not everybody knows that we are offering that course.

07:18 Early fieldwork

NA: I asked Dr. Garong about what some of her early experiences with field work was like. For example, her first excavation site was something called a “habitation site” where…

AG: What I first saw were old potteries, the remains of utensils…

NA: ...and then she got to work on a real burial site, in the province of Negros, where…

07:42 “An accident happened…”

AG: We were excavating this plaza, and they have these funerary goods, Chinese wares or ceramic goods together with the remains of the humans. Of course it’s my first time…

NA: ...and like many first times…

AG: An accident happened. There was this pebble on the ground…

NA: This is like on ground-level ground. So, technically above the actual pit where Dr. Garong and her team was busy cleaning up their latest find.

AG: ...and then there was a movement from the surface. That pebble fell on the skull of the individual and caused the skull to be broken.

NA: Oh no! I would have cried on the spot if that happened to me!

AG: My senior was shocked and I was scolded. But actually, it’s an accident. I was not really aware that there was a pebble there and something just made the movement. I don’t know because I was really engrossed in exposing the skulls, the bones. So I really felt bad after that. It was on my hand, it was under my responsibility. But that’s another lesson learned. From then on, I was so careful and always checking my square if there is something like that. I should remove it before I go down. After that, I’m a bit okay.

09:32 How do we find out what our ancestors ate?

NA: So, if we wanted to find out what our ancestors actually ate as a part of their paleo diet, where would we start? If you were someone like Dr. Garong…

AG: Since I am doing archeology, it’s far beyond the history. So, I’m focusing on diet. We use the paleo-diet analysis. NA: And far beyond the concept of a food trend even existing, this paleo diet was the real deal. That means early humans ate these foods because it’s what they knew how to prepare and consume.

AG: One of the best way to know the paleo diet of our ancestors is by using stable isotope analysis.

NA: But what exactly is stable isotope analysis? That’s pretty technical, I know. And, how does it help us identify what prehistoric Filipinos actually ate? In Dr. Garong’s book, she explains that for stuff that’s organic - think of flesh and blood and anything that goes into a green bin - the ratio of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in that organic matter tends to be stable enough, so that even thousands of years later, we can apply modern technology and scientific techniques to find out where the protein in that properly preserved sample of bones usually comes from.

AG: That’s the best way if you wanted absolute information on diet.

NA: I am totally getting flashbacks of playing “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” and thinking about how awesome it would be, now, to join Dr. Garong on one of these digs.

11:20 What exactly was in their paleo diet?

NA: So, what exactly were some of those foods that ancient Filipinos ate? According to Dr. Garong, she says that, “Food sources in the Philippines, especially plants, haven’t differed much then as now.” She adds that, “Plants collected for this study served as staple food since prehistoric time.”

What that means is that, it includes indigenous varieties of sugarcane, rice and millet. Meaning, ancient Filipinos knew how to grow these crops, and if you momentarily blank on what the Banaue rice terraces are – that’s pretty close to one of the sites Dr. Garong worked in – I suggest you look this up right away.

At some “newer” burial sites, they found corn that came with the Spanish galleons - a much later part of our ancestors’ diet. There were also root crops that included native varieties of taro and yams, and lots of old world bananas. Sago palm was consumed in some regions.

There were gastropods, bivalves - snails, coconut crabs, oysters – shellfish of all kinds. Prehistoric Filipinos, like many people across the world who lived in coastal areas, knew that seaweed was a delicious and really nutritious source of food. There were fish of every size, shape and color. Early ancestors of things like catfish, tilapia, mudfish, dolphin fish and flying fish that you see in some Philippine markets today. Maybe the flying fish is a bit uncommon but in rural areas they might still be around.

Across the archipelago, and especially in mountainous areas as we expected, our ancestors hunted and killed a lot of wild game, including carabao, deer and wild boar. They trapped smaller creatures like bats, civet cats, low-flying birds and other kinds of local fowl like chickens. When they learned how to domesticate animals, a lot of them learned how to herd goats and keep pigs to add to the community’s food supply. Remember, in prehistoric times, barangays, or these communities with a leader usually called the datu, were common ways the communities in the Philippines arranged themselves.

13:53 Stuff they’ve found in archaeological sites

NA: So I asked Dr. Garong if she could give us a few examples of what they found in different areas of the Philippines.

AG: In archeology, once you have decided, you will have an idea of the food resources. If you have some animals that you recovered from your excavation, and then you identify it as a bovine or pig or goat, that will give you an idea. That’s a clue of the possible food sources of those individuals. But then, it’s just a clue…

NA: Which means that a scientifically-backed isotope analysis basically trumps what we simply used to presume, were the things people ate, because we found some gnawed-out bones buried with the ancients.

AG: What I did, I used the protein to get their sources of nutrients. I extracted the collagen from the bones. I took samples from many individuals. And then, in Japan where I finished my grading, they have a laboratory where you can do everything that you need for a stable isotope analysis. So, you have to extract the collagen from the bones of those individuals and once you get the values, I need also to establish the food resources from those municipalities or areas that I use.

15:32 Batanes and ancient fish

NA: Let’s go on a trip to the Philippines. Some of the sites we visited are: Batanes, Lal-Lo in the Cagayan Valley, Benguet Province, Sta. Ana in Manila, the city capital of Cebu province, and a couple of other places.

AG: One of them is Batanes. Both the National Museum and U.P. Anthropology have excavated in that area. So that means I can get more than five individuals. I also went to Batanes to get samples of their staple food. I can also use that to gauge the value that I can get from my analysis. I went to the fishing village. They have this fish that they said they’ve used as a staple food for a long time. I interviewed elders to ask what they remember as their old food.

NA: This particular fish from Batanes is known as the arayu. It’s a type of dolphin fish that’s line-caught and really a lifeline for many, many generations of local Ivatans. This fish, which is often slung two or three at a time – they’re huge, across fishermen’s backs when they haul them in from the sea – are split down the middle, scored into equal portions, then salted and dried for a week in what can only be called “unpredictable” Batanes weather. Remember, Batanes is at the very tip of the Philippines.

NA: In Batanes these fish are either hung in a dedicated smokehouse that’s made of bamboo and palm trees just outside the kitchen in people’s backyards, or over the hearth in the kitchen, slowly smoked as they go about with their daily cooking, to last for the rest of the year. What’s amazing is, how these local fishermen, called mataw, have perfected this preparation for arayu fish over centuries. It’s such a testament to the artisanship that’s needed to preserve this kind of fish, and it just lasted through time for the very same reasons that their ancestors had this fish for a staple food.

18:07 A giant heap of shell trash in Cagayan Valley

NA: In Lal-Lo, Cagayan Valley…

AG: Going down from Batanes, I worked in Lal-Lo, Cagayan Valley for 10 years from ’95 to 2005. Lal-Lo is very famous for its shell midden. It’s made of freshwater shells. The locals they call it kabibe. We found some burial sites in the shell midden…

NA: …and this shell midden, as Dr. Garong describes it, is basically a large trash heap of discarded shells from sea creatures. They were thrown into this huge pile by generations of prehistoric Filipinos in the Cagayan Valley. Over time, these prehistoric garbage dumps basically also became burial sites. The dead were laid to rest above this layer of shells, and then finally much later on, they were also buried under layers of fine, silty clay that flowed down the river from the mountain ranges up north.

AG: You can see how our ancestors relied on this Cagayan river by gathering and collecting the shells as their food - for the meat - and they just threw it in the riverbank, and it piled up.

NA: And here, Dr. Garong says, some of these shell deposits can get up to 10 feet deep. While some other sites are from the 16th century, and some have been dated to come from as far back as the neolithic period – that’s when people learned how to use metal tools like shovels and axes to domesticate crops and herd animals – this neolithic period in our global history is also widely considered the beginning of farming.

AG: So, that’s the shell midden along the Cagayan river. That is really very interesting.

NA: I’ll say! It’s easy to forget a lot of the history that literally lies under our feet.

One question that stumped Dr. Garong and her Japanese colleagues, though, has to do with what they found after examining those human bones that were at the top of this shell pile. Remember, there’s the 10-foot layer of discarded shells, and then above that were human bones from ancient grave sites. Those human bones must’ve had traces, in somewhat large quantities, of all the shellfish they ate, right? But...

AG: We found out that those who got the shells, they did not eat the shells. Instead, they make the salted kabibe - salted meat - and then it’s like preserved food. Then, they will sell it.

NA: So, all that work that our ancestors did to harvest the shells and extract the meat, turns out that wasn’t even for their own consumption. Instead, it was to make preserved oyster meat, that may have been traded with inland communities or early seafarers that traveled along the Philippine peninsula, possibly going all the way to China, possibly even in encouraging the development of oyster sauce. Mind blown!

21:29 “Tinapa” mummies in Benguet

NA: In Benguet province…

AG: They have this ritual that will last for a year. It’s removing all the muscles, the fat of the individual, like tinapa.

NA: Tinapa is a Tagalog term for smoked fish. Traditionally it’s made with scad or milkfish. It’s salted or brined, hung out to dry and finally, smoked. Tinapa taste intensely of the sea, and I kind of love them ’cos they look like little sun gods basking in their golden brown glow, especially when they’re all laid out in these neat circles on a woven tray called bilao.

