Agua Bendita

Outside St. Anne of the Sunset, Judah St.


Surely faith has repayment.

Boxes

Giftwrapped.


Reyes Express: servicing El Salvador and Guatemala.


Uniting families (by way of moving goods and money around).

Portrait

Could be the Philippines, but is actually in a Hispanic community of San Francisco.

SF Street Food

The crème brûlée cart. Photo from Don H. at Yelp.

I have been hearing from various sources living in the "other city I sort of inhabit" that there is a something of a street food movement coming about in San Francisco, California. Using serious word-of-mouth and Twitter, the crème brûlée cart and the Magic Curry Kart have been popping up (together, yep wow, rumor has it they are brothers) with mobile food production units at Dolores and Linda to sell fresh and relatively cheap delicious things to munch on.


The Magic Curry Kart. Photo from Don H. at Yelp.

It fills my heart with unexplainable joy and excitement as I think about how many more people who cook good food in the city will hit the streets when and where they wish, keeping their costs variable and their overhead nil. Carts like these are able to harness the advantages of a densely populated and walking city. Read a roundup SF street food outfits here.

On a related note. some friends and I have been throwing around (but not doing much about it) the idea of peddling Pinoy home-baked sandwiches, spring rolls with foraged greens, and herbed peanuts on buses and busy hubs of the gritty Metro Manila cities. Because doing this (or even preparing food traditionally) is a bit expensive in a city that doesn't produce much, I don't imagine anyone can make much money off this, but it is a worthwhile experiment to shake things up in the roving street food scene, as well as bring quality food to people.

Champurrado and Champorado

On a cold, damp day in San Francisco, I was sitting in a bus, hardcore fiending for some Philippine cacao. Thick, dark, not instant stuff, not scrimping on the bean. It was pretty understandable that I frantically jumped up and yanked the stop cord as I saw a sign outside a cafe that said "Champurrado! It's back!".

I had previously read that Mexicans made their champurrado with corn, instead of rice. I was a bit disheartened, therefore, to receive a cup filled with what is basically hot chocolate with masa harina (corn flour) and cinnamon mixed in. Or, from a corn-centric view, it is an atole or corn-flour beverage with chocolate mixed in.


Egads.

Of course, I grew up with Filipino champorado-- whole pieces of sticky rice, floating (suspended) in a goop of thick, dark, chocolate. More like, the best porridge in the world. I was expecting whole corn bits for texture. This is not to say that it wasn't good-- frothy and at least more dense than most Western cacao drinks-- but the name can mislead poor homesick Filipinos.


Street champorado.

Yesterday, I was walking the streets of Manila and came across a man pushing a cart with large vats of champorado and pansit. Many people congregated. I was interested in the chocolate stuff, as I always am!


Most folks opt for evaporated milk on.


Drowning in milk for this fellow.

Curiously enough, the co-existence of champurrado and champorado brings historical interactions alive. While champurrado had no doubt previously existed as atole de chocolate, the Philippines only obtained cacao during the galleon trade. Our own version may have been a Spanish-time invention, but who gave it the name?

Apparently, champurrar, vernacular Latin American for "mixing drinks", came from the Malay word tchampur or campur, meaning the same thing, or simply, "to add". Consider this a word that migrated into the Americas from Southeast Asia, and has gone as far as French Algeria (champoraux, a coffee and alcohol mixture).

This puzzle of great variations, but same names (and an additional factor of possible renaming from an atole to something specific), makes me think about galleon snippets. Boholano slaves in Acapulco and the current abundance of chocolate in Bohol. Our shared tool, the chocolate frother, there called molinillo, here, batirol, batidor, or chocolatera. And so on, and so forth.

What a species advantage it is-- to be delicious! The cacao needed only to hit a taste bud for humans to carry it across oceans and make it a part of their lives and desires.

Musical Visayans

While browsing the Asian Art Museum store, I chanced upon this tidbit in the book Early Mapping of Southeast Asia by Thomas Suárez:

That song was a part of everyday life, with the common people singing during their everyday tasks, was striking to Europeans. Francisco Alcina, visiting the Philippines in the seventeenth century, claimed that "rarely can a Visayan man or woman be found, unless he is sick, who ceases to sing except when he is asleep."

Halva, Halwa: Two Variations

Only looking to use the toilet in the middle of the Jaisalmer desert, I suddenly found myself in the middle of intense inter-village wedding preparations, with all community members manifesting extreme curiosity towards my ethnicity. In a nutshell, it ended in near-indigestion as the village people made us taste a variety of fresh dishes made for the ceremony... and then led us into some riotous dancing.



It was here that I tasted the freshest halva ever. Still steaming and hot, it was moist with ghee (Indian clarified butter). The sweet semolina, ground almonds and pistachios melted in my mouth. If heaven was a grain-nut dessert, this would be it, and it would be cooked just in this kitchen:



Anyway, weeks later, I found myself in the Mission District of San Francisco, face-to-face with a large block of something that claimed to be halwa (in India, the two words are used somewhat interchangeably, and various other peoples mess things up a bit more by saying halawa, helva, etc.). It looked like the Indian pista barfi, which I would describe as essentially a large gob of pastillas de leche.



Does it have milk? I asked. No, the shopkeeper said quite adamantly, it is halwa, and only has sesame seeds, sugar, pistachios, and some root that it was named after. So apparently, they put something called soap root into it ('erq al halaweh) to make it chewy. Was the root named after the snack or the snack after the root? I'm not so sure, but I speculate that he got it mixed up.

$0.90 got me a good size, and it tasted good, albeit on the too-sweet side. I appreciated the ground sesame. I thanked the cosmos that it wasn't one of those flossy halvas, which are very dry and make squeaky sounds against your teeth as you eat them.



