Headpack

A sack of rice on the head.

I often think about a parallel universe where, by some twist of fate, carrying stuff on the head gained more popularity than carrying stuff off the shoulders. Carrying stuff on your head does, after all, allow you to bring around 20% of your body weight around without increasing energy consumption.


A woman carrying some stones in a basket on her head.

How would our modern bags look? Would we be reaching above our heads for our wallets, not doing the whole cumbersome backpack maneuver? Would the cliche silhouette of the mountainclimber resemble like The Head?


Rootcrops up the mountain, on her head.


A bunch of grasses, on a banana leaf to prevent itchiness, on her head.


Upland pottery with a woman with, well, stuff on her head.


An empty "head basket", containing a pine needle cushion for the top of the head.

Wood Organizing

Wood arranged like banana turon, Sagada.

Unwarranted Coffee Expectations

Green coffee beans drying out in Sagada.

I was sent a package of roasted coffee from Mindanao sometime ago, and several packets were ground very finely and burnt quite severely. It was bitter, and the solids kept getting into the beverage, when done both on a drip machine and a French press. When I asked my friend, whose coffee ("Kape Moro") is a hit every week at the local wet markets, he explained to me that every town has its own preferred form and way of preparing the bean.


More green beans in Sagada.

Some areas like it roasted until it is extremely bitter. Some like it a little bit lighter. Because they do not own coffeemakers, some people boil grounds with water in a pot or kettle and strain the liquid. Others pour boiling water into a cup containing finely powdered coffee-- and eat the resulting bitter muck at the bottom when they are finished drinking. The bitterness is often a measure for potency and provides a "kick". Apparently, because the Moslems cannot take alcohol, there are some "everyday" avenues for mind-alteration.


Coffee drying out in Alfonso, Cavite.

In a world where a small group of connoisseurs exist for every large commodity, it can be easy to invalidate folk usage. Sometimes we have to be reminded that there is no one (or two, or three) way(s) to prepare a certain food, and we need to be confident enough to explore our own preferences. In a country where many people still grow coffee trees in their backyards for personal stash, there are equally many ways to enjoy it.

Halo-Halo With Macaroni

High-elevation halo-halo. To keep you cool in the cold. More photos and a video below.

It's halo-halo season now. I dunno about you, but I've definitely stopped for this icy snack on the road more than once since the onset of the blistering heat. For those who aren't familiar, here's a short description of the snack in a Gourmet article on Asian iced desserts:

The gaudiest is surely halo-halo, which has all the exuberant gaiety one associates with Philippine culture at its happiest. Halo-halo means "mix-mix" in Tagalog and is often used as a metaphor for the Philippines' own distinctive mixture of East and West. You can see these cross-influences in the dessert itself, a mélange of ingredients served in a tall, clear glass and eaten with a long spoon. When you get it at a stall in Manila, the bottom of your glass is first covered with a crazy blend of ingredients that can include macapuno (sweetened coconut meat), jackfruit, sliced cantaloupe, mango cubes, bits of plantain, sweetened garbanzos, mung beans, and gelatin made from agar-agar. These are buried beneath a big scoop of ice, then topped with evaporated milk, pieces of leche flan sliced like tamago sushi, and maybe a big scoop of ice cream, ideally yam. Bright, sweet, and bursting with attractions, halo-halo is the Las Vegas of iced desserts.

Some, like Felice Prudente Sta. Maria, claim that halo-halo developed from Japanese immigrants' mitsumame or mongo con hielo (mung bean with ice), which was a snack originally made with snow in their home country before commercial ice shaving came about. Sta. Maria posits that Filipinos began adding fruit and flan to the imported concoction.

I'm more inclined to think that it is a post-ice (this would mean after 1904 for our country) modification of our guinataan, a general snack classification of a sweet soup or porridge made with gata (coconut milk) and whatever bean, root crop, or fruit you want to add.

One should observe the different forms of halo-halo relative guinumis, where some versions use shaved ice (it is the glass on the right) and the others, just coconut milk.

Anyway, the whole point is that such things are constantly evolving with new additions to the market, and there must be so many tangents on their evolution that your guess is as good as mine. But I'm betting ice changed a pre-existing snack drastically and created halo-halo as we know it. Then canned evaporated milk made it easy to assemble and sell on the streets, and then commercial ice cream saw the entry of "special" (a la mode) halo-halo. Now, in Sagada, they've started to add macaroni pasta to theirs (see topmost photo of this post).


Options: corn, camote or sweet potato, gelatin made from seaweed, coconut strips, melon strips.

It might sound hard to wrap your head around this, but among all the crunch and firmness of the beans and fruit, the doughy, chewy nature of a noodle is welcome.


The glass of halo-halo sitting on another color of gelatin, beside sago balls.


Slices of jackfruit and the infamous macaroni.

Here's a video of how they prepare the halo-halo. Note the man in the back eating it-- jabbing his spoon in first to mix the elements together. Also note how she rations the milk with a small shot glass.

Bean Love

Soaking for planting.