AG: All you can see is the skin. It’s only in Cagayan where we can find the practice.

NA: So these mummies in Benguet province, the ones that are found in wooden boxes, have been dried and preserved in a process similar to smoked fish. I wonder if these practices are connected.

In Manila…

AG: If we go to Manila, we have this Sta. Ana site. It’s close to the Pasig river, actually, and based from my studies they utilized the Pasig river for their food.

22:50 Why Cebuanos love corn

NA: In Cebu...

AG: If you go to Visayas area, we have the Bolho-on.

NA: That’s in the province of Cebu. And here’s an interesting thing. If you ask native Cebuanos about some of their favorite foods, no doubt a large chunk of them will swear by corn. But have you ever wondered why is that so?

AG: They cannot grow rice. That’s why they like mais or corn, and millet.

NA: According to what Dr. Garong’s research uncovered, despite being so close to water, most of the human bones they found were actually not composed of sea creatures, but instead largely of plants that are called “C4 plants.” In the book she identifies these as rice, corn and millet. So what we can surmise is that in pre-colonial times, dating back to the same metal age of those shells up in the Cagayan valley, indigenous people in Cebu grew millet. Over time though, rice became a staple crop in other regions of the Philippines and never really took hold in Cebu because the soil was mostly made of limestone, and rice simply don’t grow well on limestone soil.

Later on, when the Spanish brought corn to the Philippines, that’s when locals realized that corn loved this kind of soil and growing environment. So, mais thrived and never left the Cebuanos’ diet.

Next, I wanted to know: what were some challenges that Dr. Garong and her team came across?

24:51 Challenge #1: Time and thieves

AG: If it’s already past 5:00 pm, we need to stop our digging, our excavation. Before you remove and recover all the materials, including the bones, you have to properly expose it. Our scientific illustrator needs to draw the whole structure or the whole skeleton, including the artifact, together with the human remains.

NA: So, as Dr. Garong tells us about her early digs, they’d go about their work and, at the end of the day, cover up the site they’d started digging, for the night.

AG: Actually we’re not really that cautious because we thought that the local people, who used to watch us during the day...would protect that. We’re doing archeology and we’re doing lectures in the schools.

NA: But, then…

AG: The next day when we returned, somebody did the excavation and they removed the ceramics. So, from then on I started to gauge, to have the sense of time. We really need to estimate whether we can still finish or not.

NA: So basically, as soon as they see hints of a new layer of bones - if it’s close to 4 or 5 pm, at the end of their day – they realized that it was safer to leave the site undisturbed for the night. Because once you start working on it, you can’t really go back. You gotta keep those bones and artifacts away from extreme exposure to harsh winds or humidity. Then, the illustrators and photographers they have on the team have to document where everything is in relation to the skeletons and other markers that they’ve found. So, you have to actually do the work of carefully excavating these items that are hundreds of years old.

AG: So, it’s better if you have the whole day, the whole time to do it. Then at five o’clock you have this peace of mind that you don’t worry that other people might be doing “archeology” at night...whoever has this negative feeling about archeology. So it happens, always.

NA: I could say it breaks my heart to hear that, but in reality, I prefer being optimistic. The core of the problem is that locals see this group of scientists digging about their land. Maybe they don’t fully understand what people find so interesting in a pile of bones. But what they do know is that sometimes, these digs unearth pottery, and they know how to make money from that, in some way.

28:11 Challenge #2: On rituals and religion

AG: When it comes to burial, it’s very sensitive. You need to be an anthropologist. You need to observe if they have some rituals that they perform for burying their loved ones.

Even though I am a Christian, I am a Methodist, in my faith - we pray. In other communities, in other ethnic groups, they have their own ways di ba (don’t they) of remembering the dead.

NA: So in every community that they visit for a dig…

AG: I ask somebody to pray, like a shaman. I will ask if someone can lead us, so in that way, we are making ourselves visible to the community, in a way trying to adopt in their practices.

NA: They provide offerings of food, sometimes cigarettes and liquor…

AG: And after that, once we do the excavation, I always invite people to visit us.

NA: They found it’s a way of educating people, and…

AG: Telling them that we’re trying to recover it carefully, not to destroy it, because we need to study them. And after, they will be brought to the museum for proper storage. Prior to that, we will try to study them first and hear if they have other things to tell us beyond the historical aspect. Nobody can tell us unless we try to dig it. So, that’s the only way we will know how our ancestors lived during those times.

NA: To many of us, that probably sounds a little archaic, but it’s a reality that researchers like Dr. Garong face, working in remote and deeply rural communities in the Philippines.

And this leads into…

30:33 Challenge #3: A lack of knowledge and involvement

AG: The community, they’re always there in their community. But the National Museum only goes there for a month. After that we will go back to our office. But it’s the community who will protect whatever heritage we can tell them that they have.

NA: I just want to add here that “telling locals of the heritage they have” in this context, means explaining how and why archeology is important, why it matters. For Dr. Garong and her team, who work with a respect for local communities front and center, it’s not about “stamping out” beliefs or even falsifying an ideology that’s been in place for hundreds of years.

When outsiders come in to make changes or propose a new way of doing things, naturally they’re met with resistance, and that’s common anyplace in the world. The study of anthropology in itself, deals so much with this really complex way that humans behave.

But what’s important is getting locals on board with that basic need to keep these kinds of sites undisturbed. This kind of involvement…

AG: We’re protecting the cultural aspect. It’s really important also. So they should know and they should also be informed that they should not ruin it or do something bad. Instead, they have to really protect it, kasi (because) it’s part of our heritage, and that’s the only way we will know our past.

NA: And with this approach, Dr. Garong hopes that…

AG: The community will understand and be familiar with what we are doing. They can also report to us if they’ve seen those materials already, and we can check and we can explore. So, it will also add information for the National Museum.

NA: …and by extension, the body of knowledge in Philippine archeology as a whole.

32:56 What’s next?

NA: “So, what’s next?” I asked Dr. Garong.

AG: Actually, Nastasha, it’s my dream to continue the isotopic analysis and to reveal more of the resources.

NA: In addition to building a body of research on ancient Filipinos and how they lived, this stable isotopic analysis…

AG: It can also reveal environmental situations or conditions.

NA: …in other words, it gives us information about what the country’s climate and geography used to be like. And combined with modern day research, this helps scientists better understand how to tackle the big questions that we face today, like how climate change affects farming, fishing, and everyday life in the Philippines.

AG: Hopefully I can still continue doing this in the future. There are still other sites that can be explored with this kind of research. At the moment, I’m still working with other burial sites in Negros and still working, with understanding the funerary practice in the Philippines during prehistoric times.

There’s still a lot to study about the practices of burying our loved ones and other analysis that can be done, like ancient DNA, that’s also one of my dreams.

NA: And working on ancient DNA, I just discovered, is an actual thing.

WRAP-UP

My warmest thanks to Dr. Ame Garong for speaking with us for this interview and answering all the questions I had about the Ancient Filipino Diet. I hope you learned as much as I did in the process of researching for this episode.

Music for this episode is by David Szestay, that’s his music you hear in the opening and closing credits of the show, “Gillicuddy” and “Blue Dot Sessions.” Visit fma.org to hear from these artists and more.

My special thanks to Rajiv at “The Kitchen Bookstore” for connecting me with Dr. Garong. If you’d like to get a copy of “Ancient Filipino Diet,” visit www.thekitchenbookstore.com and head over to their Filipiniana section to order. They’ve got some amazing titles.

Finally, if you’ve come this far, I do wanna ask you a favor. I would really, really appreciate a short review on iTunes. That helps me reach more listeners and in turn, gets more people get to hear about these awesome stories of food in and from the Philippines.

As always visit exploringfilipinokitchens.com or find “Exploring Filipino Kitchens” on Facebook for updates.

See you next month at maraming salamat - thank you, for listening.

This is a transcript of "Episode 08: The Ancient Filipino Diet With Dr. Ame Garong" (Click the episode link for the audio!)

On Pinoy Heritage - Episode Transcript

Find the transcript of my interview with Francis Ang below.

INTRO

Welcome to Exploring Filipino Kitchens. I’m your host, Nastasha Alli.

Today we’re talking with Francis Ang about Pinoy Heritage, touching on what it means for him, and how his experiences led to the Pinoy Heritage pop-up dinners that he organizes with his wife, Diane.

I’ve got to confess, I’ve been following Francis online for awhile – mostly on Instagram – and I love how he plates his renditions of classic Filipino dishes. The colors, the textures, the brightness, somehow it evokes this sense of movement on a plate, and it’s so interesting to see homey Filipino dishes like adobo or kilawin plated in such a way. But it never feels out of touch – at least for me – and I’m pretty particular about that kind of stuff! What I mean by that is, it’s not strictly fine dining food, but it totally merits – in my mind – like a full spread in one of those glossy food magazines I subscribe to.

