Recollections

The whole world will surely remember, for a long time, the horrendous attack on the World Trade Center in New York. We will each have our recollections of the year that passed. But to the mind of the homemaker, the biggest impact of 2001 was definitely the continuous and uncontrolled escalating cost of feeding the family, in a situation where some wage earners lost their jobs while others reckoned with decrease in income.

Not to mention the vendors who take advantage of special occasions, like the past holiday season, when jumbo prawns literally ‘jumped’ to being the most expensive item in the wet markets, selling at P700 a kilo! Rice went up a few centavos/pesos a kilo/sack, meat tagged from P120 to P175, depending on the cut and chicken at over P90 a kilo. Even vegetables went to an all-time high– Baguio beans at P60 a kilo, chicharo (snow peas) at P180, potatoes at P60 and green pepper at P150. Salmon, however, was cheaper in the wet markets starting from P380 a kilo. The rare apahap (sea bass) commanded a stiff price as well and they were very small.

Hopefully, prices will settle down. But perhaps we should also look at less expensive food stuff, local against imported–kangkong, sayote, upo, tinapa, daing, ready-to-cook tapa, tocino, longaniza, fish such as tilapia, hasa-hasa, samaral, tulingan, or even the lowly galunggong. Believe us, they make delicious viands.

Look around and source your food from non- popular brands, they normally sell for less without sacrificing flavor and quality. Try the Vitalife Deli products (based in Calamba, Laguna and soon will be introduced in Metro Manila outlets). As the company raises chicken, all their products are made of this meat. The line-up includes patties at P70 a pack, nuggets with sauce at P60, ham at P60 and hotdogs at P80.

In the Alabang area there is the Food Factory that makes what they call Borderless Food, meaning adobong bagoong at P60 a bottle, pickled pajo (seasonal) at P60, Pinoy Putanesca, Bicol Laing which can be really hot and smoked tilapia. Our brood simply loved the latter.

Connie’s Kitchen is in Quezon City, but their more gourmet products are sold in supermarkets around Manila. They have Bacalao Filipino, regular and spicy at P135, special chorizo, which can also be hot, mushroom paté and marinated kesong puti.

We will yet have to visit Robinsons ‘new concept’ store at Eastwood City. It is called Choices and certainly we are curious about what we (and you) will find there. Likewise there is the Suki market in San Pedro plus the trip to Antipolo where a good friend will bring us to the ‘tambakan’ of fresh and inexpensive seafood.

Back to the year 2001, which indeed went very fast, it was marked by the launch of a good collection of cookbooks. The beautiful thing about this is most of them focus on easy to prepare dishes, using available ingredients that are easy on the pocket.

The publishers of the popular Food Magazine came out with "The Best of Food Magazine" cookbook which contains 180 recipes, most of them Filipino. This one is almost a take-off from the Vogue (Australia) Entertaining Cookbook, in size and concept of presenting easy-to-follow recipes. That of Food is an interesting collection contributed by popularly known foodies, like former President Cory Aquino, who have been featured in previous issues of the magazine. It is a good buy at a little bit more than P300 a copy.

And while browsing in a book store, we came across this one–Cookbook Diary published by the Don Bosco Press Inc. with writers, researchers and designers from their School of Printing . This is a good one (P195 a copy) to have near your kitchen, specially for menu planning. Most recipes are of Italian origin. There is ample information (with photos) about kitchen utensils, herbs, nutritional data plus Bible verses to reflect on, ‘because men can not live by bread alone’. In each page (date) is a space to write on–your notes, innovations, menus etc. This then can very well be your second bible.