Wash it down with beer

Lillian Too, the queen of feng shui horoscopes, wrote that September would be a really slow month for Monkeys. I am a Monkey. Last Sunday at the market was a really slow day for me. Nobody asked about the postcards made from my paintings. Somebody asked about the anting-anting I sell but I knew he had no intention to buy. This Sunday I knew Too was right. Nothing much was happening.

My eyelids got heavy. I must have looked sad and droopy because my buddy Joey came by and asked if I had tried the foreign fare. “What foreign fare?” I asked, smiling sleepily at him. “This is a local market.”

“Come, I’ll make you sample them. Maybe that will put a bit of life into you.”

First stop, down the corridor from me, after the lechon but before the Chinese noodles, is the Portuguese booth, Lisboa, run by Mario Pires and his Filipino wife, Arlene. They have quite a spread of seafood: ameijoas bulhao pato, which means clams, not duck; mexilhao grelhado or mussels/tahong; and caracoleto grelhado or kuhol. Don’t you love those names? Ameijoas for almejas in Spanish and carcoleto for kuhol, snails. Escargots in French but these are the local ones, the ones we cook in coconut milk and chilies. I tried the clams, which looked a lot like our local halaan but tasted different, deliciously interesting. “You don’t have ginger in it, do you?” I asked. 

“No,” he said. “Cilantro.”

“It tastes really different and really good,” I said.

They also had bacalhau, bacalao, in Spanish and frango assado, grilled chicken in Portuguese. This had a good hot sauce. I liked it, too. And finally they had two desserts: pasteis de natas, which is similar to the egg tarts at Lord Stow’s but they encourage you to eat it with a sprinkle of cinnamon, and bolo de bolacha, which is an interesting cake made up of Marie cookies piled one on top of the other and held together with cream and nuts. 

I found the Portuguese food interesting, similar to Spanish food but with its own twist, and I loved the spelling of the words similar to Spanish and yet not similar at all. I don’t know how to explain it. It was great. One of these Sundays I will eat Portuguese food.

Then we went on to the Turkish booth owned by a Turkish man, Levend Ekizoglu, and his Filipino wife, Claire. For that we had to cross to the center of the market. Their specialty was the dessert baklava. I tasted my first baklava when I was a student in Lausanne almost a century ago. Here, they have it with pistachios, walnuts, and hazelnuts. They also have baklava buds with walnuts and something they call sobyet with semolina cream, which they say is a softer version of baklava.

In addition, they had spinach quiche, cheese pastry with hotdog, Turkish crepe, Turkish meatball. I wondered when we would hit the Turkish delight but, no, the Turkish call it loukhoum. Interesting food, too, with very different flavors from the Portuguese.

Then finally we went down to the Indian booth. The young Indian chef manned his booth alone last Sunday. The doctor advised his wife to take bed rest. I thought she might be pregnant.  Maybe he, too had a Filipino wife.   He introduced me to his chicken cooked in yogurt. I loved it and promised I would have it for lunch. He made me taste his paneer, quite good also. Then he offered me a cup of his yogurt drink. I turned that down politely, not because I did not like it — but I’m a Coca-Cola freak. I prefer to drink Coke or beer with my meals.

That ended our foreign tour. I must admit that the food items were all so delicious and different that it was difficult to decide what I wanted for lunch. Fortunately a friend dropped in and bought us lunch. He loves Indian food. I had my chicken in yogurt and something delicious with red kidney beans combined with empanadang Vigan, ukoy and beer.   I bought the German beer.

At the end of lunch we had too much to eat. I dragged myself back to my booth. Still had not sold anything. Still no traffic building. So I joined another group of friends who were having lunch and giggling. This is what I love about this market — my friends are here. 

Lunch is always fun because we mix whatever food we want to sample and a lot of teasing and laughing. So I didn’t sell a thing. So Lillian Too was right, as she usually is, or so she claims. But I got to sample some of the new foreign fare and liked it a lot. That should fill up my next three Sundays. By then it will be October, one of my best months. Lillian Too said so.

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