The plates that are served to people during these Pinoy heritage pop-up dinners are beautiful to me in representing Philippine cuisine, because I get the sense that Francis puts a solid understanding or getting a solid understanding of the cuisine first. After chatting with him, I realized that the knowledge gap I’ve been trying to identify and address these last couple years – specifically about Filipino food – is an actual problem that exists, and it’s not just me with my crazy book collection. Simply put, there’s a lack of accessible resources on Filipino food for those who are interested it. Whether you’re in the Philippines or some place else across the globe, a lot of younger Filipino chefs – I’m hearing – are coming across this issue and hopefully this kind of knowledge gap is something we can address soon.

Anyway, today we’re going to hang with Francis Ang, to talk about how the Pinoy Heritage dinner series started, where he finds inspiration for his take on Philippine classics – very Bay Area inflected – and about introducing Philippine food traditions and recipes to diners who aren’t really sure what to expect when they go to a “Filipino pop-up dinner” – this very newfound way of sharing some time and crowd-tested food traditions from the motherland.

Here’s Francis.

INTERVIEW

FA: Hey, my name’s Francis. Hello everybody! We run Pinoy Heritage, as Nastasha mentioned. It’s me and my wife, and Danica, our other partner.

NA: Could you tell us a little bit about where you grew up? Maybe some of your early cooking experiences and how that led to what you’re doing right now.

03:20 Training at culinary school and in San Francisco’s best kitchens

FA: Yeah. I grew up in Manila. Never knew really how to cook, honestly, until I was 19, until I went to culinary school in city college. Growing up, I’m Filipino-Chinese. So I grew up with diverse food – Filipino food, Chinese food; going to Chinatown, and then until I came here, I learned how to cook. So I went to city college…

NA: That’s in San Francisco…

FA: …and my first class was Pastry. That’s when I appreciated pastry a lot more because it was a creative outlet. Growing up I never knew how to sing, dance, do anything, like paint or draw. There’s just zero talent. So I went to city college and I appreciated pastry, and then I focused a lot more on pastry. I worked in the Crowne Plaza Hotel, mostly on the savory dishes, and then I worked at the bakery, and then eventually left, worked at Fifth Floor as a savory cook.

FA: I was trained first, at Gary Danko, which does a lot of classic French dishes, pastries, and whatnot. Then I went to Fifth Floor with David Bazirgan. He’s very spice-heavy. He’s American-Armenian. I learned a lot about spices, and then we get this amazing wall full of different spices. I cook for Taj Campton for pastries right now; it’s California-Indian. Again, more spices.

04:58 A life-changing visit to the Philippines

FA: From there, in 2013, I went on vacation with my wife to the Philippines. It was during that time we were in Samar when typhoon Yolanda, or Haiyan, happened. We were there and we got stuck an extra week off the grid. It was pretty crazy. We didn’t know how extreme the typhoon was. I guess nobody knew. Towns were displaced, just wiped off the map, families were disappearing. It was chaos.

FA: After the typhoon we walked around different towns, neighboring towns. It was devastating. It was… I don’t know. There’s no words for it. So we went to the market. We tried to buy whatever we can just to be able to feed the neighboring town. We were lucky because our town – my wife’s family’s town – there were two islands blocking it, so the waves didn’t go in. The other towns beside us, they were just wiped out. We bought two sacks of sweet potatoes. We did as much as we could. We didn’t realize how fragile life is, how crazy. One second you’re okay, and next you just disappear.

NA: I can only imagine the type of experience that someone can walk away with, after being in that particular environment, where you’re really seeing the communities and how resilient people are even in those types of situations. I guess they really did have a big impact on how you decided to move forward with your cooking career, and what you wanted to do once you got back to San Francisco.

07:08 The seeds of Pinoy Heritage

FA: So we came here, back to Fifth Floor. We did a fundraiser of Filipino food. People were really happy and it was well received. That planted the seed for us, for Pinoy Heritage.

FA: By the way, when we were gone there was a whole lot of chefs here in San Francisco – they did a huge fundraiser for the Philippines. I didn’t realize until we were in Manila; they’re calling us, “Yeah, we’re this fundraiser. Everybody was calling you, everybody was calling your family, trying to figure out where you were, even your mom didn’t know where you were, what happened...” because there was no communication at all. We were supposed to fly out Tacloban where the eye of the typhoon happened, and the majority of the chaos happened. It’s astounding how human beings react to help each other. It’s very humbling for sure.

NA: In 2013, I volunteered with an organization called NextDayBetter. You may have heard of them. I know they’ve put up a couple of events in San Francisco as well. But the big driver to that particular organization was really the typhoon too. For me living in North America at that time, humbling was totally the right word to use because then even strangers would volunteer and participate in these fundraisers and you really see that the amount of care that goes into caring for other people, and it’s totally a reflection I guess, of the Filipinos themselves and how that comes out in whatever they’re doing.

NA: One of the things I wanted to tell you that I really love about your dinners here is precisely that, where the way you share photos of the stuff you’re working on, and how you come up with certain dishes. Even that in itself is really encouraging and it really excites me as a person who’s never come to your dinners to come and check it out. I guess my question is, when you first got back to San Francisco and started thinking about wanting to put up these pop-up dinners,, what did you have in mind? Were you thinking of doing your take on some regional dishes or were you driven more about a lot of local California produce? Just wondering what you can share about how the dishes first came about.

10:24 Interpreting traditional Filipino dishes

FA: So, I knew I wanted to make Filipino food after that. I don’t know how or why. It was something that’s been a calling; I’ve always put Filipino dishes here and there in different formats – either savory or desserts – to Fifth Floor, Dirty Habit, or wherever. Even the Taj Campton I consult right now is California-Indian, but I still sneak in some Filipino ingredients in there.

FA: We’ve been doing this pop-up for about a year and a half. It took a while for us to figure out what we wanted to do and what format we wanted to go. Last year we traveled the Philippines for culinary research for six months. That actually opened our minds to how much unknown territory we don’t know. We went to Bicol, Eastern Samar, drove up to Northern Samar, all the way Bicol, to Manila. We learned all these amazing dishes that inspired us to create new renditions of.

11:34 Personal experience as a source of inspiration

FA: We just keep taking notes and then asking either our neighbor’s cook, or relatives, relatives’ relatives. They’re like, full-on “Alright, we’re cooking today, and over the next three days.” They would ask us what kind of dishes do we want. And I was like, everything. One day we cooked like 10, maybe 15 dishes. There was like, a lot of us. There was three full cars of just family driving up north to Manila from Samar. So there was a lot of food, but there’s a lot of people to eat it. We cooked a ton and, you know, you just take your notes and you come here, you go to a farmer’s market, which we love here in San Francisco, this a bit of a sight. Every day there’s a different farmer’s market. It doesn’t matter what day of the week.

FA: So, you go to the market, you see that, and then it triggers some memory like, “Okay I should do pinangat with swiss chard,” which we recently did. We traveled in Ilocos as well. We learned how to make Ilocano empanada. And then last winter was endive and chicory season, so we use that as a filling instead of green papaya.

12:51 The “soul” needs to be in it

FA: The way we create a dish is, the Filipino soul needs to be in it. Whether it will be a traditional dish that we spin off, or a traditional ingredient that we use. For example, let’s say pancit. We would make pancit, then think of Italian pasta. So we would think of adding a touch of butter, and then put in soy sauce, garlic, that’s how we spin off the dishes.

NA: I think one of the things that makes it really relatable, like the stuff you’re doing now and the stuff that a lot of chefs are doing now, where second or first generation Filipinos think there’s really a lot of that respect that comes with understanding what the “soul” of those dishes are, and I totally love your comment where “your rendition” or “your take” of a certain food has to be ‘rooted’ in some part of that dish...you wonder what the original Filipino delicacy or dish is about? For example, pinangat, as you mentioned. Can you tell me exactly what pinangat is? Is it taro leaves that’s wrapping something?

14:24 Dishes with roots

FA: Mm-hm. The way we learned it there is, you take a fish and then they paksiw it, which is, they cook it in either vinegar or some acidifier, garlic, onion, ginger and then they scrape it. Then they add chopped taro leaves and stems. They put it inside the taro leaf, wrap it, and then cook it in coconut milk. The way we learned it in Bicol, that’s how they did it.

NA: Bicol is a region widely known to be the Philippines’ best place for cooking anything and everything with coconuts. I even got a book called “The Coconut Cookery of Bicol” that attests to how ingrained it is in the local culture.

FA: So I take that same concept and just apply it to whatever local dishes we can get here. There’s just amazing, amazing produce here in San Francisco. I can’t stress it enough!

NA: So that’s really what kind of makes it a bit of a hotbed for these types of food ‘concepts’ – you can still call it that – for experimenting with how you want to interpret just how those kinds of dishes are really developed or inspired by traveling. Around the time you were visiting the Philippines last year, as well, I was also there. The purpose of my visit then was I wanted to go to Mindanao, because I have never gone. When you grow up in Manila, there’s still a big cloud that hangs over just visiting Mindanao in general, like what kind of food they have there. I was really curious about visiting Davao and I went to visit some chocolate farms and where they grew coffee there. I totally treasured the three weeks I was there. It was a short stay but I learned so much.

NA: After I came back from that trip, that’s when I decided I totally wanted to do the podcast. I want to keep blogging about it because the only way you are going to be able to start sharing those kinds of stories about certain foods in those regions are eaten, and how people enjoy them too. There’s not enough people talking about it, so the part that I can do best for myself, as someone who writes and does a lot of media stuff, is to kind of do it my way, to talk about it online.

