Beer for breakfast, and other indulgences

It’s high time I talked about one of my favorite subjects in the context of the Philippines trip: food. I consider myself pretty adventurous for an American, which I admit isn’t saying much, here in the land where ketchup is considered by some to be spicy. But growing up, we ate all kinds of weird things: tongue, liver, kidneys, and every imaginable vegetable, including the infamous brussel sprout and ones you ain’t even heard of like kohlrabi. So I was well prepped for Filipino food, which seems to consider just about anything edible, including crickets. (Note: it is damn near impossible to Google anything about the eating, rather than the sporting, kind of cricket, so no link for you.)

First off, let me be clear that I did not try the crickets. And I didn’t cross paths with balut, although I admit that after a beer or two I might have actually tried it if someone had plunked it in front of me. But I was spared. Anyway, having said all this, the food was consistently awesome. Besides the daing na bangus I already mentioned, another seafood standout was inihaw na pusit (grilled squid). Just damn good. I was also glad to have tongue again, which I haven’t had in ages. Yay kaskasero for having it at your wedding! Also great was sisig, which is probably best when you have no idea what’s in it. (Everything is chopped up nice and small, though, which helps with any urk factor you might feel.) You can see the squid and the sisig in the picture below: sisig on my plate, and squid two serving dishes away from the camera.

Don’t forget the rice, of course! Rice with every meal including breakfast. And everything is eaten with a spoon in one hand and a fork in the other; you use the fork to push food onto the spoon. And if you’re paranoid about food safety like I am, you wash everything down with San Miguel, which is a pretty good beer considering that I pretty much hate beer. (Even Jet Li and Stephen Chow like it, so who can argue?)

As for nonnative food, well I have to laugh, because there are heaps of American chains in Manila, and I studiously avoided them all just like I do at home. Shakey’s is apparently popular there, which is amusing because I think they have almost no presence in the U.S. these days. And how funny is it that I traveled almost 9000 miles to eat the first Krispy Kreme doughnut I’ve had in a long while?

I leave you with a link: This article has a lot of interesting stuff in it about eating in Manila. And based on my own experience, I have no doubt that it’s all true!