Joe Philippines: Partaking of Food

After the lengthy post that I wrote previously on the ins and outs of shopping for food, I thought I would show you a few miscellaneous food pictures that I took during the course of our trip. Above is a plastic bag of quail eggs which we boiled and snacked on. It was my first time to eat them and while they were similar in taste to a boiled chicken eggs, their texture was creamier and not as dry as a chicken egg. In fact, I liked them better than hard boiled chicken eggs though you had to peel three or four to equal one chicken egg.

Fresh shrimp cooking on a little charcoal grill on the patio. Many Filipinos use these as a sort of summer kitchen to keep the heat outdoors.

Above is dragon fruit which has a taste and texture similar to kiwi fruit. I saw numerous dragon fruit plantations as we were driving around. They consisted of a field of posts set into the ground about five feet apart with a used motor cycle tire fasted to the top of the post in a horizontal position with a cross brace. The dragon fruit plant was a cactus like plant that would be tied to the center post and as it grew up and through the tire would drape over it. I'm not sure when harvest season was but I didn't see any plants with fruit on them while I was there.

When is the last time you had bottled pop? For me, I'm guessing my last time was nearly 30 years ago when I was in college. I was happy to see that bottled pop is still alive and well in the Philippines. The only drawbacks were that it came in teeny 8 oz bottles which are shadows of their American plastic counterparts and that the servers inevitably stuck a well used and recycled straw in it when serving it to me. I always took the straw out and just drank from the bottle because I'm guessing the straws were probably never sterilized or even rinsed.

Road side vendors abound on the island and you are never more than a stones throw from food if you want to pull off to the side. Many times the vendor isn't there but if you pull over and honk your car horn, one will quickly appear and quickly open up a buko (young coconut) or as in the picture above, wrap up some tupig in a plastic bag to eat on your journey. Tupig is just one form of a gelatinous rice and coconut mixture that is found in snack type foods. In this case it is wrapped in banana leaves and grilled. Another form called tinubong finds it in the cavity of a bamboo shoot and steamed. In all cases it is a sweet and tasty snack.

When visiting restaurants in the Philippines, everything is served with rice as can be seen in the above photo. This platter of food was served family style for about a dozen of us and we quickly went through all the mountain of rice seen above and ordered and consumed a second mountain to go with the BBQ meats, salads and sides. I think it cost me about $25 for everything (in 2014 dollars).

While in Baguio, my mother-in-law wanted to throw my oldest daughter a Filipino birthday party at their most popular fast food restaurant Jollibee. The two pictures above and below are their versions of the happy meal. The one above is fried chicken, a cake of rice and a side of gravy. In the picture below the cake of rice has been replaced by spaghetti. I have eaten pretty much everything put in front of me during my time in the Philippines but I have yet been able to try fast food spaghetti. I chose the option above with the rice cake and it wasn't too bad though I was confused about what to do with the side of gravy. I ended up pouring it on top of my rice.

  

Above is charcoal grilled squid purchased from the wet market earlier in the morning. Below is a pinakbet pizza which we saw while driving though a town and bought for a snack along the road. Traditional pinakbet contains fish sauce, bitter melon, string beans, tomatoes and a few other ingredients and is served as kind of like a stew eaten with rice. The pizza form which was a first for all of us, American and Filipino alike, was pretty tasty.