NA: I guess it’s a very similar concept for even the Filipino Food Movement. We have all these folks joining the Instagram page and sharing their homemade recipes. It’s really heartwarming because you see so much potential and a lot of drive behind people exploring their own identity and their own appreciation and understanding of the food through whatever way they can, whether they do it professionally or at home.

17:34 On travel plans

FA: That’s very true. We honestly have a trip coming to try to go to the Mindanao region – Davao, Zamboanga, General Santos – hopefully, we’ll see.

NA: That trip happened after we recorded our interview...

FA: But we’re definitely going to explore that Malaysian-Indonesian Muslim region. That specific cuisine is very different from what you grow up in Manila. So I’m trying to incorporate more Filipino dishes. That’s why we want to travel to Mindanao where the spices are really…

NA: Yeah, like try out palapa and see how that’s made from scratch kind of thing?

FA: Honestly, the only regional cuisine like that is in Manila by Quiapo. I’ve never had it before until last year. I was like, “What the hell is this? Oh my God! I need to travel more.”

NA: Yeah! Galing ano? (Awesome, isn’t it?) It just really makes you realize how large the Philippines is and to get to explore all that.

FA: Yeah. I think what opened our mind to it was the Madrid Fusion for sure. Last year, Chef Tatung was talking on stage about Mindanao cuisine…

NA: That’s Chef Tatung Sarthou, a very well respected chef and advocate for regional Philippine cooking…

FA: …and that was definitely a reason to go check it out. Right now we’re asking people we know, so we can actually get relatives or whoever to actually teach us the dishes, because you can’t just go there and say like, “Hey I want to learn.” Everybody’s going to look at you. You got to find people you know.

NA: Exactly, absolutely, and that’s what’s exciting to me about Filipino cuisine. You touched on it a little bit earlier where you’re going around and you’re going through all these towns. Even to me, I guess where it comes from is that, there’s so many different techniques and so many different, even ingredients that many other Filipino folks are not familiar with either because they’re not from that region maybe, or they just haven’t heard about it or not very many people use it in regular Filipino cooking.

NA: So that’s what’s really exciting about the stuff you’re doing with Pinoy Heritage, where you’re trying to incorporate a lot of these cooking styles and techniques with the stuff you serve to guests.

NA: Let’ switch gears a little bit. I’m going to refer to a couple of dishes that you have in your Instagram feed just because I want to see how some of those dishes were made. So for example, the pinangat you mentioned. I see that you have swiss chard, pickled stems, halibut, coconut milk, kumquats, and baby shrimp. So, I guess in that presentation, how did you do it differently from the regular pinangat?

FA: This one what we did is, we got some fresh coconuts. We used the water to poach the fish. We poached the fish, we took it out and then we marinated it like the paksiw, the vinegar, ginger, garlic. And then we folded back in the blanched swiss chard. Then we cooked the coconut leaves from raw and then you just keep cooking, cooking, cooking. Eventually your fish becomes either really tough or really soft. It’s delicious either way but I want to make sure it translates well here.

NA: If you’re testing a recipe, for example the pinangat that you want to translate into stuff that you are going to serve at the pop-up dinner, when you’re testing it out in your kitchen, what are some of the things that you keep in mind? Like for fish like that, you want to make sure that it stays the right texture, like –

22:11 Dishes come from what’s local and abundant

FA: Yeah, we have the right tools to do the pop-ups, so for this one we have a controlled oven where it doesn’t go crazy with temperatures. A lot of the dishes we create use whatever’s available, whatever’s in season, what we can get. Majority of the inspiration is just what’s around, and there’s a lot around. So, kumquat is just amazing. The fish needs to be cut with something, a little bit of sweetness, a little bit of acidity, brightness. Watermelon radish is just like another funk that adds to the dish. And then the baby shrimp is alamang that we might have just brought here in the States from the Philippines. And then we add a little bit of vadouvan – it’s like a French curry – very onion-heavy. So we add a little bit of that to add another layer of flavor. It’s got acid, spice, fattiness, and just freshness from the kumquat.

NA: This attention to detail is what really makes this style of Filipino cooking stand out. You can see where the professional training Francis had that shapes things. Gary Danko, that first restaurant he worked in, is one of San Francisco’s top French restaurants. If you look it up online, you’ll see “superb dining” and “exemplary service” as common descriptions of peoples’ experiences eating at the restaurant.

NA: But what’s worth celebrating, I think, is the fact that Francis takes that sensibility for creating a really memorable dining experience, not something often associated with Filipino food especially in the restaurant circuit. Sourcing local ingredients and translating Filipino recipes to adapt to that local produce while improving upon traditional cooking techniques, all this stuff contributes to developing the profile of Philippine cuisine as a whole.

NA: This approach definitely isn’t something that only Francis does, not by a long shot. It really inspires me to think that more people are starting to think this way about our food, because it’s not “boxed in” by what your grandparents think it is or what traditional Filipino food is supposed to be. And if you don’t live in the Philippines, that isn’t a barrier at all! There’s so much interest in Filipino food – by both Filipinos and non-Filipinos – I think because we’re really starting to realize how much there is to discover about the culture and the traditions and the geography and just the origins of these everyday things that are very normal for Filipinos, especially for regional cuisines.

NA: One of the things I want to ask you about is the influence, because you mentioned about some of the other chefs you worked with before, at the first was more like traditional French and the other one where you were really encouraged to play with spices and understand the depth that spices can really bring. In terms of expanding your different styles and what you want to do with some of these Filipino dishes, how important is it to you to be able to learn from other people, from other chefs, and use that as a springboard for some of the stuff you want to do?

26:38 Why you need to go to the Philippines

FA: Every chef’s experience creates their own originality, I think. That’s how I think of Filipino this way and another person can’t. We just cook a different way. It’s not like my Filipino dish is better than yours, it’s just very different. I think what’s the most important part is - which I tell a lot of chefs, about Filipino food - if you have the chance, if you have the time, you really need to visit the Philippines. It’s just beyond of what you think. Every time I research something, we find something new and it’s just very inspiring. You really don’t want to f-up Filipino food for the rest of the people. So please do your research, and you really need to go visit. You need to find the soul. That’s the most important part.

27:39 A nod to tradition

NA: You gotta find that soul. I guess, in a nutshell, that is what Pinoy Heritage is about.

FA: Yeah. Basically what we say is, our Filipino food is a nod to tradition in a California sense, basically.

NA: Can you tell us a bit about what your pop-up dinners are like? Who comes to the dinners, and what kinds of feedback have you received?

FA: To be quite frank, everything is well-received. People who go in to pop-ups aren’t the same people who go in regular restaurants. They know what they’re getting into, either a good review from a blog or a food writer. But all-in-all there’s a lot of people who haven’t had Filipino food, who go to the pop-ups. Everybody so far is pretty happy with what we’ve put up and I can’t say how blessed we are with the pop-ups we’ve had so far. There’s a lot of support definitely from the Filipino Food Movement and just local media here in San Francisco. Even local chefs are just coming out, local industry people are coming out. It’s really cool. We definitely feel the love down here.

NA: What’s it like in the community of Filipino chefs over there in San Francisco?

FA: We all pretty much, for the most part, know a lot about each other. Collaboration-wise, I haven’t really collaborated with a lot, but we all support each other here. We go visit each other’s restaurants and find each other inspiring. It’s grateful. It’s just cooking styles are different everywhere.

NA: Would you have ever thought back then ,when you were a teenager in Manila that you would be doing this, like now?

FA: Absolutely not! I don’t know how to cook until I was like 19, 20. I think it’s more of survival that I learned how to cook because you grew up in Manila, you’re pretty spoiled. You never have to cook anything. Then you come here and like, “Oh man! I want Filipino food. I don’t know where to go. I don’t know have any money. But you have to learn!”

NA: Back home, when I was growing up, we had a helper at home. She was our yaya who helped raise myself and my two other siblings. She would often do the cooking. My mom and my dad were both working. They worked like insane hours and they’d be home every night at ten o’clock because traffic in Manila is just horrible. It didn’t even occur to me until I moved to Canada and I moved out of my parent’s house because I went to school in a different city. One of the reasons why I started writing my food blog with my Canadianized recipes is that I was really craving for sinigang one time because I was sick and I was living by myself and I’m like, “I don’t know how to make sinigang from scratch!” I don’t even want to go to Chinatown to get the produce because there is really no other way that I can make sinigang by going to my local grocery store. Stuff like that kind of made me start thinking there must be a different way to get the dishes or do the dishes I want to satisfy the craving or the flavor I am looking for.

FA: You definitely take it for granted until you come out on your own, for sure.

NA: Did you have any particular Filipino foods that’s your favorite?

FA: Definitely sinigang. I grew up a skinny kid and everything else didn’t seem good until sinigang. Growing up when I was like five, six years old, it took me like two hours to eat a meal. And then if it’s sinigang, it’s like 10 minutes lang (only). For sure it’s sinigang.

32:04 Advice for interested cooks

NA: Do you have any advice for people who are interested in cooking Filipino dishes and recipes but maybe aren’t sure where to start?

