My first visit to the Philippines

When I fell in love with Filipino food + recipes for garlic fried rice and garlic fried pasta

I am finally starting to get in the groove with this newsletter and better understand what I want to share and how. Thank you for joining me! From here forward, I aim to send one newsletter a week on Mondays or Tuesdays. My focus will be on unearthing histories and personal experiences—from myself and others—about food, memory, collectivity, and how we create our own realities. I’m thinking about it as a food- and art-focused anthropology of the small universe I perceive around me. Towards that end, I’ll share personal writing and projects as well as the work of people I’m close with. (See my post about my brother’s incredible animation.) I’ll also start incorporating recipes, as in this post. A huge thank you to my dear Stef Choi for drawing a Group Living logo featuring a nice ripe banana (more on that someday).

I am strongly driven to share my perceptions, but I find myself less inclined towards a single subject like so many other great newsletters (i.e. history of cocktails and cookbooks). You are part of this experiment! Please let me know when something amuses, intrigues, annoys or bores you. This is a playground, and I hope that as I continue to imagine, invent, learn, and grow, I can entertain myself and you. If something really works for you, please share it with others.

A few questions for you, my first readers:

• Would you like a consistent section with movies, books and foods I’ve loved?

• Would you like more recipes?

What follows is some writing I dug up from the waste bin like a true hoarder. I wanted to share because I have had the Philippines on my mind. I am delighted to see a huge uptick in media about Filipino food and the Filipino experience in America just in the last few months. In Portland, I’ve just learned about two new women-led Filipino dessert projects: SHOP HALO HALO and KUMARE. And I recently read about the continuing human rights violations of the Duterte regime in the Philippines, which inspired me to sign this petition and continue to reflect on how U.S. colonialism lingers internationally. Food is always an invitation to learn about context.

I wrote an article for Oregon Humanities this past winter called Kitchen Ghost in which I asked the question: Where are the Filipino restaurants? I spent a long time trying to uncover the answer and shared what I’d learned in that essay. While researching and writing for that piece, I wrote about my visits to the Philippines, although I didn’t include them in the final. Here are those memories and recipes from my family.

Delirious

When we arrived, our hotel room looked indistinguishable from any other hotel room, all gray and beige floral non-patterns, but the smell inside was so intense it lit up the room with color. The dominant aroma was hot sugar, but I could also smell ripe apricots and orange when you rip into the peel. My mom’s cousin Dita had sent us a case of perfectly ripe Manila mangoes, picked somewhere that morning. These were the first mangos I had ever tasted, and I could not believe their pure, intense sweetness with that tangy acidity that made my mouth ask for more. My mom ate one, but how many did I eat? I don’t know. Three, four, maybe eight? I vividly remember holding one of the small oblong mangos to my cheek and affectionately rocking it side to side like it were a baby doll I was cradling. I was twelve, just old enough that I had stopped playing with dolls, but young enough that the language of having a doll and imbuing it with my internal world was still close at hand. The mangos came to life. This was the sweetness of another home, the Philippines, a place where my grandpa Goyo was born, where my eldest aunties and uncles had been raised, where the chicken adobo I had come to love more than anything, with that same acidity that never lets your mouth quit, was the popular national dish. This fruit was the best thing I had ever tasted, and I could eat an entire box if I wanted, right there, right then.

Before the trip, our doctor had suggested we take the anti-malarial drug Lariam, formally known as Mefloquine. My mom refused, but I gamely acceded. By the 2000s, Lariam was well known for bringing on hallucinations, anxiety, depression and psychosis, the drug in name and effect having unintended similarity to delirium, but at the time, people just warned that it gave you intense dreams. 

That night, I had my first lucid dreams. I was standing on the corner of a street in the Philippine countryside at night, waiting alone. The night was muggy; the world was lit by a warm neon glow that pulsed. Slowly, I saw an old man biking towards me. He was spindly and hairless and biked like a mechanical toy, in creaky, large motions. As he got nearer, he turned toward me with an enormous, gaping grin, and in that moment I saw that bugs were crawling out of the corners of his eyes, his nostrils, his ears, his mouth, insects of all sizes and shapes—ants, beetles, cockroaches, flies—swarming from every orifice of his face. I awoke in an itchy, sweaty panic, and I was in my bedroom at home, had never gone to the Philippines, the trip was still ahead of me, and I shook at my own anxiety about going so far away. My dad knocked on my door, and when he came in, he was a grasshopper as tall as the room, so big he had to fold himself in half to fit through the door. His actual hairy mustache sat on green bamboo-like lips, and it drooped towards me as he brought his mouth towards my face for a kiss. I screamed. And then I woke up. And I woke up. And I woke up. And I woke up. Every dream was an insect nightmare. Every time I awoke, I felt awake. I could no longer differentiate between the dream world and reality, so much so that when I actually awoke, in our hotel room in Manila, I waited and waited for the next horror to unfold. I waited until morning, when it did, and was both more real and more surreal than the dreams: a series of bumps and pustules like tiny insect larvae was spreading across my face. I was breaking out in a rash so extreme it had its own heat and pulse. I was allergic to the mango skin, which contains urushiol, the same toxic substance found in poison ivy. 

