Life in the time of Covid - 19 Apr 2020

What I've learned and made over the week

1)  I learned how to skin peanuts easily 

I needed to skin a batch of freshly-roasted peanuts so that I could make them into peanut butter. To do so, put the peanuts in a sieve or colander, then gently massage the peanuts until the skin separates from the nut. Sift. Do it again until all the peanuts are naked. That's it. 

Tip: Use food-grade rubber gloves so that the skin could stick on the gloves while you're rubbing them together.

Peanuts on a shallow tray before roasting

Peanuts on a colander

The skin separated from the nuts

2) I learned how to make peanut butter

This is something that is surprisingly so easy.  You just have to put your roasted peanuts about one cup in a food processor. Pulse until it is coarsely ground. If you want some chunk in your peanut butter, take a quarter from it. Continue grinding the rest until the oil from the peanuts come out. If it's too thick, add a bit of melter butter. Season according to taste -add salt, or sugar, or chocolate power. Mix the chunky bits back into the paste. Done!

3) I learned how to make Pandesal

This is the most difficult one because it is multi-stage and it takes a bit of baking knowledge to get it right. One needs to know how to knead or what a good dough feels like. If you know basic bread making, the technique is fairly easy but the time and process itself are still long. You can also make different kinds of bread using the same dough just like what I did.

dough from 4 cups of flour

Bread 1 : cheese and minced pork filled rolls 

sealed at the bottom 

finished product. the cheese came out from some of the rools

proofed pandesal. i need to work on my rolling skills. the rolls shouldn't be visible 

proofed cheese roll. i didnt expect they would grow so big

finished product. the pork buns is missing 3 pieces which we have already devoured :)

4) I made kare-kare from scratch

I didn't use any kare-kare mix. I roasted and made my own peanut butter. I made annatto seed oil. I toasted ground glutinous rice. These are the things I could only do if I have a loooot of time.

Whole foods 

Sliced version. Counterclockwise (from lower left hand) 1) banana blossoms, 2) diced onion, 3) diced garlic, 4) annato seed oil, 5)bok choy, 6) string beans, 7) toasted glutinous rice, 8) home-made peanut butter, 9) ground nuts, 10) annatto seeds in water (in case i needed more color), 11) eggplant. Beef is not in the picture. 

Boiled beef with hardened fat. Throw that fat away. 

Sautee beef in garlic, onion, annatto seed oil, and beef broth. Boil.

Add vegetables one by one. Banana blossoms first. Then boil. Add the eggplants next. Boil again. Add the string beans and bok choy and beef last. Boil and mix. Thicken the sauce with the toasted rice flour. 

Serve with shrimp bagoong. 

5) I made tom yum pasta

This is the best tom yum pasta I made so far.  The secret I think lies on the fresh lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves. I also sauteed the prawn shell and head, boiled them in a bit of broth, threw it into a blender and use the rich broth in making the tom yum paste. Adding a bit of cream and squeezing a wedge of lime also made a big difference!

fry the prawn separately

Clockwise from the top: 1) straw mushroom, 2) coriander, 3) kaffir lime leaves, 4) lemongrass, 5) onion

What a good sauce looks like. 

Finished product

6) Tocino and tapa

This is good for breakfast.

Beef tapa

Pork tocino

Finished product

7) Dalgona coffee 

I jumped into the bandwagon

Hers and his. The left one had coffee at the bottom because the froth failed. The right one had the pooped-looking froth

Random thoughts for today

We now see a lot of news reports about China's alleged cover-ups of the actual number of COVID-19 infections and deaths. At the risk of being labeled as negative or toxic, this to me is a manifestation of how reports need to always be factual, regardless of how toxic it is.  Covering up the toxicity of a fact could result in fatality.

Life in the time of COVID : An Ode to Binallay (Ginataang Bilo-bilo)

It's the 6th day of Circuit Breaker here in Singapore and 29 days since the lockdown in Manila. With a lot of time in their hands, people have been cooking and baking. Im one of them.

The idea came after seeing saba or plantain bananas in the market. Those bananas are not easily found in supermarkets but they're almost always available in Chong Pang. I dont like the cavendish variety. Too sweet for me.

Saba

Binallay or ginataang bilo-bilo is one of the most common meryenda back home. Growing up in a farming community, rice is of prime importance. Almost every household would have it.  For rice farmers, glutinous rice is a premium.  And this is the main ingredient in this dish.