I swear, this whole "we are all connected" thing is making itself more and more apparent to me as I wander about, stuff my face, and listen to people just talk. My fascination was ignited by reading the journal article "The History and Lore of Sesame in Southwest Asia" about four years ago, as well as Doreen Fernandez's Philippine-Mexico discussions in her book Tikim. This perspective makes travel extremely engaging, with your imagination running wild about stories of exchanges past-- from everyday interactions of common people to sudden changes brought by culinary equivalents of invasions.

Anyway, back to halva, halwa, whatever. So our protagonist found its way across the desert, completely transformed and indigenized, retaining almost only the original meaning of halaweh-- sweetness. Halva is, as it turns out, a general term for sweetmeat.

I prefer the moist Indian version to the sesame one, mainly because the latter made me really thirsty, next time I will have just an inch of it. I cut the SF purchase some slack though. I may have liked it equally, or more, if it had been served to me inside a sandstone hut along with crazy music and merriment-- or its contextual equivalent in another end of the desert. After all, our condiments, as Thoreau advised, are often right where they should be-- in the "condition of our senses". To more joy, wherever!

Valderi, Valdera!

Samiramis Imports
2990 Mission Street
(Between 25th & 26th Streets)
San Francisco, CA
(+1415) 824 6555
BART Station: 24th Street Mission

Jayakarta Restaurant and More Sub-Regional Reminders

If you are Filipino and homefoodsick abroad, perhaps an Indonesian restaurant can satisfy your hankering. There is a great one in Berkeley, California that might be worth a visit for you.

My lola, tita, and nanay and me were in high spirits upon entering Jayakarta on our "girls' day out". We continued to be semi-rowdy and happily pointed out the familiarly named offerings in this Indonesian-Singaporean joint (our lumpia= their lumpia, siomai=siomay, pansit=pangsit, kropek=krupuk, kangkong=kangkong, togue=toge).



Everything we had was exceptionally tasty-- from the lumpia semarang (Indonesian spring rolls, $3.95) to the oseng-oseng tempe (stir fried fermented soy cakes with string beans, $6.95) to the bubur ketan hitam (sweet black sticky rice with coconut milk, $4.25).





The ingredients used are similar to those in Filipino food, except less tinged with colonial influence, and more use of spices (and sugar). It is just baffling how little I know about Indonesian food, and how little of it I have eaten. Not to mention how I never even try to make it, given the ingredients are readily available. I have taken some immediate steps to remedy this.

I sincerely believe that diving deeper into our Southeast Asian heritage can help us discover ways to maximize our local crops (and have good, cheap food) and re-discover parts of our food culture. Finding common strands is a really fun and satisfying thing to do.

Jayakarta
2026 University Avenue
(Between Milvia St. and Shattuck Avenue)
Berkeley, CA
(+1510) 841 0884
BART Station: Downtown Berkeley

The Chinatown Women And Their Jive-Ass Shoes

Fun and harmless generalization-- SF Chinatown dwellers have their own unique style. It is consistent and unself-conscious.

A short summary:

Shoes. Approximately 70% of the women wear black leather shoes in a particular shape, 10% wear other-colored leather shoes. The remainder goes with white rubber shoes. Perhaps 50% of men wear the same, the remainder sporting function-over-style models of rubber shoes like New Balance.

Pants. Most women don loose polyfabric trousers that never graze the floor (some are inches above the shoes, exposing white socks). The older men do so as well, but below-forties wear jeans.

Tops. Nondescript and likewise loose (and slightly balloony) jackets and windbreakers are worn over nondescript shirts.

Accessories. Almost all (especially women) carry plastic bags with vegetables or freshly cooked viands and dim sum. It must rule being from the homes they are always shuffling off to!

Buchi, My Old Friend

I grew up a fan of buchi. Before knowing what cholesterol was, I was forever stuffing my face with these deep-fried, sesame-covered globs of sticky balls. There was something irresistible about the popping little seeds, the crispy exterior of the glutinous rice wall (and its equally chewy interior), and the soft, sweet bean filling. However...

When I was a wee lass of eight, I tagged along with an uncle to the divey Chinese joint Mr. Ho Tsin Ho Noodle House in Manila. It was around midnight, a very scandalous hour for a little girl to be awake, but the motivation was that he would treat me to anything I wanted, in any quantity I pleased.

Not being a fan of other Chinese food in general, and exhibiting early signs of the satiate-yourself-sick behavior I still occasionally manifest, I ordered a disgusting amount of buchi platters. After consuming them all, my young palate came to know the horrible sensation of extreme nausea due to excessive unctuousness. I abandoned buchi for more than a decade.

Only recently have I been brave enough to try them again, emboldened by my streak of oily street food adventures in India. Even so, I make sure I dab the whole ball in tissue, and have hot water or tea around to counter the bad vibes and regret.

However, I have found one buchi that is surprisingly light, and beats all the greasy SF Chinatown contenders. Asian Pearl in Millbrae makes them well, with only around US$ 5 for 6 pieces-- still more expensive than the US$ 1.40-for-3 Chinatown deals, but way more edible. In fact, I had three of them without gagging. They are just the right sweetness and delicious!

If you're coming from SF, you have to ride a BART down to Millbrae and take a SamTrans bus or walk down El Camino. The restaurant is super-popular among the Chinese set, and get packed during weekends. We've never bothered to have a sit-down dinner, but we get the buchi to go.

Asian Pearl Peninsula Chinese Restaurant
1671 El Camino Real
Millbrae, CA
(+1650) 616 8288
BART Station: Millbrae

San Francisco Kalye Views