FA: For me, for people who just want to learn how to make Filipino food, you need to travel to the Philippines. First, it’s a good excuse because the Philippines is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. Amazing beaches, the most hospitable people. That’s a good excuse for you to learn how to make Filipino food. Just know that, yes there are traditional ways, but you don’t need to go the traditional route. Just know the soul of the food and the dish, because Filipino food is an evolution. Either the Chinese traders, then the Filipinos absorbed it, think of like lumpia, pancit. And you got the Spanish, you got the Malaysian influence. So it’s just an evolution of food. Eventually Filipino food will blow up here in the US… or I guess it has already. It’s evolving again to involve local produce, what’s available here. I wouldn’t say it’s fusion. It’s an overused word and people just butcher that word. Even though Filipino food is true fusion, in a sense. So just make it tasty. Don’t try too hard. Just make it tasty. And it just needs the soul. That for me is the most important part. The soul.

NA: You got it, Francis. To me too, it’s that soul paired with this almost ingrained hospitality that I love about sharing Filipino food with others. It gives me a lot of pleasure and joy just being able to do that.

34:20 On Filipino hospitality

FA: Filipinos are known for being hospitable. It’s just very genuine. You come to a Filipino’s house – “Oh let’s eat. Have you eaten yet?” “Kain na. (Let’s eat.)” It’s always, you have to be full. If you come to my pop-up and you say, “I’m so hungry.” By all means you need to tell me this, I will feed you until you’re happy.

FA: I’ve told people in my pop-up dinners, “If you’re hungry, you let me know. I will send you another course, and I will be very happy to do that.” That’s just part of it, of being Filipino. You just take care of people. There’s just genuine love, I think. We’re just wired that way. Yeah, it’s beyond a job, it’s just second-nature, I believe. And people here in North America who have Filipino friends and have been into their family’s house, I’m sure they’re agreeing with me too, because they’re not going to leave until they’re extremely full.

WRAP-UP

And with that, I hope you’ve found this episode just as satisfying. I’m definitely craving some kind of Filipino food, so I’m probably going to end up making something for dinner. Visit pinoyheritage.com to learn more about Francis and his team, and to book a seat for their next dinner if you’re in the Bay Area.

My warmest thanks to Francis Ang for this interview. I definitely look forward to where Pinoy Heritage goes next!

Music for this episode is by David Szestay for the opening credits, Eric and Magill, and Lee Rosevere. They share their music along with an incredible roster of artists at fma.org.

For those of you subscribed to the show, I’m so sorry this month’s episode was a bit late. There’s a lot going on here in Toronto and I’m so excited to share that with all of you soon. I’ve been involved with a number of different Filipino food events in the city, and the energy from each of those projects, each of those communities we work with, it really is something to experience. I can’t say that enough. I’m hooked on sharing Filipino food culture in as many ways as possible. If you’re interested in learning more about that, head over to nastasha.ca to learn more.

And as before you can subscribe to the show on iTunes by looking up ‘Exploring Filipino Kitchens.’ My RSS feed is now finally working again. So please do subscribe, and if you had issues with it before, it should be working now, but please do drop me a line if you are having any problems with it. And visit exploringfilipinokitchens.com for further information about this and other episodes we’ve done.

Maraming salamat, and thank you, for listening.

This is a transcript of “Episode 07: On Pinoy Heritage With Francis Ang” (Click the episode link for the audio!)

Cooking Filipino Food At Home - Episode Transcript

Find the transcript of my interview with Betty Ann Quirino below.

INTRO

Welcome to Exploring Filipino Kitchens. I’m your host, Nastasha Alli.

Today we’re talking with Betty Ann Besa-Quirino, an author, recipe developer and prolific blogger whose thoughts and experiences on cooking has personally helped me develop confidence in my own cooking abilities – to become part of what keeps global Filipino food culture alive.

I’ve been reading Betty Ann’s blog, called Asianinamericamag.com, for awhile now - pretty much since I started cooking Filipino recipes from scratch. What I love most about Betty Ann’s writing is that it’s very personal. She writes truthfully, and like the best blogs, I always feel like I’ve walked away with some kind of reward, or treasure, after reading her posts about cooking Filipino food at her home in New Jersey.

So I asked Betty Ann if we could talk about home cooking - and particularly, the kind of Filipino home cooking that first and second generation Filipinos who grow up in the US know. And these are lessons that apply to understanding every kind of food culture, not just that of Filipinos.

There’s a deep love for food that’s simultaneously comforting and also really ecstatic. Between friends, I’ve found that although our love for the food runs deep, there’s still a bit of apprehension with actually cooking the dishes we crave, either because we know our moms make it best, or we’re not familiar enough with the cooking techniques and get this fear that we just ruin a dish would take over. Maybe that’s just me, but it’s a familiar feeling!

This episode, we’re talking about what it’s like to cook Filipino food at home. I can’t promise that we won’t make you hungry.

BQ: Hello Nastasha, and hello to all your podcast listeners. My name is Betty Ann Besa-Quirino. I’m a Filipina at heart who lives in America. I live in Northwestern New Jersey. I’m a writer by profession. I’m a cookbook author, a journalist, and I’m also an artist.

NA: Betty Ann has also written a book about her husband’s grandfather, a former president of the Philippines named Elpidio Quirino. The foundation they’ve helped start, continues to advocate for accessible education among students and teachers in the Philippines. Betty Ann is an active member of several research and journalism committees as well, including the International Association of Culinary Professionals based in New York, and a group called the Culinary Historians of the Philippines.

BQ: Right now I’m a correspondent for Positively Filipino, a premier online magazine that publishes out of San Francisco, and I have a blog called Asian in America, where I transform traditional Filipino dishes to modern meals in my American kitchen.

NA: I’ve been reading Asian in America Mag for several years now, and that’s one of the things that I’ve found really manifested itself in your blog posts, it’s a really big inspiration too. Roundabout the time that you started your blog, there weren’t that many Filipino recipe blogs online at the time. I remember that was when around the time we first moved to Canada and if I would start to crave some things, I would start searching for recipes. I always came across your recipes online there and I always enjoyed the stories. That was such a big part of cooking for me, that there’s always a story involved about the Philippines and life in America and that kind of thing.

04:25 “People paid attention to my stories?”

BQ: Oh thank you! That’s very encouraging to hear and I’m flattered. I didn’t realize people paid attention to my stories. It’s just that I was beginning to feel the I was boring people, and I don’t want to come off as a very self-centered person in my writings. So lately I’ve been trying to cut shorter my stories, but that was interesting to know.

NA:I think it is really valuable and I guess it’s kind of eye-opening in some way too, because for Filipinos sometimes, we still have this tendency to feel a little bit shy about ourselves and our cooking. So even – for example – if I’m cooking at home with my mom, we’ll talk about making dinner or something, or cooking Filipino food, and then I’ll tell her, “I cook this for my boyfriend who’s not Filipino.” And she’ll go, “Oh well that’s just lumpia. Would he like some?” And them I’m like, “Yah, he actually really does!”

NA: So, I really like that your stories are very descriptive and it’s a mark of a good journalistic take on it.

BQ: Oh thank you! Now I’m looking at my blog and I’m wondering, “Really? She likes my blog!”

NA: Some of my friends also know about Asiainamericamag.com because of all the recipes that you have published over the years. Could you tell us a little bit about how the blog started?

06:07 From writing ad copy to blogging and authoring

BQ: Okay sure, I’d love to. First of all, the blog is a recent writing platform. I have been a writer all of my career life. I have a degree in communication arts from St. Paul University in Manila. So, right out of college I worked as a copywriter for an ad agency. For many years, that was my life. I was very proud because I was trained by the best in the industry in the Philippines. It was a lot of hard work, but I learned so much. It was a very diverse industry and field, and you learn to write for everything – motor fuel, airline, cars, butter, noodles, ice cream, beauty soaps, detergents, and our clients from Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, San Miguel Corporation, Nestlé…

NA: And those are some of the largest corporations in the Philippines.

BQ: ...And it is hard work but I was trained by the best. So, that’s honed my writing skills.

NA: And if that wasn’t enough...

BQ: Oh, and I also was a college professor for Assumption College when we were living in the Philippines. I taught creative writing and advertising.

NA: Now THAT’S impressive. “So, how did being an advertising copywriter and college professor lead to the blog?” I asked.

07:30 Moving to the US

BQ: Then we moved to the US and of course, life was different, totally different. Totally different from what you see in the movies and magazines, and it just shatters everything you dreamt about living in America.

NA: This was the first of several “real talk” moments during my conversation with Betty Ann that’s stuck with me; that difficulty of adjusting to life in another country as a new immigrant. I understand what she means by how it shatters you, perhaps not always in a way that other people can see, but you know is real.

NA: Anyone who’s started life in a new country inevitably becomes familiar with that feeling of being very far away from the world and family you know, with a day-to-day reality that doesn’t always match up to what most other people think life in America is going to be like.

BQ: Our children were very small. Our youngest son was only three years old. Of course, I opted to stay home and raise them even if I had offers to work in ad agencies. New York City is 50-60 miles away and I just won’t do that, leave the children. So I took some part-time jobs along the way just to be close to home, research jobs. I also taught language at Berlitz Learning Center because I’m also fluent in Spanish; I was teaching professionals Spanish to English. So those were things that kept me occupied as my children were growing. Before I knew it, they were soon off to college.