In our small farm, I remember that we would always have one of the plots reserved for planting glutinous rice. The grains are round compared to the regular rice.  My parents never sold them.  It was always reserved for consumption or gifting to relatives.  Oddly enough, we didn't cook a lot of binallay at home. I think it's because it takes a lot of time to cook.

The food is staple during wakes. For celebrations, it is staple for households who cant afford to buy pansit.  It's understandable. The ingredients are cheap and at certain times, free.  The most important ingredients are ground glutinous rice, mature coconut, and sugar.

1. The glutinous rice can be sourced from your own farm or a present from a neighbor although it became more commercialized when I was a teenager.

2. Almost everyone has a coconut tree in their backyard. If you dont have one, you can walk around to survey which household has a mature coconut tree and ask for that. Usually people do not mind.  You can just give a portion of the cooked binallay once you're done.  Or just give you can share other stuff from your backyard to that same neighbor later on like a bunch of moringa leaves, freshly picked sweet potato leaves, or even rice. People give and take.

Once you've spotted your coconut, the next to look for is a group of kids whom you could ask to climb the tree for you. Usually, they would.  It's like a game for them.   When you get home, you could grate the coconut yourself. I was tasked to do the job once in a while although it's Uncle Doming who would always do it when he was around.

Aside from the bilo bilo, the other ingredients are optional.  Again, these are easy to find crops. Bananas. Sweet potatoes. Arrow roots. Cassava. You can put whatever you want. Just chop them into small pieces and you're good to go.

Binallay ingredients. The pandan is from our corridor garden 

Sago. Cook it separately from the rest of the ingredients

Sweet potatoes. You can mix different colors for a more vibrant-looking binallay

Langka. Aside from the sweetness, it gives a nice fragrance to the dish

Cassava 

The most enjoyable part of cooking this disk is preparing the bilo bilo. Usually a group of people would prepare it. It's a social activity. People will be chatting while working making the job easier. During special occasions, or sad ones such as wakes, it's mostly women who would gather around a basin filled with the galapong or dough.  In our community, the dough is rolled into sausage-like rolls and cut into small pieces. From there, you round it in your palm to make balls. It's easier than taking one small pinch at a time.

Roll the dough and cut into small pieces

Then roll them into balls

Voila! Bilo bilo! Sprinkle ground rice so that they don't stick together 

Cooking is easy. Just boil water and coconut milk with pandan. Put a pinch of salt and sugar. The salt gives a more complex flavour to the dish.  The sugar sweetens the soup base and sweetness depends on your taste. The pandan is responsible for the sweet aroma of the dish.

Boil boil boil

Once it boils, you can put your other ingredients.  The sequence follows a simple logic - hard ones first (sweet potatoes, cassava) and once they're soft, mix the softer ones next (banana, jackfruit).  The last to go into the pot is the bilo bilo.

Just keep mixing. You'll know the bilo bilo is ready once they float.

Bilo-bilo floats when it's ready

That's it. You have your binallay or ginataang bilo bilo.

Cooked binallay or ginataang bilo bilo
Fun fact: I learned that binallay in Isabela is suman and not the ginataang bilo bilo  which the Ibanags in Aparri refer to. 

This post is inspired by Dave Chang's Ugly Delicious series where he delves into the history and culture of the dish featured in each episode. 

Life in the time of COVID-19 : 5 Apr 2020

Since dining in hawkers will be temporarily prohibited for a month starting Tuesday, the husband and I went to the coffee shop downstairs for breakfast. Safe distancing is implemented of course.

Fishball noodle and kopi ka C

I spoke to my Mother on FB Messenger to catch up. I told her that work will also be suspended here starting Tuesday and that only essential services will operate.  She advised us to buy supplies for the week but I assured her that we still have enough.  She then asked if we have relief goods to which I said none and she wondered why. I said because generally, people have money to buy food. 

I told my husband about it.  Born and bred in Singapore, the term relief goods didn't register to him. Such a first hand illustration of the differences in our societies.

Over the course of the day, images of the long queue in Ikea was circulating on social media.  The headline says couch is apparently essential.  One of my friends was there last Friday to buy a desk because like everyone else, she will be working from home.  Another friend meanwhile shared with me about people flocking to electronic shops because parents are buying laptops for their kids who will be shifting 100% to online learning.  My husband pointed out the level of disposable income Singaporeans have.

This made me tear up. In a first world country like Singapore, days before a lockdown means people flocking to stores to buy what they would need to sustain them for the duration of that situation.  Back home, people worry about surviving.