What had happened? How could I be allergic to something I loved as much as those Manila mangos? Was there just not enough Filipino in me? Had my eastern and northern European inheritance weakened me? 

My mom named me Lola after her father’s mother, but on that trip I learned that Lola means ‘grandmother’ in Tagalog. She’d named me the equivalent of nana or baba or grammy, turning me into an easy joke and an obvious imposter: Who is this 12-year-old grandmother? 

I spent the rest of that trip having an amazing and assaulting sensory experience. I wore a bandana over the bottom half of my face like a bandit. I don’t remember the discomfort of the weeping rash, although I recall how grotesque I looked. Looking back, I now realize that none of my relatives ever saw my face. I met my great aunts and uncles, in their nineties, who kept fighting cocks and wore barongs—beautiful, stiff, formal shirts made of native fibers like pineapple leaf and banana with a round collar and lacy embroidery down the front. Their skin was smooth and soft like my grandfather’s, their elegance worn in like old leather. In the streets of Manila, I encountered poverty more extreme and heart wrenching than any I had ever seen alongside the jarring disconnection of extreme wealth. Vacation was a seamless extension of the surreal and hyper-vivid world I entered each night in my dreams.

Near the end of our trip, we flew to the island of Palawan, southwest of Manila, and hired a guide to take us snorkeling. His name was Romeo and he was a huge NBA fan, as so many Filipinos are. He loved Arvydas Sabonis, a Lithuanian big man on my home team, the Portland Trail Blazers, with super-hero like passing abilities, a lumbering gait, and a step-dad-style hook shot with no arc but incredible accuracy. Romeo took us in a put-put motorboat to a tiny island near other tiny islands amid azure water, each with its own small beach. I snorkeled in a circle around the entire island, watching tropical fish dart in and out of technicolor coral. The saltwater stung but eventually felt healing on the now crusted-over sores around my mouth. After a few hours, Romeo, who had caught a fish while my mom and I snorkeled, grilled it over an open fire and served it to us with calamansi limes, chopped tomatoes with green onions, garlic fried rice, and a cold Coke. It was the best thing I had ever tasted. Better than mangos. 

We returned to the Philippines when I was in high school. My grandpa was turning 100. He had lived with us and my mom’s sister Gloria in cycles for years, but as he got older, he moved in permanently with my eldest aunt, Dolores, in Manila, where his GE pension could accommodate two full-time caretakers. All of his eight children and a spattering of grandchildren flew to the Philippines for his birthday, and Dolores threw a party for the ages. As befitting an important celebration in the Philippines, in the center of the table was lechon, a golden and crispy skinned whole suckling pig. There was also a tower of Filipino egg rolls known as lumpia; platters of pancit Canton and pancit Palabok, grease-shimmering noodles both descended from Chinese dishes; garlic fried rice, and vinegary adobo made from native sugar cane vinegar. There were foods I had never seen nor tasted before: peanutty rich kare kare oxtail stew; sinigang, a steaming tamarind stew, and sisig, a heap of well-seasoned organs. There were delicious sweets: flan, buko pie, and a lottery ball collection of lychee. And in the midst of this scene, my grandpa sat spectral and handsome, pursing his bottom lip in and out.

My grandpa Gregorio “Goyo” Marquez

Unlike the earlier trip, this time I was less drugged, since I had refused the next generation of anti-malarials, and less monstrous, since I hadn’t touched a mango since. I was also a little older and more observant. Over and over, I noticed that this is how food tastes in my home: The generous quantity of garlic. The exact degree of sautéing the garlic so that it browns a little more than deemed acceptable in Italian cooking. The instinct to be generous with oil. The ubiquitous tomatoes, green onions, and limes. The willingness to go further with acidity than you expect. I believe that my mom has always cooked through the lens of her childhood—of her mother’s very personal takes on Filipino food—even as she experimented with global cuisine like all the hippies did. In our home, we ate garlic fried rice, just like I remember off the island of Palawan. But we also ate garlic refried pasta, as much Filipino in flavor and technique as Italian, and something so simple and delicious it’s crazy to me that it’s not the food of every childhood. Filipino food is a mash-up of colonial, Chinese, and Indigenous influences that have been bended and shaped over time. This is pan-Asian food, in its home—generations of cooks navigating complex identities, heaped and collaged.

