Tastes Great, But What Is It??

As you probably all know, I take cookies with me when we do a record review in a ward.  They have a name for "breaks" during the day, "merienda."  A few weeks ago, we were in one of the southern stakes and had an interesting experience and this prompted me to do a post on differences in food traditions.

We were finishing up the record review with the ward council and I got out the cookies and soda.  Everyone was excited to eat American cookies.  Snickerdoodles, chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, ginger chewy and chocolate crinkle.  They started eating and I'm hearing 'masarap', 'delishioso' and other compliments and then the bishop disappeared and returned with the remainder of the loaf of bread for the sacrament.  As I watched, he put a chocolate chip cookie between two slices of bread and began to eat away..... okay.... and then everyone else joined in and the loaf was gone!  Cookie sandwich, haven't seen that before.  So the next week, we went south again to a different ward, and they did the same thing!  It must be a Candon thing.

Now I find out that they also eat ice cream on bread.  We provided cookies and homemade ice cream for a YSA activity.  Lesson learned....they don't eat the cookies with the ice cream.  Those are two different desserts to be eaten separately.

On to the scientific discoveries:

Question: Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?  Do you make jam out of vegetables? No. But look what we have here........

This is tomato jam.  It is sweet, but you can still tell that it is tomato.  Therefore, the scientific answer must be tomato is a fruit.  But wait, what about tomato catsup??? Isn't that a vegetable???  Silly person; haven't you heard of banana catsup??  So you see catsup is a fruit product.  Banana catsup looks just like tomato catsup, although they say it is sweeter.

Now we come to one of our favorites.  Barbeque on a stick.  In this case Ineng's Pork.  We love it.  They have Ineng's in California, Washington and Florida.  Looking on the internet, there are tons of recipes for Philippino barbeque sauce.  Two of the common ingredients are....you guessed it... banana catsup and 7Up.

This will be a project when I get home; how to make our own version.  Getting the right cut of pork will be the first test. 

Speaking of right ingredients; how about this...horseradish in rolls.  There is a very popular bakery here that only makes hot rolls.  Duron's Malunggay Pandesal.  You eat them hot, any time of the day. Especially popular for breakfast.  There is other pandesal, but it is not the same.  So I'm asking people what makes them different and they say that it is the horseradish.  Now I love prime rib with horseradish and I can tell the flavor of it and these rolls do not taste like that at all.  So on further investigation, guess what I find......

The special ingredient to these is this.....

The leaves on this plant get used in all kinds of cooking.  And is not the same thing we call horseradish in America.

Our all-time favorite discovery so far, except maybe for fresh mangos, is the yellow watermelon which Sister Eddington has already mentioned.

We will attempt to grow them when we get home.  I think you can order the seeds from Gurney's and they are delicious.

To end with a little controversy.  We have been told by Philippina sister missionaries that this is spinach.  Do you think they are teasing us?

It looks like a weed in a tomato patch to me.