When it comes to Christmas, no one celebrates it better than the Filipinos. The Philippines is known for celebrating the longest Christmas season in the world.
The best celebration happened during Noche Buena. After the midnight mass on Christmas Eve everyone’s looking forward to this event. Noche Buena is a grand family dinner and a hearty feast full of delicious Filipino food such as lechon, pancit, ham, queso de bola, and a lot more. This has also been a favorite family tradition in the Philippines where family members are expected to be together, even sans the sumptous feasts.
Fruits will not come cheap during this weekend’s Kadayawan celebration. Visitors will have to fork out more bucks per kilo in order to enjoy what little harvests maybe available. But yet, there are other things worth celebrating as Dianne Suelto writes below:
I always tell people who are willing to listen that the Kadayawan Festival is a weeklong celebration of my birthday. Davao City was just so happy to learn of my birth that they decided to throw me a grand party complete with parades and floats to thank the heavens of their good fortune of having me.
Of course the story’s baloney, Kadayawan is really a thanksgiving festival for the bountiful harvest given by nature. But it is my story, I decide the plot.
Kadayawan means concerts, agri fairs, mall sale, parades, fruits, and DURIAN.
It is my birthday celebration week already, but where is my durian?
Oh, there is durian alright. It is just way too expensive. Last year, you can buy a kilo of durian for P25-35 a kilo. Good luck finding that now. Today, the price of durian pegged at P150 a kilo. Yes folks you read that right — P150 a kilo.
A report from SunStar Davao said that “Prices for durian and other fruits for Kadayawan Festival is expected to be much expensive this year as compared to last year due to limited supply brought about by excess rain.”
The abnormally excessive amount of rainfall caused the flowers of the fruits, my beloved durian included, to fall off. No flower means no fruit.
Last year, we didn’t have much rain because of El Niño so we had plenty of durian at a very cheap price. However, we also had power outages because of the low water level in hydropower sources. But, we had lots of durian, and to me that balanced things out.
On my birthday, I wanted to eat lots of durian, except that I can’t have a mountain of it because of the price. I can’t even order a small hill of durian.
What’s my point, you ask. My point is this, I should be writing something about Kadayawan but all that is occupying my mind is durian. I can’t think straight. I need that creamy, sweet-smelling fruit to function and I need plenty of it.
It is a bummer when nature takes a different turn. It does not care if an entire city is celebrating its supposed bountiful harvest in its honor. It does not even care if it is my birthday.
However, life is still beautiful and there are so many things that are worth celebrating like the P150 per kilo durian or that I am alive and everybody I love are healthy and well.
We may not have plenty today, but tomorrow is another day that we can look forward to. And that is why we will celebrate.
Happy Kadayawan everybody. I’ve invited a lot of guests this year, so be sure to watch the parades on Saturday and Sunday. My friends from the food business have also come out this year and they are serving good food at the the food fair.
In this post, we feature Diana Lhyd Suelto’s review of a street food themed resto in Davao City.
Diana talks about a Malaysian street food restaurant in Davao which takes after the famous stretch o hawkers,food stalls and seafood reaturants in Jalan Alor : Malaysia. Here it goes:
The dining scene in Davao City used to have limited choices – tuna sutokil (sugba, tinola, kinilaw), pork and chicken barbecue, and the other usual Filipino fares. Today, however, we have a myriad of cuisines to choose from — Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Middle Eastern, Korean, Indian, and American. Joining in the foray, wanting to carve a niche is Jalan Lok Lok and BBQ, a street food themed restaurant offering Malaysian dishes.
Jalan, which is located at Sobrecarey St, Obrero, serves traditional Malaysian fares such as beef rendang and nasi lemak. While these are delicious, it is their lok lok skewers that I like the most.
Lok lok skewers are basically flavored gluten balls that you dunk into a boiling chicken stock for two minutes to cook. Then you slather it with your choice of sauce. My favorites are the spicy sambal and peanut sauce.
I tried the Maranao version of beef rendang and it is a bit different from the one served in Jalan which is saucy. I like the Maranao version better but the one served in Jalan can hold its fort.
I am not a chicken fan, but I guess if you slather sambal all over your food it will taste good, because the nasi lemak (fried chicken with cucumber and egg on the side) tasted great.
There’s just one thing that did not suit my taste and that was their rose lassie, a rose flavored juice. It tastes of cheap perfume. But other than that, everything was superb.
Another thing worth noting is that the servers at Jalan are a very cheerful bunch. They were also very helpful to their ignorant customers (that’s me). They’ll make your dining experience more pleasant.
Martial Law be damned. There’s no better way to spend the weekend than to go on a froad (food road) trip to Buda in Marilog District to cool off and escape the city noise.
Unlike a few years back when you can’t find a decent place to eat, Buda (Bukidnon-Davao boundary) on the highlands of Davao City, is slowly transforming into a foodie destination. There are now quite a number of quaint restos that serve good food. Plus, the view each resto offers is nothing short of amazing.
Here are three of our favorite eat digs in Marilog:
La Toscana
They serve some of the best pasta and pizza in Davao City. Their fresh noodle seafood pasta alone is worth the more than an hour drive. They also have a branch in Tionko Avenue in Downtown Davao, but their pizza tastes much better at their Buda branch. Both branches use the same recipe, but the long travel to get there makes the food taste much better.
Seagull Mountain Resort Steakhouse
This roadside restaurant has become the unofficial pitstop of motorists traveling to and from Bukidnon to Davao City. What made them famous is their delicious suman and sikwati combo. Your travel to Buda will not be complete if you don’t try this.
