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.