imagery

A rambutan.

Pagsanjan.

Our Christmas tree.

almost pasko

Pasko is Filipino for Christmas, and although there's no snow and I have yet to see a live Christmas tree, the holiday is pretty similar. There is certainly as much commercialized, Santa Claus-ed hullabaloo as there is in the USA. You may be surprised to know The Christmas Season starts even earlier here, since there's no holiday after after All Saints Day to keep it from spilling over into the prior parts of year. The evening news, for example, kicked off their X Days Until Christmas at 50 --well after the seasonal tunes had become ubiquitous.

Anyway our solid three days of work-related Christmas parties are over and I managed to make it to a friend's place in a different part of the country. I have to laugh about traveling here because otherwise I want to kill things, but I did eventually manage to get to where I was going. Now that I'm here it's good to sleep in and not have much to do for a while, other than cook and chat. The plan is for gumbo on Christmas eve.

I probably won't post again before Christmas, so everybody have a good one, especially those of you who I would otherwise be spending the day with. Love you all!

gata ng niyog

("milk of shredded coconut")

Like the Eskimos and their snow, the Pinoys have their coconut, their shredded coconut, their coconut tree, and I think there are different words depending on whether or not it's ripe or not. That said, it's not so ubiquitous in their diet as you might imagine. Other than the juice, which is available fresh and slightly sweetened with nice slippery strands of the flesh from street vendors everywhere, and the milk, which is used as a base in numerous dishes, you don't come across it too often. They make a coconut wine that I haven't tried yet, which isn't surprising since I've been consuming alcohol about once a month. However, they rarely use it to top desserts, and you can't, to my knowledge, buy coconut-flavored anything.

Instead, one of the most common sweet-thing flavors is the purple root vegetable called "ube" (ooh-bay). It's not too far from a potato, and certainly not as sweet as a sweet potato or yam. But you can buy ube-flavored ice cream anywhere and other types of sweet ube-flavored junk food as well.

Different cultural conceptions of food are one of the things that continually takes me unawares. In Germany they have cold cuts on bread (with lots of butter, of course) for breakfast. In the Philippines cheese is most commonly found on top of desserts. And you can buy sweet hot dogs.