BQ: I have been home-cooking the whole time and all my life. That was the norm for our family, home cooking.

NA: And so with the help of her American-raised children who became digital product designers and cross platform journalists, Asianinamericamag.com became one of the first Filipino recipe blogs that consistently landed in top search results for Filipino recipes.

09:36 Starting the blog

BQ: I was afraid that my sons will be eating junk food when they go off to college, so I started writing recipes in a yellow pad for them. But being millennials they preferred something digital, so they told me, “Mom, you need to have a blog.”

BQ: So then my son Tim, who’s now a product designer at Facebook, he told me, “I’ll create it for you, and I’ll only teach you once. Then you’re on your own.” My youngest son Constante, is a journalist and a communications major. Both of them went to Drexel University in Philadelphia. Constante also gave me tips on writing for online publications.

BQ: So that’s how the blog started. It was a desire of a mother to make sure that her sons were well-fed while they were away from home. Even the name was off the cuff and done in a hurry because we were at the dining table and my son Tim – the older one – was starting away, and he said, “Okay what name do you want?” “Oh I don’t know,” I said. So I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. I had no idea what I was doing. But both of them said, “Mom, you’re a writer and you write about food. So you’ll know what this is all about,” they both said.

BQ: So that’s how it started. I had the camera but it wasn’t a nice one. Eventually, my husband started giving me for birthdays and Christmas - cameras, lighting equipment, and the boys did the same. Now they give me props for my blog or for my cooking.

BQ: So, it has grown. It was a writing platform at the start for me, and it grew.

NA: I love that story that you just shared with us because one of the things I really like about blogs is that it allows you to be very intimate with your writing in a way you can share it with other people. I was smiling as you were telling me the story about how your sons had encouraged you to start it and prompted you to start doing the recipes and recording them online because it’s such a great example of how really very family-oriented a lot of these types of projects begin, especially with cooking and especially with Filipino cooking.

12:22 On food, family, and cooking

BQ: Food, family, and cooking has always been central in our lives. Like I told you, home cooking has been the norm for us ever since. My sons, I taught them how to cook, and now I’m very proud they do better than me in the kitchen. It’s always a feast when they come home. There’s so much noise. We fight. They shoo me away from the kitchen. Now they think they know better, and they do! They actually do. It’s a very fulfilling and gratifying feeling and I’m very proud of it. I’m proud of how they turned out and I’m so happy when I hear from people that they read my blog, they love my recipes. It’s always my intention to help somebody, to share a recipe, if I can make somebody’s day better, that gives me a lot of happiness.

NA: As it should and to me as well. Personally, what I find very rewarding about it is really being able to share that experience as well as the story too.

13:35 Growing up on a farm in the Philippines

NA: I mentioned over email a few times that, really when I started learning how to cook Filipino food, was really when I moved out of my parent’s house because I was going to college downtown. With a lot of Filipino families too, there’s still the tendency where, you know “Oh you know my mom will cook it,” or “I’ll come home.” And there’s always like something that someone in your family has made, and after I moved out it was like, “Oh you know I’m craving adobo or pancit,” and all that. Then I’m like, “Oh well, I have to learn how to make it,” because no one else will be able to make it for me unless I go to get some take-out or something.

NA: It’s very reflective of me realizing that so many of these food traditions I didn’t really care about much while I was growing up, became really important as I became an adult. That’s what I’m finding in your blog posts and recipes over the years. They’re like a marker of life and things that you’re experiencing, that kind of thing.

NA: Naturally, I wanted to know more about how all of this started for Betty Ann, so I asked her to tell us about where she grew up.

BQ: I grew up in a very rural, agricultural province. Tarlac was my home province. I was raised in Tarlac up to high school. Then I went to college in Manila. But my father – by nature, by profession – was a farmer. He was an agricultural businessman. We owned farms and we owned rice fields and sugarcane fields. I was raised in that kind of environment. Our home had a large, huge backyard in the back. And we had cattle and we had a piggery and we had chicken and goose. I can’t even remember what other animals we had. Then we had fruit trees and vegetable crops. That was my way of life growing up. I didn’t step into a supermarket to buy food until much later, by the time I was merely a teenager. As a child, I remember being tasked with collecting the eggs from the chickens we were raising. For as long as I remember, there were always brown eggs because that’s how farm-raised free range chickens lay eggs.

BQ: For years I would collect the eggs and put them in the basket and later on, when we went to the city – by this time I was, I think it was fourth grade or fifth grade – my first experience to see white eggs in the supermarkets, I was shocked. The first thing I asked was, “Who washed them? Why are they white?!”

NA: …as if to say, why do these eggs look different from what they should be? They should be brown right?

BQ: So yun nga (that’s it). That was my kind of upbringing. Everything we had on the table was from produce that we grew in the backyard or our farm. As the seasons came and went, then our vegetables and fruits were seasonal.

BQ: And that’s how I learned to cook. I started going into the kitchen, and if I could reach the kitchen counter, one of my first task was trim the edges of sitaw, long green beans. I remember that. That’s why I love sitaw because that was one of my first tasks, to remove the edges of it with my fingers first, and later when I was old enough to hold a knife I was assigned to cut it into smaller pieces to be cooked.

NA: That’s the magic of bringing kids into the kitchen, pretty much as soon as you can trust them to keep their hands off of hot items, because those are the kinds of lessons that need to be learned. They need to be internalized in their own way. I totally remember snapping the ends off from these bright green beans like the yard-long ones Betty Ann talked about. They’ve got this little snap to them when you break them off, kind of how you’re supposed to snap off the woody ends of an asparagus stalk at the point where they naturally break. It’s a good task to give like six or an eight year old maybe, get them all set up in the kitchen, prep some vegetables next to the grown ups while they’re cooking. It’s the kind of stuff that sticks, until you’re grown and you have your own little kitchen helpers to share that kind of experience with.

NA: These kinds of food memories, in the end, are the things that drive us to write the stories that matter; the stories that we get to tell from our own perspectives, and in our own voice, driven by the need to connect with some part of ourselves that we’re looking for, or maybe have lost, in the “now” or the reality of our everyday lives.

NA: This next story is about mango jam, and it’s Betty Ann’s award winning piece in a food writing competition that’s like the gold standard of Philippine food writing.

19:50 The story of mangoes in a jar

BQ: I saw in your website you have the book ‘Savor the Word’ of Doreen Gamboa-Fernandez’ Writing Award Essays. My essay ‘A Hundred Mangoes in a Bottle’ is in that book. I won an award in 2012, and if you read that essay, it’s all about making mango jam. That is a very memorable essay for me because I grew up cooking with my mother, learning from her, and mango jams in the summer were one of the most important traditions we used to participate in.

BQ: Fast-forward to life in America. A few years ago when I saw mangoes in the market, I was so excited and I said to myself, “Let me recreate the mango jam of my childhood.” I was trying and I couldn’t quite get it. At the same time, I was refreshing my writing, so I was taking writing classes with Monica Bhide…

NA: Monica is a renowned food writer and cookbook author with a dedicated online following. Her blog about modern Indian cooking has led to several book deals, leading workshops and international conferences…

BQ: …and she was coaching me on different writing styles. I told her about the mango jam experience…

NA: …and Monica basically said, “That’s a beautiful story, why don’t you write about it?”

BQ: …so I said, “Yeah, why don’t I?” So, she said, “Write an essay about how you made mango jam with your mother.” So I set off to write an essay, then I went back to my writing teacher, went back to Monica and I said, “There’s a problem. I can’t write the essay.” She said, “Why not?” “You know? I just remembered, one of the most painful things I remembered is I never asked my mother for the recipe. My mother died in 1981, so of course six years ago, I couldn’t ask anyone anymore.” I told Monica, “How sad is that? I’m really, really so sad that I never asked my mother for the recipe of the mango jam. It’s something we did for so many years and I took it for granted, and I never asked her. Why did I not ask her?” I said, “I know how to do it, but I don’t know the measurements. I don’t know how many mangoes, how much sugar, or the temperature, or what kind of mangoes to choose.” I was so sad, and Monica said, “You know what? There’s your essay. Write about the sadness.” And I said, “My God! That’s hard! I’m going to be crying for every word.” “And that what makes a good writer,” she said.

BQ: So I wrote the essay. Long story short, I wrote it, 800 words, showed it to Monica my writing teacher, showed it to my sons, showed it to my husband, and they all said it’s good. “Yes,” I said, “it’s good. But I’m not giving it to anyone,” I said, and I put it away in a drawer. I kept in in a drawer for years.

NA: At that point, Betty Ann says, she just wasn’t ready to share something so personal yet; something that affected her deeply, that touched upon a memory that wasn't just about food, but really about loss and regret.

BQ: Then one day, I saw the Doreen Gamboa-Fernandez Writing Awards. They were open to submissions and, even if I was in the States, they encouraged me to “Yeah, why don’t you submit?” So I emailed my essay, and I’ve won an award…

NA: Which just goes to show that if you’ve got a story that needs to be told, go ahead, tell it! Because there’s no other person on earth who can tell that story better than you can.

