Something like this:

oh look, a shiny coin!

But lately, I’ve been on this ‘prawn cracker’ phase. Even though the bag smells nasty like all the rotting food in d’talipapa, they actually taste pretty good. Especially the spicy ones.

prawn crackers

Longanisa Links

Its usually in shorter segments than western sausages and includes bits of fat and soft gristle with enough texture to easily feel. Loads and loads of fat. What makes this so different is that is also packed with sugar. I find the best ones are made by using a long sleeve that’s got string running down the side to tie-off the segments… I have no idea if this means anything but to me, it’s always tastier.

It cannot be cooked like western styles of sausage (or any other sausage I know of) and  apparently I’ve been doing it wrong all this time.

Take a set of links and boil them in enough water to cover them just barely, maybe even less. I cooked until the water is reduced to glaze in the bottom – you see, a lot of the sugar and fat bleeds out into the water, (if you cant get a thick almost-syrup in the bottom, just add a few tablespoons of sugar and a little water to re-reduce). Occasionally flip the links, especially near the end so they don’t literally fry on one side. It might look like a sugary water and oil mix, but heat a little longer and the water evaporates while the fat and sugar makes a heavenly sauce/glaze. No kidding, this shit is GOOD!

I just plop the whole link-string into a plastic storage bowl, get as much of the glaze out of the pan as possible, turn on the aircon and a good movie, pray to the god of obesity, grab fork – chow down!

In a single term: Sweetly Succulent.

I’ve always had this phobia of eating whole non-gutted fish with head, tail, skin, and scales on it. But honestly, its easy as hell. I enjoyed the whole lunch!

Phil food? Well, there’s a lot of pork, grease, chicken heads/feet, and thick brown gravy. This should tell you all you need to know about the evolution of necessity in the Phils. They like fat so much that when shopping, the heavy fatty meat of the pork belly is more expensive than the lean cuts…the opposite of what I’m used to. My neighbors brought some roast pork from downstairs and he gave me what he considered to be selections from the best stuff……………..several thick slabs of fat with a little trimming of pork on the side. A five square inch section of roasted pig skin with, yup, fat on the inside. A 2 inch square of fatty pork meat with about 6 cubic inches of fat around it. ————- oh yea, and a Styrofoam coffee cup full of gravy.

He was smiling when he brought this up to the house, I wasn’t about to offend him so I took it and thanked him. I tried eating it but just couldn’t do it, (in private of course).

And that would have been nice if I was a tourist, but now I live here. I was working for a week on St Lawrence island (Bering Strait) when they killed a whale. Had some muck-tuck…it was the single greasiest thing I have ever tasted. More oily than plain oil.

So, getting back on topic, I found this food blog and its pretty damn funny. It’s the anti-Vegan site. If you like red meat, this is the place. This fucker is all about cutting up some dead cow. Heres an article about grinding your own beef…and considering I cant get decent cuts of beef on this island or even get the butcher to leave the meat thick..I’m gonna try this. Every time I order beef, I tell them thick, not thin. 2 inches thick I say…ok’ is the response. But they must think I’m crazy because they still always cut it into thin-assed ‘breakfast steak’ strips. Which have virtually no use or flavor. So I think I’m gonna start grinding patties now. My own hamburgers…..its been forever since I had a decent hamburger.

Then I remember its a partially formed duck….so no thanks.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Balut. That much-loved, much-maligned Filipino delicacy: favorite of beer drinkers all over the country, degree zero for culinary nastiness (used as a stunt on TV’s Fear Factor, apparently), the dreaded food test for the Kano (and Filipino American, as my students tell me).

Say it: balut. Ba-lut. Your lips gently press together at the beginning, your tongue flicks quickly up towards your palate, your lips move as one in the shape of a narrow ooo, and ends with your tongue teasingly poking behind your teeth.

(This is, however, in contrast to how balut is sold in the Philippines, by ambulant vendors who yell in the streets, “Ba-luuuuuuuuuut!”)

