Neighbor's birthday last night. He's Ilocano, meaning from Ilocos Norte, so this is genuine Up-North home cooking being served...
...which didn't include the seafood, though no one minded (a donation by his officemates). Small crabs, some five inches plus across, steamed with leeks, garlic and ginger, but thick, rimmed with deep-red fat and crammed with the sweetest meat. Came with a sweet n' spicy liver sauce, the way you serve roast pig; not healthy, but very good.
Also huge prawns, the size and thickness of, well, a good-sized penis. Head was full of orangey fat; the flesh was briny fresh. No sauce--you kidding? Would only ruin it...
Then the wife served her pinakbet--stewed vegetables, the heart of Ilocano cooking. Bitter gourd, usually chopped but here she used the small fruit, about the size of a large plum; eggplant, again not cut but whole, around the same size. In fact none of the vegtables seemed to have been cut or diced in any way; the tomatoes were whole, the string beans, the patani (white beans)--what she did was to layer the different vegetables in a palayok (clay pot) with bagoong isda (fermented fish paste, as opposed to shrimp paste), and top with huge chunks of bagnet--deep fried salted porkloin. NO WATER--the vegetables stew in fish paste, bagnet fat, and their own juices; the wife doesn't even open the palayok to mix it, she simply shakes it...
It tastes incredible. Bitter gourd, crisp beans, sweet eggplant, salty fish paste, deeply rich pork, all mixed up and thoroughly, as Samuel Clemens once put it "swopped their juices" with each other. This stuff tastes even better the next day, when the juices have swopped overnight...
That was the wife; the husband spent the early evening making goat adobo. Very dry adobo, just enough oil to line the pot, plenty of garlic, enough soy to darken the meat, vinegar. Incredibly tender--he complained that he overcooked the meat, I said I've tasted pork that wasn't this tender, or tasty. Not the least bit gamy.
Kilawing kambing is raw strips of goat sliced very fine, mixed with ginger and chilies and vinegar--again very tender (he claims it's overcooked, I claimed he doesn't know what he's talking about). The vinegar--Ilocano vinegar, dark and powerful--is so tart it curls the goat meat; first time I looked in, I thought I was staring at a potful of poisoned centipedes, all curled up, only poisoned centipedes prolly never tasted this good...
Then the climax of the meal: pinapaitan "first class." I've heard and written about this before, I was tasting it now for the first time: the upper intestines of a goat, thoroughly cleaned and chopped, mixed with bits of innards and liver and made into a fatty soup, then flavored--oh so subtly--with goat bile.
Making Ilocano bitter goats' innards stew "first class" is no easy task--easier matter if the stew was made from lower intestines, the food found there is already digested; with upper intestines stuffed with digesting food, you have to have raised the goat yourself (or know the one who raised it very well), and know for sure that the goat's only eaten good-quality grass...
He'd spent the whole morning cleaning the intestines--squeezing them out, hosing them, pulling them inside-out and picking at all the dirt--one piece of shit left behind will give the stew a rancid flavor. This is the key to good Ilocano bitter goats' innards stew; you can't boil the innards for a safe amount of time, you lose the texture of the intestines; you have to have clean intestines to begin with.
Adding the bile is yet another art; he fries the gall bladder in lard with garlic, squeezes out the bile with a cheesecloth, applies it to the stew with a medicine dropper. A drop too little and it's just goat stew; a drop too much and it's inedible...
Well, last night it was glorious. Tender intestines, chewy liver, bits and pieces of interestingly shaped and textured meats--who knew the old goat (actually, it was probably a kid) had so much flavor inside him? And the soup--ahhh, the soup. Thoroughly cleaned, innards are incredibly sweet; flavored with bile, well, I've just discovered a whole new definition of the word "bittersweet." If I ever suffer the misfortune of a failed romance ever again, I can easily picture myself consoling myself with a hot cup of this stuff. Seems to me that given a choice between a girl and this pinapaitan, I'd seriously have to think about it first...
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