A fulfilling day at Laguna’s food and heritage fest
BAGUIO CITY—This city brat, whether situated in the cities of Baguio or Pasig, needed a whiff of rural living even for just a day.
So the invitation from Socorro “Corito” Llamas, founding editor of Food Magazine, to visit her home province recently in time for “Sa Pantalan: Biyaheng Pangkatagalugan Laguna Food and Heritage Festival” was most welcome and refreshing.
Who hasn’t been tired of fast food and prepackaged cooking? Well, I and my friends have.
What was left for me to do was figure out how to take our gang of media women (the “Merry Weirdos,” led by Rosario “Chato” Garcellano, Ester Dipasupil and her caregiver Fely, Nini Yarte, Lynett Villariba and myself) to the fair on Oct. 25, as Guenevere sang in the musical “Camelot.”
Chato and daughters Liana and Lyra, along with Lynett, forged ahead in a separate ride. Ester, Fely, Nini and I hired a spacious van with enough room for our cooler of drinks and bags of chichiria (see, we needed to change even our snacking eating habits at some point).
We arrived at Ted’s Kitchen in the town of Santa Cruz just in time as Corito began her lecture on the food of the province, what needs conserving and preserving (nata de coco and nata de calamansi, among many), what the food business can do for those entrepreneurs whose business luckily thrives with the feeding of strangers and their own families. Even if that business fails, she said, it would have succeeded in feeding the tindera (seller) cook’s family members, so nothing is wasted.
Dressed in a stunning lime green dress and wearing her Divisoria headband like a tiara, Corito decried the “hamburgerization of our food culture” wherein the young especially recognize nothing, except hamburger and spaghetti.
She asked rhetorically if these youth even know how balut (duck’s egg) looks and tastes like. She praised restaurateur Glenda Barretto though, for elevating the balut in state dinners through her Via Mare catering service.
Wonderful memory
Corito said food is a language of love in Filipino culture. She cited her Lola Josefa Francia, who always stocked her refrigerator with potato salad, cheese pimiento and pan de sal. Mrs. Francia fed whoever came through her door and told workers to eat, eat, eat.
Corito’s cousins, who did not want to touch their allowances, would help themselves to the food at their lola’s instead of spending for merienda.
In Filipino, she said, “Para sa ating lahat, food is magandang alaala ng ating maligayang nakalipas (For us all, food is a wonderful memory of our once happy past).”
She also said our countrymen cannot go hungry because of our rich soil—“kahit ano ay tumutubo (anything can grow).”
After her talk and Q&A, I ventured around the mess hall where pop-up booths were set up.
Within budget
I had my husband and Pasig siblings in mind as I shopped for nata de coco and the endangered nata de calamansi (a time-consuming process of brining and sweetening the fruit, including the skin of the calamansi and inserting the nata in its core), salted red ducks’ eggs na nagmamantika (oily, a sign of savoriness) at P8 each compared to Baguio’s P14 an egg, sweet lanzones at P180 a kilo (compared to Estancia Capitol Commons’ tiangge rate of P380 a kilo), sinaing na bangus and chicharon liempo for our dinner viands. Everything under my one-thousand-peso budget. Saan pa (where else) but in the pantalan?
The Merry Weirdos agreed that when summer or the hint of it waltzes in, there’ll be time from our busy schedules for a soak in a hot pool in Pansol and exploring other towns of Laguna.
