Beyond adobo

We celebrated Filipino Food Month in this quiet island state where food ingredients mostly mimic those of home.

We’re new in Fiji, our shipment has just arrived waiting to be unpacked so I was not equipped with kitchen utensils needed to prepare dishes to advance the theme “Connected by Taste: The Filipino Food in the Flavors of ASEAN.” But celebrate we must! Like the self-taught home cook, whose culinary flair is guided by the ingenuity of my two mothers, both great cooks, I thought of how we can present Filipino food, given our limitations, while making use of locally available ingredients. I also kept in mind what our good friend and STAR columnist Chit Juan wrote about in her recent column: “Any recipe can be tweaked as long as the cook or chef comes up with a dish worthy of repeating and is pleasing to the palate.”

Consul Emi and I spent a few days discussing what we could present, given our constraints while exploring potential ingredients as we scoured Suva’s Saturday market. Kamote, known as kumala in Fiji, was hands down a preferred ingredient because of its abundance; polvoron is a pasalubong staple while corn is a universal food. We decided on a sweet selection of polvoron, kamote cue and maja blanca.

In keeping with our government’s directive to make celebrations prudent, we opted for the more economical tent rental in a Sunday bazaar, which are popular in Suva. This vibrant open market of pitched tents and friendly vendors showcase handicrafts, clothes in dominant bula motifs, preloved books, plants, handmade trinkets and food stalls. Filipino-owned booths are among the crowd drawers.

As it is our newly established embassy’s goal to strengthen engagement with Filipinos in Fiji, Consul Emi, who steered the event, coordinated with Filipino food vendors to participate. They have made Fiji home for the last 30 years or so and have done a remarkable job of introducing our cuisine to Fijians and the international community here. Our enterprising kababayans sold home-cooked adobo, sisig, pansit palabok, sapin-sapin, pichi-pichi, biko, ube cake, pandesal, pan de coco and more. I observed how their patrons, suki for years perhaps, purposedly bought food that to my mind had become their favorites over the years.

Recognizing that an encounter with food is experiential, we invited our guests to a polvoron making activity. After demonstrating how to make a well-molded, firm piece of polvoron and how to wrap it neatly without tearing its delicate paper wrapper, I encouraged our first two guests, Nobuko and Lea, to do the same. They were delighted with their finished product and were more excited when we offered our samplers in three variants – classic, cashew and chocolate – all wrapped in different colored paper to distinguish each flavor. We were cautious about food allergies and warned our guests that the ones wrapped in blue contain nuts.

Team Suva’s lean team of six had specific roles such that Dan, the finance officer, delicately sliced the maja blanca into sampler sizes, making sure the crunchy budbud or toppings are evenly spread on every piece. Sitti, Nilo and Jing set aside their tasks as admin, communications and ATN officers, respectively, and decorated our stall with festive banderitas. Tables were adorned with graceful Narda’s runners with standees of Philippine flags completing the decor.

At home, the Philippine ambassador liked his distinct task of tasting maja blanca which I cooked the night before (maja is best eaten when chilled) and polvoron which I prepared earlier. I doubt he’d make a credible food critique though because every time I asked him how the finished product tasted, he consistently commented, “Masarap!”

We were honored by the presence of the ambassadors of Indonesia and Malaysia and their spouses – a demonstration of how ASEAN member-states support each other; the chief of protocol and another officer of Fiji’s Foreign Ministry and External Trade with their respective families; kababayans and bazaar goers who gladly sampled our food and gamely joined our polvoron making activity.

For one of our guests, there’s no better time to celebrate the nostalgia of food than the first time we met him at an earlier event hosted by the High Commission of Malaysia. Jeff was first posted in ADB “many years ago at its original building in Roxas Boulevard” and happily revealed “my first love was from the Philippines.” Yet I sensed his more enduring love affair with Filipino food as he enumerated his preferences: kare kare, sinigang, kaldereta, kilawin, halo halo among others. He recalled the times they dined at a restaurant “where you use your hand to eat” – “Kamayan,” we said to the rescue. Jeff spoke tenderly of his adventure with Filipino food like it was only yesterday, punctuating his stories as if relishing the flavors of every food he mentioned. He was probably disappointed when he visited our stall not seeing any of his favorites, but he was quick to hint that he could probably taste them again at our residence one day. We said, why not?

The late cultural historian, food critic, writer and scholar Doreen G. Fernandez wrote about food as more than an act of eating but also “an act of understanding, an extension of experience.” Our over two decades of foreign service postings through embassy events, food festivals, encounters with the Filipino diaspora up to intimate gatherings at home genuinely validate what DGF famously said about food.

Our celebration of Filipino Food Month through the sweet treats we prepared and the variety of dishes our kababayans thoughtfully cooked is an affirmation of our country’s presence here in Fiji and other Pacific Island states. We are bound not only by the versatile coconut (a staple ingredient in most Fijian cuisine and many Filipino dishes, especially in the Bicol region where I come from) but by an all-encompassing appreciation of how we can expand cultural understanding, particularly through food beyond adobo.