23:50 “Who cares?”

BQ: When I wrote ‘A Hundred Mangoes In A Bottle’ essay, Monica – my writing teacher – encouraged me to submit it to several publications. “But, first of all,” I told her, “Who will be interested in this? People who don’t know me are not going to care.” I said, “It’s about my personal sadness, and there’s no recipe. So ultimately, nobody will care.” And she said, “No you’re wrong, no really.” The thing is from my perspective, who’s going to care about my sadness? If you don’t know me, are you going to care? Who’s going to care about mangoes if they’ve never tasted mangoes. I also said, “It’s about a rural town in a province in the Philippines that people have probably never heard about.” There’s really no draw for the reader; that’s what I kept thinking. So I kept it.

24:50 A lesson learned

BQ: So what did I learn from that? Nobody else has your story. Every person is unique and if you worry about things that have not yet happened, then it’s an exercise in futility and it’s just going to make you crazy. I should not have said to myself, “Hey, nobody’s going to care.”

NA: See what I mean by real talk? Thanks for the life advice, Tita Betty Ann! It’s all real in many respects. There’s absolutely nothing to be gained by simply waiting for something to happen to you. I can’t help but think of how motivationally engaging that is; to know that other people experience that same kind of vulnerability you feel, that you’re not alone.

NA: Drifting away from our story for just a little bit. I just want to talk about this event I went to not long ago called “Fear as Fuel,” organized by my friend Gelaine who runs a social entrepreneurship meet-up group. Amazing, right? Anyway, I’m glad I went that evening. It was at a co-working space right across the Christie Pits Park in Toronto. At the event, there were business owners, people who ran workshops, people who were looking to find a community of other self-starter kinds of people. Honestly, taking part in that form of community engagement – for me I think – really helps. In the end, it’s kind of nice to hear other people go through similar kinds of challenges with their lives. You can feel vulnerable about work, about relationships, life in general. But you kind of just have to learn how to overcome them, and it’s a lot easier – or at least a bit more comforting – knowing that other people experience that same kind of fear, that same kind of vulnerability too.

NA: Next, I wanted to hear about things Betty Ann has learned over the years as a food blogger and recipe developer; like cooking techniques she’s honed or adapted for her North American kitchen, and examples of ingredients she’s used to substitute for more traditional Philippine fruits and vegetables.

28:02 Finding ingredients is a challenge

NA: I’m wondering over the years, what kinds of substitutions have you had to make? Say for calamansi, for example, because that’s kind of a really very popular, integral thing to a lot of Filipino cooking, but even here, it’s not very easy to find.

BQ: No, it’s not. Here’s the thing. As far as the ingredients are concerned, substitution has always been a challenge for me and I will say, for most people who do not live close to a Filipino community where Filipino groceries or Chinatown are far away, it’s always a challenge.

28:43 Three components to successful recipes

BQ: How do I deal with it? First of all, I came to the realization that for the success of a recipe, there are three things that are needed: ingredients, ease of the recipe/how easy it is to do, and the delicious result. If you have those three things, those three components, then your family will have a very good meal. It doesn’t matter if it’s a simple adobo or an elaborate paella. You have to have ingredients, ease of the procedure, and a delicious result.

29:22 Substituting traditional Philippine ingredients

NA: So, how does Betty Ann get that in her own kitchen?

BQ: Early on, I realized I will not always have 100% of all the ingredients in my Filipino notebook or my Filipino cookbook. So, I learned to memorize what flavor I wanted to achieve and I taught this to my sons. Then I kept searching and searching for the right substitute. For example, if we got invited to Filipino parties in New York or where Filipino communities are, I wouldn’t ask, “Oh where did you buy your calamansi,” or “where did you buy your pancit.” I wouldn’t ask. I pay attention to the flavor that was achieved, then I keep that in my memory, in my mind, in my heart, in my senses. Then I go home and try to recreate it to the best of my ability. Calamansi was only something I recently found because it’s only lately that we have frozen calamansi. In the early 90s, we had to go to Chinatown in New York, which was 60 miles away by car for us. Even then it was always expensive, so why do that? Later on, through asking, through researching, and through tasting myself I found that Meyer lemons are the closest in flavor to kalamansi. So I kept that in mind, even in my blog I say that, I said that to friends, I share it as a cooking tip to other fellow Filipinos, or to those who are not Filipino who want to cook Filipino food. That’s one.

BQ: And you know, everything down the line, if you need a souring agent for sinigang? I know that tamarind is not unique to the Philippines and geographically it’s used by other neighboring Asian countries. So, this was like in the early days of the Internet, in the early 90s. I researched for ingredients from other cultures, from other stores. Sometimes, international markets will have a wider inventory of Thai ingredients versus Filipino products, so that’s where I look.

NA: And really, the 90s were not that long ago. Thinking about how difficult it was to source certain types of Asian produce then – before the arrival of today’s international mega-marts and online shopping and even Asian vegetables like bok choy and those yard long beans we were talking about, available at local farmers’ markets – you would really have needed to think outside the box and kind of critically about the flavors you were looking for. If you couldn’t get the ingredients you wanted at the closest grocery store…

32:30 Remember the origins of a dish

BQ: When you have to remember also the origin of the dish – again I taught my sons this one; aside from remembering what the flavor is trying to replicate – you have to remember that basic Filipino dishes in the Philippines, they use backyard fruit; like sinigang, pinakbet, they always use backyard fruit; nilaga, whatever is the produce from the backyard is what goes in the cauldron, and that’s what you cook with. That’s important to remember. That’s how I learn how to substitute ingredients here in North America. You just have to remember the origin of the dish. You have to remember how it tastes like, and then you go on your search to try to recreate that by being creative and finding different sources.

33:40 A visit to the Ilocos region

NA: Switching gears a bit. Next, I wanted to talk about culinary trips, and some of Betty Ann’s travels to the Philippines that she’s written about online.

NA: I know earlier you were telling me about the experience you gained as a copywriter in the Philippines early on in your career and how a lot of the skills and the lessons you learned, copywriting for all these different brands and these different types of products kind of fed into your approach to writing in general with being creative. For people listening as well, I’ll post the links to two of Betty Ann’s articles on Positivelyfilipino.com.

NA: Specifically the one you sent over to me was something called ‘Holiday Dishes With Ilocano Flavors’ and ‘Day Trips to Culinary Heaven.’

BQ: The Ilocano Flavors coincidentally, that was the same year we were celebrating the 125th birthday anniversary of the late President Elpidio Quirino who was the grandfather of my husband. So the entire Quirino clan was going to get together in Ilocos in November 2015. As early as a few months before the trip, here in America I was already planning, “Hmm, why don’t I research about Ilocano food and write about it?” It was twirling in my mind already; the different ideas, different things, and what approach I could do, because I knew we will be served the flavors of the province. I knew that. I knew that just going from one town to the next, there’s a big difference in flavor and in ingredients, even if it’s the same dish you’re served. That’s how it came about. I already planned it even before going home to the Philippines.

BQ: Now when I got there, that was the challenge. You know why? Because nobody else had the mindset that I had. Everybody else was busy with the reunion, with the historic events, with getting together with relatives you haven’t seen in 30 years, and then the heat, the traffic, and so many other elements. So, long story short, I was the only one who was interested in doing a deep dive of Ilocano flavors. Nobody else was thinking the way I do.

NA: Man, if I were there, I’d have loved to go around and accompany Betty Ann with her research. That would be amazing!

BQ: It was interesting. You know how I went about it; I would take as many pictures I could. I tasted everything; taste, not ate; taste a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I interviewed people – not celebrities – I interviewed ordinary people in the restaurants, in the streets, the family cook, the aunt, the cousin, the friend of the cousin, and just basically put the article together. The thing about Ilocano food is that regionally, the flavors are strong and powerful. They grip you. You know when you come from America where the FDA controls the saltiness and the ingredients and requires a list of ingredients on the labels, then you’re thrown in the province where nobody gives a hoot what’s in it, but it’s delicious, then it’s really, really, really a cultural experience.

BQ: Again, you have to look at the geography and where you are. Ilocos is in the northern part of the Philippines, where the soil is barren and dry, and not good for many other vegetables and produce that are grown in other parts of the country. But there are things that survive in that kind of soil, in that kind of heat.

NA: Some examples of fruit and vegetables that thrive in this environment include string beans, squashes, gourds, peppers, eggplants, some corn, papaya, root crops like sweet potatoes and purple yams, and a plethora of beans, okra, and the eponymous bitter melon.

BQ: Believe me it was so hot in Ilocos. Hotter than any other province I have been to. Geographically, that’s because we’re nearly at the tip of the northern part of the Philippines. There’s actually a part of Ilocos where you can see China from there. Now, going back to that you have to understand the geography and what kind of food they produce. They produce a lot of garlic, that very powerful Sukang Iloko (Ilocos vinegar) made from coconut, and then they put siling labuyo (wild chili) with some bird’s eye chilies which, whoo! It’s much more potent than it is here in America.

BQ: One of the first things I ate was the Vigan longganisa. They’re small, cured pork sausages that are very garlicky and very vinegary. You can’t be in Vigan, Ilocos Sur if you don’t try the longganisa. Then I also had lechon kawali (crispy pork belly). In Ilocos, it’s called bagnet, and we had that. Why is it very popular there? Piggeries and agricultural livestock are predominant.

