Mindoro

My, I've neglected this site, haven't I. Horribly sorry. Aside from the continuing difficulty of signing into blogger (wazupwidat?!), I have been in a beautiful province that is a RORO away - the hometown of my late grandmother Sally Cuadra Salcedo, the town of Bansud, Oriental Mindoro.

Unfortunately, I only began to appreciate Mindoro when Lola Sally, as we fondly call her, had already passed away. We all used to wonder what Lola saw in that place. It was so far, so poor, so simple ... we wondered how Lola Sally survived. On her last trip there the roof of her house was literally blown away by the Typhoon Milenyo. "Eto, tinangay na ng bagyo ang bubong ko pero don't worry, I'm okay!" ("Well, the typhoon blew the roof off but don't worry, I'm ok!")

In the ICU after her heart attack in 2005, she was still murmuring "Mindoro ..." and in the hospital, when my mom asked her to describe it, she said that it was Paradise. After being discharged from Makati Med, she literally tried to escape from our house in Makati to take the boat to Mindoro (we wouldn't allow her to go on her own, for fear of medical complications in a city where a cardiologist comes in only once every two weeks!). I realize now, after moving there (been going and living there more and more often since Lola Sally passed away) that there is so much to appreciate about a farmer's life, usually taken for granted by ignorant city dwellers like myself.

View of the farm from Lola Sally's house in Brgy. Salcedo, Bansud

First is the proximity to nature. No matter what brilliance is poured into architecture or art, nothing can ever beat the beauty of Mother Nature. To me, anyway. Maybe it's the Sag in me. But nature really takes my breath away. In Mindoro, the day skies are a picture perfect blue and the midnight sky is full of stars. It boasts of amazing black sand beaches but also, the road from Calapan to Bansud gives you a view of yet untouched mountains: green and alive, they almost speak to you, making me understand why our ancestors used to worship nature and hide in terror when they thought they had sparked Bathala's ire.

Second, because of its proximity to nature, there is the freshness of produce. Circling the farm we came across a man weaving his own fishing net! How cool is that? That afternoon I had a unique kind of fish called baga-ong, cooked simply in vinegar (pinaksiw). I loved it. It was a pleasant relief from the usual tuna, salmon and tanguige we have in restaurants in the city. Really, it was a small, simple fish, practically like galunggong, but slightly bigger, slightly softer, and tastier.

After our simple lunch of baga-ong and rice, I watched Beth, a farmer's wife, make bibingka cassava cake from scratch. Now in the Philippines there are many variations to this delicacy. In my maternal grandmother's province, Bulacan, bibingka malagkit, as they would call it, is rice-based. It is a delicacy that is totally separate from the cassava cake, which, as its name implies, is made of cassava. This is further differentiated from the more common bibingka galapong, that yellow pancake-like delicacy which Via Mare is very well known for. In Mindoro, the bibingka and cassava delicacies are combined, and they call it bibingka-cassava.


Ka Beth and Ka Lucy expertly extract the meat from the cassava or kamoteng kahoy and the coconut or buko.

To indulge me and my mom, as we insisted to watch the bibingka-cassava made from scratch, Beth, the wife of Mang Emok, one of the farmers, got kamoteng kahoy or cassava and expertly peeled off the skin with a knife (looked like a machete to me!). She passed the peeled cassava to Ka Lucy (ka here is a term of endearment for the elderly, like "miss" or "madame" or "sir"), who then grated it (or what they call "gadgad"). Then Beth got a coconut, again expertly broke it in two with her machete (I should call her the machete queen), got the juice and put it aside for later, then grated the meat. When Ka Lucy was done with the cassava, Beth put the cassava meat (ginadgad na kamoteng kahoy) into a cheesecloth (or katya/kacha ... there are no spelling rules in this province!) to squeeze out the juice. The purpose of this is to take out the bitterness. This meat then became the dough.

The coconut juice was then poured onto the cassava dough for added taste, along with around a half cup of brown sugar and a teaspoon of salt (no measuring cups here!). Everything was mixed and kneaded in a bowl by hand (no Kitchenaide either!). After mixing, the dough was placed on a banana leaf (how country is that!) atop a plate, made into the shape of a pie and then transferred into a wok (kalan - gawd, hope I'm translating right!) that was later placed on the make-shift oven for "baking".












Now the make shift oven is the really funky/cool bit. Sure, they used a lighter to spark the fire but instead of fire atop the wok, as would be the case for a regular oven, they put a simple steel board to cover the kalan, which they covered afterward with coconut husks! To make sure that the bibingka inside wasn't burning, we would peek every now and then under the steel plate.

The result? Camarelized cassava cake. $12 at Pastis, he he he ... in Bansud? Absolutely free, absolutely yum. (Sam Cooke was right, the best things in life are free!)

I wish I had gotten to know Mindoro more when Lola Sally was around. But I guess it's cool, too, to discover its beauty on my own. I really can't get over how beautiful it is. So if I'm missing from blogger ... that's where I am!


More pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/margauxlicious/