Fish Soup and Clyde Weaves a Fateful Tale

Tinola Isda or Fish Soup

Fish soup is a common dish here in Cebu Province. It starts off with the catch of the day. To this is added some onions and garlic. Emelie used green onions for today's soup. Then she added the round, green leaves pictured - molonggay, or kalamungay. When it was done cooking, I put the soup over rice. Many people eat the rice on a separate plate from the bowl of soup, but I like to combine them.

The variety of fish and other seafood seems endless. It is all delicious and healthful. The molonggay leaves add a power-packed lot of vitamins and minerals to the food, and it is tasty, to boot. The leaves come from a tree of the same name. The tree grows everywhere here and can be started by plucking a small branch from an existing tree and stuffing it in the soil.

We consume seafood from a few times a week to a few times a day. In the year and a half that I've been here, I have never seen a fish fillet, other than the ones I filleted myself. The fish is always served whole or cut into sections, if it is a larger fish. I filleted fish at home a couple of times and showed my wife how to do it. The next time she served fish, one side of the fish was filleted and the other side was cut into sections, with the bone. The fillet was for me and the sections for her. She thought I would prefer the fillet, but steaks are just fine with me, so, after a couple more times of serving the fish half one way and half the other, I suggested she just cut it the traditional way.

I have gutted and scaled fish a few times but I am slow at it, compared to Emelie. She can have ten fish done in the time it takes me to do two of them. I'm pretty sure this is an aptitude shared by most Filipinos. They are experts with most any kind of knife. Today, I watched Clyde take a dried branch from a guava tree that was cut off several weeks ago, and make it into a knife handle, using nothing more than his bolo, the machete of the Philippines.

I am eating a banana as I type this blog. We recently bought about 150 bananas, in two bunches, from the man who rents us his house. The bananas were growing in the yard. We paid a little over two bucks for the whole lot of them. You might be wondering what on earth we will do with 150 ripe bananas. We have three teenagers. Eating thirty bananas a day is no great feat for our crowd. Even the two year-old can devour several a day, between meals. The bananas we have now are about half the size of a large Chiquita banana, but the flavor makes a Chiquita seem tasteless.

Peanuts, anyone? I bought a large coffee can full of them at the market yesterday, intent on making lugaw today, which I did, but almost didn't because the boys ate most of the peanuts. I gave the boys and their sister each a handful, in the shell, after I boiled them last night. I told them I wanted to save the rest for the logaw, which is sweet rice cooked in lots of water so the consistency is mushy and soupy. Meat, fruit, veggies or anything edible can be added to the rice. I like mine with peanuts and I decided to add some bananas as well.

The boys got into the pot when I was in town doing errands  today. By the time I got home, they had eaten most of peanuts that I was saving for the lugaw.

I had a premonition. Last night before we went to bed, Clyde was telling us all a story about how he was born on a Sunday and on Monday he was given one apple to eat but it didn't fill him up. On Tuesday, he at one orange, but he wasn't full. On Wednesday he ate one apple and one orange; on Thursday it was one bag of rice. As the days went on, the gist of the story became apparent: nothing could fill Clyde's belly. A bag of rice, an apple, an orange, the combination of all of them - same result. The wrap-up to the story was this: only peanuts could fill Clyde up. He laughed and laughed at his own storytelling and we all laughed along with him. But I already had a suspicion about the fate of the peanuts.

Bagio, Typhoon, Hurricane. Same windy and wet animal.

October 11, 2011

 After washing my clothes yesterday in the late morning, my wife informed me that a "bagio", typhoon, was on the way. A couple of hours later, the relentless rain came with a furry. It has rained for the past two days straight. A couple of times it petered out to nothing more than a mist, but it never quit completely, and mist turned to heavy rain once again.

The Philippines gets an average of 25 typhoons a year. Our island of Cebu is sandwiched between bigger islands on either side of us. Most of the weather comes from the West, where Negros Island shoots skyward with its mountainous interior, keeping us safe from the kind of waves that would otherwise pound our coast and wash away the bamboo houses that stand on the sea wall or tempt fate by hanging out over the ocean, on pilings of wood or concrete.

In the cities, rain flows into garbage-clogged sewers, backing up into the concrete and tarmac streets, where it can't be absorbed by the ground. Overflowing rivers add to the melee. People are stranded. Some drown. Many are homeless. Not a pretty sight.

But here "in the Province", meaning anywhere outside the city, the water simply flows out to the sea.

My clothes are still hanging - and still wet - in various places around the outside of the house, under the shelter of the overhanging roof. If the rain doesn't let up soon, my clothes will grow mold. We don't own a dryer and there isn't a commercial laundry anywhere in town. If you own clothes, you dry them on a line. It's part of living here. If mold and mildew take up quarters on your shirts and undies, you just wash them again and pray for sunshine.

Two years ago, seven typhoons piled up on the backs of each other. The rain was extremely heavy and the wind blew hard... for two weeks solid. Trees were knocked down. A couple of houses got washed out to sea. Emelie and I were renting a place a couple miles south of here, right on the ocean. We didn't have a problem.

Typhoons might seem like something that occupies a spot near the top of a list of "cons" for living here. Not so, really. Since we don't get flooded, the typhoon spits and blows like a toothless old man who can't bite.