But there is nothing sensual per se about balut; it is, after all, an aborted duck fetus. As opposed to, say, eating an ordinary chicken egg with yolk and all, the balut is already fertilized and ready to go, as it were, with an actual, healthy, living duck embryo (incubated up to 18 days in a hatchery). And this where, of course, the balut gets its notoriety: the duck really looks like a duck, eyes, pink little limbs, gray feathers, useless beak and all.

Duck embryo in the shell,
I pluck you out of the shell; –
Hold you here, beak and all, in my hand,

My fondest memories about balut had more to do with buying them. They were always sold late at night (my father would bring them home after playing mahjongg until midnight), but sometimes we would go out ourselves. In Los Banos they were sold by this gaunt, gray-haired woman who would squat by the side of the road. The balut would be swaddled in cloth, and nestled in an old wicker basket; the woman would carefully unwrap the rolled-up blanket that kept the eggs warm, give us a thimbleful of salt in a twist of recycled graphing paper, and count her money in the light of the candle anchored with melted wax on the pavement. (I remember these were windless, humid July nights.) We would then ride home, feeling the heat of the eggs in our laps.

Instructions for eating balut:

1. 1. Boil water gently in a pot, and put the balut in it for a few minutes.
   2. Untwist the salt and put it in a dish. (A dipping dish, the kind used for soy sauce or patis, works very well.)
   3. Hold the balut upright and, with the underside of a spoon, make a crack at the top of the egg.
   4. Chip away pieces of eggshell with your finger until you have a hole about the diameter of a finger. (This could be bigger, it depends.)
   5. Sometimes you’ll see some kind of gauzy membrane. Pierce it.
   6. You can peek inside the balut now and see broth. Is this albumen? (I always preferred to think of it as amniotic fluid.)
   7. Tip the egg to your mouth and suck out the amniotic fluid.
   8. Continue removing the eggshell. Depending on how you cracked it open, you may then see an undifferentiated mass of stuff that feels like slightly runny, soft-boiled egg in texture. Dip the stuff in the salt and eat it.
   9. Or you may encounter a hard, spherical section that looks like a seed. Throw that away. (My godmother swears that it’s all calcium and good for you, but it’s tasteless and hard for me.)
   10. Or you may finally get to the jackpot: the duck fetus. You may pick it up by the head — at which point the body unrolls from its fetal position and its little legs dangle — dip it into the salt, and pop it into your mouth.
   11. Wash down with a cold bottle of San Miguel beer. (I think I may have been drinking it with milk when I was in elementary school — now that sounds disgusting. Balut and milk…)

Answers to frequently asked questions:

• 1. Yes, you can feel the feathers on your tongue.
  2. As a former (white) professor discovered (he was being administered the balut test), entering a pitch-black closet so you don’t have to see it makes no difference. You can still smell the faint, slightly gamey, deliciously menstrual aroma. (Also see #1 above.)
  3. No, the duck’s eyes are closed.
  4. Of course it’s dead.
  5. No, I have never been able to buy good balut in the United States, and I won’t try to. One time my schoolmate Tim (can’t remember his last name, but he lived in Mountain Province once and was studying Heidegger and Japan for his dissertation), Jenny Franco (I wonder where she is now), and I drove to Queens to Roosevelt Avenue to buy Filipino food. I bought a six-pack of San Mig and two balut eggs, which were simply horrible — they were all pinkish and looked under-incubated, and they tasted rotten.
  6. No, you can’t pop the whole thing in your mouth. To begin with, there’s too much, unless you have a big mouth. You have to separate the balut into its component parts to appreciate it, and that requires reverent contemplation of the duckling, forever asleep.
  7. Yes, it tastes great and I miss it.

One guy listed that this was a “poor mans redbull” and that he loved the stuff (Manila guy). I dunno, that’s a far cry from redbull if you ask me.

I used to say that I would try everything at least once. Even the disgusting and morally reprehensible stuff. I learned when I was a kid that it doesn’t take therapy to get over things as long as you forget to take a sense of morality with you in the morning.

But this? No…I don’t think I will try, even once. Too many people have gotten sick that I know of. Like scat movies….human feces is potential disease from above… Balut, can easily harbor living bacteria that would make me cut my bunghole open wider just to get it out faster. I used to say I would try it at least once, but I don’t think so anymore.

I dont care who you are…this one is funny.