I've been pretty much obsessed with beans for more than a month now. Since arriving from Sagada with some in a sack, I've been diving into what old and meager literature exists about the Mountain Province people and their deep relationship with beans.


Sprouted itab or lima beans, with their mottled skin off.

And it seems that the Igorot from Bontoc, at some given point, had beans as his most preferred food (followed by rice, corn, millet, then camote or sweet potato). According to Jenks in 1904:

The Bontoc man has three varieties of beans. One is called ka'-lap; the kernel is small, being only one-fifth of an inch long. Usually it is pale green in color, though a few are black; both have an exterior white germ. I'-tab is about one-third of an inch long. It is both gray and black in color, and has a long exterior white germ. The third variety is black with an exterior white germ. It is called ba-la'-tong, and is about one-fourth of an inch in length.

From this article and talks with Sagada folk, I have determined the following about the above description. Kalap is the tiny yellow rice bean or what some Tagalogs know as tapilan. Itab is patani or sabatche to us and lima bean in English. Balatong is mungo or the ubiquitous mung bean.


Kalap or rice beans. They grow much like mung beans and have a similar flavor.

These days, eating habits up north have definitely changed, but you still see a few kinds of beans in the public markets. While beans were common and preferred in the past, I didn't eat a single dish in Sagada containing them (but then again, many of them serve Western food due to tourism) except for streetside halo-halo's sweetened assorted beans. It made me wonder about the real food of these upland people, how the mountain sib-fan (stewed beans commonly eaten with rice) would taste, seasoned liberally with fog and whatnot.


Dried kardis or kadyos.

Aside from the beans mentioned above, there was also an abundance of dried kardis (kadyos or pigeon pea), kidney bean (the local name escapes me), a kind of beautiful pinto bean, and Baguio bean seeds (obviously, I was not able to coax some local names out of the vendors).


Kidney beans with a speckled sheen.


Supposedly the seeds of the Baguio bean, I've used it in cooking bacalao.


Very pretty and smooth pinto-ish beans. Uncertain about what it really is.

There is very little documentation I've come across about this plant that used to be such a huge part of Igorot life. Moreover, the plants are given sweeping classifications, often according to their "green" form (sitaw or pole beans are one and the same thing in most markets, no matter how different their seeds look). I've always marveled at the small distinctions between the mung and sitaw beans I buy in the nearby market (where the latter are sold mostly for planting greens as well as for sweetening), and I'm excited to have barely scratched the surface of the upland dried-bean-based culture. I'll surely be back in the Moutain Province poking my head around for local recipes and varieties.

In the meantime, I've been cooking the beans as an improvisation of sib-fan, as well as sauteeing them and making seafood dishes for my seafood-eating family, like the bacalao with Baguio beans below:


Basque-style bacalao, but added white beans and local Indian almond nuts.

Bakotoy the Humble

Name and description, in the cut-out stickers typical of public transportation art.

Funny and public use of adjective to accompany this Sagada tricycle owner's name. Behind the driver seat, on the tarp to protect him from rain or mud, is the typical trike/jeep zodiac art. Below that is a little indication of risk-averse driving style: "I may be slow, but I'm ahead of you, friend."


This design was cut out of black waterproof material and sewn onto a white tarp.


Stickers again, with a missing F and D. And a messed up B.

Baby Carrying

With a knotted up piece of cloth so snug it's almost like a membrane.

Sagada Cemetery

Ferny tombstone.

Sagada is famous for its hanging coffins, but Christians are lain to rest in the Mission Compound cemetery, which is a curiosity in itself. It is a pleasant and chilly walk. There are many piles of charred black spots on the puntods. This is because, apparently, the winds make candles useless, and combustible pine wood the preferred means to light a short session of remembering.


I dunno, being named Killy is like being named Deady.

A short walk down is a path that leads to a good view of the mountain across, whose jagged rocks hold some of the non-Christians hanging coffins. I didn't get a decent photo of that, but just think about the juxtaposition.


Strong clear design that would look well on a shirt or an arm.


Cosme Madalang is buried here. Madalang means sporadic in Tagalog.


Veterans' area. They didn't bother finishing the lettering paint job.


Just another tombstone shot.


A simple and beautiful crucifix depiction.


A cross impression made by pressing bottle caps on wet cement.


Large and bold restful wishes.


The cemetery at dusk.

Announcements

Ship assembly.

Announcements such as calls for casual employment and cooperative meetings are posted in front of a general store in central Sagada town. The rest is left to word-of-mouth. Beats memos or emails!


Coop meeting.

Repurposing

House on a slope, no doubt housing voracious consumers of "edible oil".

My mini-absence was due to a road trip out to Sagada, Mountain Province (that Wiki link is a bit weird and wanting), the farthest north I've ever been in this beautiful archipelagic country.

We left at night and woke up to find ourselves far away and high above my usual lowland environment. I'm not exactly sure where, but when people start making walls out of old tins of cooking oil, you know you are far away.


Handle to lift edible oil containers.


Faded drops.


A carrot farm beside the house. Deep-fried carrots?