Wild Berry Resto
This rustic restaurant just before the quarantine stop in Lorega, Buda serves the most mouthwatering pork tenderloin steak in that part of the map. They also make a mean four berries shake with wild berry, that grows in their nearby farm, as their main ingredient.
Public advisories keep telling people to keep off crowded places, so what better place to go to than Buda. Tara na, adto ‘ta sa Buda.
The venue was Lugang Café –a three-story restaurant on Connecticut Avenue in Greenhills serving Taiwanese and Cantonese cuisine.
The ambiance is perfect. The interiors are posh and opulent in a modern oriental design. The owners have taken every effort to make sure the overall look, feel and appearance of the restaurant would justify the price range of the food, which is a little bit on the high side.
Level of service is excellent and consistent throughout the whole visit – from the time we arrived and looked for parking space, to when we waited to be seated up to the time we were served our food.
We arrived at the place a few minutes past 6pm. It was early enough to be able to get a slot at the resto’s parking lot across the street assisted by very able parking attendants. However, we were already number 3 in the waiting list and had to wait for almost thirty minutes before we got seated.
Considering that the place was full of customers all the way to the third floor, the staff were trying their best to be on top of the situation.We got seated in the dining area on the third floor. We pre-selected our orders while waiting for our seats, but they did not start cooking the food until we were seated.
And probably in their desire to provide quick service, at one instance even the janitor served a plate of food when the waiters were busy getting the other viand from the kitchen in the lower floors.
And now for the food.
Putting Lugang Café’s Oyster Omelette to Test
Oyster Omelette with Sweet Spicy Sauce
Somebody from Chinatown told one of my sons that a good barometer of how well a chef cooks Chinese food is via the taste of his oyster omelette in sweet spicy sauce. We always thought the better test was via pork or fish in sweet and sour sauce. But since we all agree that we may be biased for our own kitchen’s version of sweet and sour sauce, we decided to check the correlation between the oyster omelet on one hand and the other Chinese food that we will order that evening on the other hand. So that was the first dish we ordered and tasted for the night.
The verdict: 8 on a scale of 1 to 10 for the dish. After the dinner, we agreed that this rating has a strong correlation with the way overall rating we gave to the dinner — majority of the food were very good but one or two may stand some improvement.
Xiao Long Bao and Steamed Vegetable and Pork Dumplings
Xiao Long BaoSteamed Vegetable and Pork Dumpling
These are soup-filled dimsums which have become popular offerings in the past year by new Chinese restaurants. Lugang Cafe has one of the better versions.
The pork xiao long bao is good. The skin was thin but the soup is contained. As you bite into it the juice oozes and you enjoy the taste of the filling that’s you should into the soy vinegar with ginger slices.
The steamed vegetable and pork dumplings is delicate and delectable. We had to make a slurping sound as we put the dumplings into our mouth or else we may have burned our tongues with its broth.
Stir-Fried Beef with Chilli Peppers
Stir Fried Beef with Chili Peppers
Served on a hot pot, a fair amount of dried chilies accompany the dish. It has the heat spunk but is totally tolerable unless you eat the actual chili or chili seeds. The very thin slices of beef has splinters of fat on the side. These absorbed the flavor of the sauce, resulting in a tender and flavorful bite.
Kung Pao Prawns (650)
Kung Pao Prawns
The kung pao prawns was cooked in sweet and spicy sauce with rings of red pepper and lots of cashew nuts. It tasted sweet, spicy and tart. It was good enough but not great. This may have been due to a high expectation we had of Chinese restaurants as regards to the way they cook prawns and crabs. Moreover, we thought that for the size of the serving , it is a bit overpriced.
String Beans with Salted Egg (220)
String Beans with Salted Egg
This is the dish that impressed us the most. The vegetable was cooked just right and has retained its crunchiness. The addition of salted egg brought out just the right amount fo saltiness to the dish. While eating we made some effort at trying to identify what other ingredients may have been included in the dish — with the intent of cooking one in our kitchen.
Dong Bo Pork with Gua Bao
The Dong Bo Pork is best eaten tucked in-between a sliced Gua Bao.The pork is very fatty, with a soft-stewed skin still on the cube. The meat breaks apart easily and is tender. The fatty layers between the meat is soft and juicy.
Dong Bo PorkGua Bao
Bellagio Breeze
Bellagio Breeze
This dessert was the big come on of the evening. It is a a tower of shaved ice, with all sorts of beans, tubers, sago mixed. We had a great time sharing and enjoying the dessert.
There are still a lot of items in the menu that are worth trying. I am sure that we will go back to Lugang Cafe some other time to try its other dishes and desserts.
Small handful of fresh Italian parsley, roughly chopped
Freshly ground black pepper
Few slices of lemons
Over medium heat, sauté garlic and anchovies together in the oil and butter. Let anchovies melt into the oil but do not allow garlic to brown. Add chopped tomatoes and capers and cook for 2 minutes. Next add your tuna and juice of capers and allow to cook for about 2-3 minutes more. Toss in your pasta and mix together. Should the mixture look too dry, you may sprinkle some water from your cooked pasta. Season with ground black pepper and lastly sprinkle with parsley. Transfer to serving plate and garnish with lemon slices.
About Myra Portillo:
Myra was a top-notch key accounts specialist at ABS-CBN Integrated Sales and Marketing until her early retirement in 2001. During our days at ABS-CBN, we look forward to lunches and small parties where we get to taste some of her recipes. After her retirement, she re-“discovered” her love for paintings and the crafts. Her watercolor artworks are so nice that a lot of her friends have encouraged her to put a one-woman exhibit. But to date, we haven’t been able to convince her. In fact, when I encouraged her to contribute to this blogsite, I mentioned her paintings, but instead she opted to share with us one of her cooking secrets — her yummy pasta with tuna and capers.