BQ: We were also served pinakbet, the vegetable stew, which is not the same as the pinakbet you eat here in America, nor the pinakbet I had in Tarlac. It’s just really Ilocano pinakbet. There’s a different way they do pinakbet there. There’s different norms and customs. In Ilocos, you do not put squash in the pinakbet. You don’t. A true Ilocano knows that. If you put squash like the kabocha squash? Aha! You’re not Ilocano. Even the way it’s cooked, they basically layer and layer and layer the vegetables in a crock pot, they don’t mix it, they don’t stir it, they just layer and layer and layer the vegetables with the bagoong (shrimp paste), a little broth, onions and garlic, some seasoning, and that’s it. That’s the way. As simple as that.

BQ: We had something that was like malunggay – moringa – we had that and it was… Wooh! Now I’m getting hungry. It’s just basically malunggay simmered in fish bagoong. Yes, it was delicious!

BQ: I also brought home a lot of pasalubong – gifts from the travels – to my family in Tarlac and to friends in Manila. I brought back Vigan longganisa – the cured pork sausages – because they were very garlicky and potent. I brought back a lot of cornik, which is fried corn kernels, they were full of garlic, full of adobo spicy flavors. The native pastries, the Vigan bibingka (rice cake) is different from the bibingka that we know. It’s more like a cassava type of coconut cake. It’s very delicious. I have the recipe. I have yet to make it here in America. I’m afraid it won’t turn out the same.

BQ: You know why? Here’s what I also learned. The humidity contributes a large part of the success of the recipe. Here in North America, on the East Coast, we cannot replicate the heat and humidity of the Philippines. But therefore, there are a lot of dishes, even if you have 99.9% the complete line of ingredients ready on your counter, it’s not going to be the same. Our water is different and the heat is different. It’s not going to be the same.

BQ: The Vigan empanada was legendary food I was trying to taste. I tried it a long, long time ago and I haven’t had it in a long time. The Vigan empanada is different. It’s a half-moon-shaped large empanada. From Ilocos, the ones they have there are almost orange in color, but that’s because they put achuete or annatto seeds in the dough. The dough is spread out so thin, it’s almost like a wafer, it’s almost like the lumpia wrapper. That’s what the texture is like of the Vigan empanada. The filling is made up of grated papaya and vegetables, some meat, some pork, and then they put a raw egg inside it. They seal the filling, so imagine it’s a half-moon orange empanada, and then they deep-fry it. And it’s best eaten when it’s warm and crisp.

NA: Mmmm. That really makes me want a Vigan empanada!

BQ: I know, me too, I’m drooling at my own description. Can you imagine how shameful that is? I have a recipe for the Vigan empanada which I got from the family cook at the Qurino-Syquia mansion but I’m still going to kitchen-test it. Like I told you, the heat and humidity of Vigan is different from Flanders, New Jersey so I’m afraid it’s not going to be the same but I’ll do my best.

NA: The way you were describing the Vigan empanada where it’s wafer-thin, half-moon pastry, with a fried egg inside, all these delicious, really yummy fillings, it’s the kind of stuff that people love posting about online these days. A part of what I really want to do with this podcast project is tell the stories of Filipino food from different perspectives. From the story that you shared of actually going to the province in the Philippines where this particular empanada is born, it reminds me and it reminds us that we can almost associate the Latin-American-like Spanish thing, and then it goes back to what you were saying again earlier of you have to remember the origins of something.

NA: There’s so many different things you can almost learn about, like the history of the Philippines through the different foods we offer. These kinds of recipes and dishes kind of make their way through time because even simpler dishes like sinigang or adobo, those are very everyday dishes most people make. Like you mentioned earlier, the three things to make a successful recipe are that, you have the ingredients, it’s easy to make, and it gives you a really delicious result. All of those three things are checked off everyday from meals like sinigang and stuff like that, and it also gets checked off with really special kinds of things that you eat like Vigan empanada, stuff like that, that you go on a trip for.

46:27 Food traditions are priceless

BQ: You know for this article I wrote ‘Holiday Dishes With Ilocano Flavors,’ aside from asking cousins and aunts and people and strangers about the different kinds of dishes I tasted, I also asked my aunt – I have to give credit to Atty. Aleli Quirino, or Tita Nila, she’s the daughter of Judge Antonio Quirino who was a brother of President Elpidio Quirino – and Tita Nila had to go through the family diary of her parents to look up some of my questions. She took the time from her work – she’s a lawyer – and I was pestering her about this. I said, “Tita Nila how do you make this and how do you make that, and what do you do during Christmas? Do you serve this or that?” and she said, “Let me go look at mama’s journal.” These are priceless memories really, because they are family journals. They are family diaries that are kept and a lot of them are confidential. But food is meant to be shared, so I guess it wasn’t a problem to ask.

NA: That’s one of the things that I would really hope. It’s kind of a little spin-off project I would like to do with these podcast recordings, to hopefully kind of encourage people in the Philippines and people anywhere who want to start recording their recipes. Especially now more than ever, it’s so easy to have a copy of these types of mementos and recordings whether you write it down or upload it to your own personal blog or record it on your cell phone and save it as an audio file. It’s so important to me to be able to get these stories about the food and about your family and about certain regions and places in the country because I am looking forward to going back to the Philippines so much because there’s always a new province I want to visit every time because there are so many places to visit and so many things to eat.

48:40 Advice for home cooks

NA: So, what’s Betty Ann’s advice for a curious cook like me?

BQ: Let me tell you this. I used to be in your shoes. I used to be young and nervous and afraid of being scolded for doing the wrong thing. Don’t be, alright? I used to hate it when someone hovered behind my back while I’m cooking, breathing down my neck and face. “So what are you making? Oh, don’t do that. Your fire’s too high. Noo...” Okay, block that all out. If that makes you nervous, get away from that moment. If it makes you nervous that your mother is watching you when you’re cooking, that your aunt is screaming at you for having a high fire, then don’t cook in front of them. Do it by yourself in your own time, at your own place, with ingredients you bought yourself. Then you’re not accountable to anyone.

BQ: Number one, get away from what makes you nervous. First you identify, “What makes me nervous? My mother? Okay. She should not be around me if I’m cooking,” but don’t tell your mother that; I’m sure she’s nice. I’m telling you, eliminate the factors that make you nervous. Number two, don’t experiment when you’re about to serve a humongous amount of people. If you’re going to have a party, serve recipes that you are used to making even if you’re asleep. So, that means going back to practicing, until you learn how to make the biko properly, until you learn how to make the puto properly and you’re confident. The self-confidence comes with practice. And most of all – don’t forget this – learn and know what you do best and keep doing it. Nobody else is like you, Nastasha. Nobody else is like me. We’re all unique people. We all have our differences…

NA: And with that, like a magically timed flourish, the power went out in my apartment building because of a heavy snowstorm that was barreling outside. Talk about pulling out of the tropical paradise we almost felt like we were in, remembering trips to the Philippines and the heat of the countryside! Total contrast. It was the middle of winter, the middle of February for both of us on the east coast and everything outside was buried in at least a foot of snow.

NA: Anyway, Betty Ann ended with some valuable advice that I’ve definitely taken to heart – do what you want to do, do what you love to do, travel to the places where you know you’ll get to taste the real deal, and don’t be afraid of translating recipes in ways that you feel comfortable doing.

NA: That follows my personal take on cooking sous-vide Filipino recipes. I got a couple of them up in my blog. They’re definitely not traditional, but I love the precision of sous-vide cooking too much not to at least try and to see what a 24-hour oxtail peanut stew is like. Man, it’s delicious! It’s my super modern, slow-cooked version of kare-kare. I gotta say, the ligaments around those oxtail bones were the perfect bite. There’s no other way you could get that with regular cooking, they’d melt right into the sauce. Absolutely worth it. Anyway…

NA: So as a take-away, Betty Ann’s philosophy on cooking is something I appreciate and totally relate to. And I hope it’s encouraged you to cook a Filipino dish, maybe tonight or if not, sometime soon. At least look up a recipe, pick up a few ingredients that you can work into your own take on a particular Filipino dish. Forget about everything other than your desire to make something good, because, with a little bit of research and prep, it’s really not that hard to create a memorable Filipino meal, whether it’s a weeknight or special occasion, to share with others.

WRAP-UP

My warmest thanks this episode to Betty Ann Besa-Quirino. Please visit www.asianinamericamag.com for recipes – it’s a good time to try one out – and follow Betty Ann on Instagram and elsewhere online as well.

Music for this episode is by David Szestay, Eric and Magill, Squire Tuck and Blue Dot Sessions.

Visit Exploringfilipinokitchens.com for more information on the show. Do check it out, I’ve updated the website with a new look! It looks pretty slick! Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts from. As before, if you enjoyed the show, please recommend it to a friend, then maybe leave me a review on iTunes. I would really appreciate it.

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Maraming salamat and thank you, for listening.

This is a transcript of “Episode 06: Cooking Filipino Food At Home With Betty Ann Quirino” (Click the episode link for the audio!)