Don't get me wrong. A certain percentage of the population also worry about survival.  However, the level of survival is different.  One worries about drying up their savings.  The other does not even have savings to talk about and worry about not having food to eat the next day.

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In the evening, we went to collect the masks issued by the government. It was a breeze. There was no one in the queue probably because it's almost closing time. The guy at the temperature screening pointed his thermometer on my forehead. I knew it was a standard procedure but it was a bit awkward. I thought of movie scenes where someone points a gun on your head.

After checking our IDs, they gave us the masks. One per person.

I was surprised when I saw what's inside. A foamish material that looked unfinished. 

Oh well, it's PM 2.5. Also, it's assembled in Singapore so it must have passed quality control

Palm Sunday Mass in the time of COVID : 5 Apr 2020

It's only this morning that I've realized that it's already Palm Sunday today. With the closure of churches since February, I haven't attended mass in 2020.

Today's mass is presided by Pope Francis. Everything was in Latin.

Attending mass through social media 

I was very sleepy that I was tempted to leave several times. But I soldiered on. And I finished the 1.5 hours of service.

Im glad I did. I feel calm and at peace.

Life in the time of COVID-19: 3 April 2020

So at 4pm today, PM Lee addressed the nation. Singapore is still on top of the situation but like other countries, it is implementing enhanced measures to stop the transmission of the virus.

Everyone is now asked to work from home 100%  which my team has been doing since Monday.  This is an important pronouncement since a lot of employers are not doing it. Schools will be closed.
Essential services will still be open though.  So groceries, hawkers and restaurants will still be open.
But then again, just like in previous instances when the PM would address the nation, queues in grocery lines are long.

Life in the past few weeks has been surreal.  In Singapore, life still has a semblance of normalcy.  Sure, there had been a lot of visible changes - public spaces with safe distancing markers, people wearing masks, less crowded streets, never-ending news about COVID-19 and its effects which we continuously consume, etc etc. But at the personal level, we could still go about our day to day activities.  The government has done a good job in cushioning the effects of the crisis. I feel like we are in a bubble and we could choose to do so should we opt to. We wake up in the morning, have breakfast, watch TV, work, do our laundry, cook food, go to a well-stocked grocery if we need to, go to one of the 3 provision shops downstairs if we crave for an ice-cream cone or a cold drink - things that we do on an ordinary day. Things that we do during the pre-COVID days. There's no denying though, the precarity of the future causes a bit of worry. But it's so far off. It doesn't have a massive effect on us yet.  Compare that with the Philippines. It's been 19 days since the lockdown and the government is only starting to stubbornly do mass testing.  It's the situation in the Philippines that causes me anxiety. It's the president's lack of plan and false display of bravado that triggers my anger. His gratitute to the orange country and his minion without any acknowledgement of the frontliners' harmful situation makes my blood boil. His senseless ramblings during his perpetually late press conferences make me regret watching him.  The DOH's call for nurses to volunteer in exchange of a P500/day allowance and potential benefits should they die because of the virus coupled with an insulting "treat it as a vacation" ad is nausea-inducing. I have to force myself to take a break from Philippine news to keep my sanity.

However, today, Singapore joined the huge number of countries which took aggressive measures to delay the spread of the virus.  I think that the planners and speechwriters made a very good move of not using the words lockdown and quarantine so as not to cause alarm yet the measures implemented shows the seriousness of the situation. It's deviation from the WHO advise about mask use is brave, same with it's use of the term safe-distancing instead of social distancing (which the WHO has already changed to physical distancing).  And typical of Singaporean standard of efficiency, right after the PM Lee's speech was the announcement that reusable masks will be given to households. A few minutes after, the link where masks can be collected were issued. I'll miss this place when if and when we leave.

A comic-relief in this anxiety-filled time relating to how PM Lee would take a sip from this cup whenever he would switch from English to Malay to Mandarin and back to English

We still have a long way to go. Vaccines are still on their early stages of clinical trials.  We dont know what the future folds but knowing how the government works here provides a sense of calm. Also, the indomitable resilience of the human spirit gives hope.

Life in the time of COVID-19 : 4 Apr 2020

We were supposed to have friends over as a small-group late birthday celebration for my husband but with the recent announcement, we decided to cancel it. So we were left with these:

Dry rub ribs after being in the oven for 2 hours 

This is after basting. Ready to serve 

Mango sago with storm-trooper shaped jelly 

Lunch was leftover home-made mala

the long beans was from our balcony garden