Sinangag (Garlic Fried Rice)

Sinangag is the flavor I most associate with the Philippines—garlic cooked until golden and crispy, infusing every bite of rice you take. It’s a simple thing that’s perfectly complete as it is and never seems to grow old. I don’t need a lot more than this to feel satisfied. Having said that, this is usually served for breakfast with meat and a fried egg in a combo known as “silog.” You can identify these on menus when the name of the accompanying meat dish forms a portmanteau with the suffix “ilog” or “silog.” “Hamsilog” is—yes, you guessed it—ham with garlic fried rice and an egg, and “longsilog” is longaniza sausage with garlic fried rice and an egg. I like to eat garlic fried rice with chopped tomato and green onion, in season, which my mom always served my grandpa with his favorite food of all time, a pork chop.  

Makes 2 to 4 servings

3 tablespoons high heat oil (like sunflower) 
8 cloves garlic, smashed
2 to 3 cups leftover cooked rice, cooled
1/4 teaspoon salt
Fresh grind of black pepper

In a wok or skillet over medium heat, heat oil until shimmering. Add the smashed garlic and cook, keeping the heat low and turning the garlic periodically, until the cloves turn a warm golden color. Watch carefully as garlic can turn from tan to dark brown quickly. Remove the fried garlic from pan and set on a cutting board. Add the rice to the pan. Stir to coat it in garlic oil, then spread in a layer in the pan and leave it alone for 3 to 5 minutes so it develops a nice crust. Check, lifting a corner with your spatula. When it has a nice color, jostle and flip the rice, and once again settle and leave it alone for 2 minutes. Repeat this at least once more until the rice is fully reheated and starting to get crispy on many of its edges. Meanwhile, mince your fried garlic cloves, return most of the garlic to pan, and fold to incorporate. Continue to fry so the garlic gets its final bit of crisping up. Garnish with the last fried garlic bits, along with a pinch of salt and black pepper.

Chopped Tomato and Green Onions

This is like pico de gallo without any heat. It would be made with calamansi limes, native to the Philippines, but limes or lemons work too. It would also be made with bago-ong, Filipino krill paste, but since that’s pretty uncommon (unless you bought some to make other Thai or Filipino dishes), you can omit or add a dash of fish sauce or skip both, like my mom, and just add salt. This cuts through the pleasant, lip-smacking greasiness of both the garlic fried rice and any meaty accompaniments.

2 medium ripe plum tomatoes, diced
2 tablespoons chopped green onions
Juice of 1 calamansi lime, lemon or lime
Freshly ground black pepper
Heavy pinch of salt
Optional: 1 to 2 tablespoons bago-ong or several squirts of fish sauce

Add everything to a bowl and stir thoroughly to integrate. Eat that day! No reason to put this in the fridge—the tomatoes will become sad and fusty. 

Garlic Fried Pasta

Whenever we had day-old leftover pasta, my mom would panfry it in garlicky oil until the noodles crisped on their edges. It’s so much tastier than, say, microwaving them to a shadow of themselves or drenching them in a casserole. This makes something entirely new, with contrasting crunchy and chewy textures. And, it turns out, it’s the same process as Filipino garlic fried rice—and also all those Chinese-descended pan-fried noodle dishes including pancit Canton. Did my mom take inspiration from them? Or is she just the master of commonsense, because why would you reheat day-old pasta any other way? It took me moving away from home to discover this is uncommon. How weird. Wake up everybody! Panfry your leftover pasta.

Makes 1 to 2 servings

1 tablespoon butter 
1 tablespoons olive oil
4 to 6 cloves garlic, smashed
2 cups leftover cooked pasta, cooled 
1/4 teaspoon salt
Fresh grind of black pepper
Optional: chili flakes
Recommended: grated Parmesan Reggiano

In a wok or skillet over medium heat, melt the butter and oil together until its shimmering but before the butter takes on any color. Add the smashed garlic and cook, keeping the heat low and turning the garlic periodically, until they turn a warm golden. Watch carefully as it can turn from tan to dark brown quickly. Remove the fried garlic from pan and set on a cutting board. Add the pasta to the pan. Stir to coat it in garlic oil, then do not disturb the pasta. Leave it alone for 3 to 5 minutes so it develops a nice crust. Check, lifting a corner with your spatula. Then jostle and flip and once again settle and leave it alone for a few minutes. (If the pasta seems especially dry, put in a spoonful of water.) Repeat this at least once more until the pasta is fully reheated and starting to get crispy on many of its edges. Meanwhile, mince your fried garlic cloves, return most of garlic to pan, and fold to incorporate. Continue to fry so the garlic gets its final bit of crisping up. Garnish with the last fried garlic bits, along with a pinch of salt, a fresh grind of black pepper, optional chili flakes, and a snow shower of freshly grated Parmesan Reggiano.