It’s hard to blog about food when your hands are always caked with bits of dry dough or slivers of garlic. When the chatter over meals with friends stretch past midnight, it leaves empty wine bottles on the floor and the camera forgotten. Then, I came across an essay entitled “Meals Without Photos” penned by Ricci Guevara, a dear friend, accomplished wordsmith and fellow foodie.
We first met when her chaotic tower of test and essay papers spilled onto my obsessively spotless desk in the faculty room in St. Scho back in ’97. With that haunting painting of Ophelia floating before she drowned tacked in front of her, I remember her saying she likes it because there was immortality in death. Great. Well I thought it was just downright creepy. Her little nook juxtaposed with my cardboard decoupage toilet roll box of bright yellow smiley faces, it was to be the start of an unexpected friendship.
“Meals Without Photos” by Nerisa Guevara
I had recently, obsessively, started taking photos of the summer meals I had eaten. Other people do it. I’ve seen their sites. I think I share the same joy at these shots framed like still life paintings, reminders of some abundance. This is the memory one hoards for the future lean seasons.
It isn’t the meal per se, but the other objects in the meal in the painting/ photo that always sparks my interest. The scene the table, the chair, the life. Who ate these and why and how and where. I did my best to frame the meal first, zoom my camera in and out, sometimes i press my cheek to the table to capture something against sky or tiptoe over the plate to get the overhead shot just right. I hold my breath and then I take my shot. Then putting my camera down, I would move the plate closer then eat the meal slowly and look out at the scene in front of me and just be my self eating this meal. I’d let the architecture of the dish topple onto a fork. I’d smile to myself. Chuckle sometimes. Then I’d hummmmm in the bliss of the bite. Who would care about the meal? I guess, my friends who love eating. And those are the friends that matter.
I wasn’t able take photos of these beautiful meals because they disappeared too quickly off their plates:
In the city of Baguio in the Philippines, at Baden Powell Inn, Might S. Gupit’s partner Michelle made these domestic flavorful lunches in their room which was the warm wooden heart of traveller friends like myself. The Chowchow, Casper would warm my feet with his blue-tongued immensity. I got copious amounts of sweet brewed coffee and spicy salabat sitting down across Might as she did her business from the same table with great calm and sage like zen. Michelle, with equally poised royalty, would dance her slow dance around the pressure cooker. The rich flaky Binagoongan she served that one lunch, the sole meal, was silky with fresh bagoong alamang and the sweet pork meat flaked and fell away in lucious tender threads.
The pale peach rarity of a Trout raised and bred in the Sagada mountains prepared simply smoked on a bed of wood chips( Villia had precious culinary knowledge of the particular local wood perfect for smoking from Sagada forests, Alder i think it was) was served on a bed of greens in House on the Rocks. The kitchen where this was prepared was nestled safely between Sagada cliffs. Walls millions of years old were draped with pots and pans. An industrial oven was wedged between its knees. I ate the head of this Trout with a lot of reverence, relishing the soft ash flavor, pushing the eyeballs to the side of the plate for the last luscious bite. Dressing them with lashes of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
Mickey Ybanez’s and Mark Valenzuela’s saucy pork adobo, almost like hungma, and the side of boiled squash crescents with extra virgin olive oil, cracked black pepper and balsamic vinegar dressing on that Rainy Dumaguete night just kept everyone lit up inside. Mark and I preferred the adobo dry (childhood stubbornness, all that crunchy garlic fierceness) and Mickey courted all of us with the stewy idea. The dirty kitchen of this teracotta sculptor’s home roared with the laughter of hardy cooking men. We women watched. And the magic began all vinegary and spicy and the rain fell cold and hard. The squash was sliced into crescents to be roasted, but were simmered instead and dressed in extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar and fresh-cracked pepper. Anna, Mark’s partner’s Austrailian blue eyes fluttered with pleasure. The sweet ochre slices spread easily like butter on the turgid tang of pork. We didn’t even leave the green squash rind. The small cannon balls of pepper were left rolling on our plates.
I was let into the heart of each house to partake these meals. I thank all of them immmensely for these meals in my memory’s eye.
Cherie Altea Bitanga finds herself constantly making food, talking about food and around people who know food. Her daily adventures go beyond her own kitchen in Singapore, spanning from the nondescript holes-in-the-wall to sumptuous dining adventures. She believes in the art of slow food and scours places in hopes of bringing home unique spices, salts and oils. She is also the occasional artist and food writer who learned how to cook early in life by inheriting culinary family traditions from her motherland: the Philippines.
For over a decade, this blogger’s career as an ESL instructor provided a multicultural atmosphere working with diplomats, celebrities, nuns, priests, politicians as well as high school and college students from all over the world. When she grows up, she hopes to cook for a living to celebrate her family’s culinary legacy.
