noel: hey fuki, check out these pictures from the motherland
fuki: is that your dad in this picture?
noel: yup, that’s him eating balut.
fuki: he looks so young
noel: he’s 62
fuki: oh, it must be from eating all the unborn duck fetus
balut is the name of a filipino delicacy. it’s a boiled duck egg with a duck embryo inside. one of my uncles actually has a balut farm balut nursery duck morgue duck matrix baby duck killing camp sells balut. my dad loves it. i’ve never seen him happier than he is when eating balut. my mom is afraid to eat it now though. my sister and i, while we haven’t tried it, aren’t morally opposed to it.
there are often times, when for fun, i’ll try to challenge my uber catholic parents on some of their views. usually i’ll try to find fault with their argument by citing some biblical precedent. my mom is usually obsessed with me getting a haircut. so when she starts going on and on about how long my hair is (it never is), i’ll usually say “well you know who had long hair…Jesus!” and then my mom usually concedes. with my dad, i said “how can you be pro-life, but continue to abort unborn duck. you can’t be against abortion, but for balut.” in response, i think he bit off the unborn duck’s head.
any discussion of food in the philippines warrants the obligatory inclusion of lechon. i’m not too big a fan of pork, but i do heartily approve of it’s use for decorative purposes. in the mega malls, we found another filipino favorite: tsitsaron (pork rinds). due to the pronunciation of tsitsaron, (chi-cha-ron), apparently they decided to give (as flips are so wont to do) the snack a nickname:
FLIPS EAT CHINKS FOR BREAKFAST!!!
taken alone, the text above would seem to suggest that all the food we ate still had all of its organs and appendages intact (where they had properly formed). that would be all the westernized meals (i <3 filipino spaghetti) that we ate at home and in the mega malls. all the fast food chains you’d recognize in the states are in the philippines, but they often have a filipino twist. the 7-11s in the philippines have a sio-down (cha siu bao) and the food packaging tends to be more colorful.
one thing that surprised me about filipinos in the philippines was how often they ate. there were two breakfasts, lunch, merienda, dinner, and some more snacks during the day. i suppose i had a different idea growing up. my mom used to tell us stories of how often times when they were young, they’d only have a bowl of rice to eat for a day. now that i think about it, there’s been days when i’ve only had a bowl of rice to eat. but that’s usually with banana sauce. oh and i suppose that’s just because i’m lazy.
fruit at a filipino market
the food i’ll miss the most though will definitely have to be the fruits (and fruit products). the bananas, the pineapple, the chico, the list goes on and on. there are these dwarf bananas that are really sweet. but the mother of them all has got to be the filipino mango. i’ve tried buying mangos in the states, but they’re never near the quality of the ones that come from the philippines. my mom said that often, the mangos labeled “manila mangos” are actually from mexico. the mangos in the motherland are super sweet, not fibrous, and are so soft, that the way we usually eat them is with a spoon. cutting up mangos into small slices means you have an inferior mango. we had all things mango in the philippines, including mango ice cream. i really wish i could have smuggled some back.
