A Feast For One
When the chairs around a dining table are empty there’s always dilaw na lugaw. Bea J Ledesma writes about how her favourite dishes got her through lockdown loneliness.
Words by Bea J. Ledesma
My dining table, a marble-topped piece surrounded by chairs purchased at a secondhand shop, easily sits six. Eight, in a pinch. Ten, if nobody hates each other.
But over the past 16 months, it’s barely seen any visitors. A rare occasion for this dining table, which has seen seven Christmas parties, seven birthdays, seven New Year’s Eve festivities and more than a hundred gatherings.
It’s spent many meals groaning under the weight of impractically portioned courses, oversized stews, heaping bowls of rice, a side dish or two or five. My strategy as a host, like any Filipino, is to leave your guests so stuffed, they fall unconscious immediately after dessert. Over here in the Philippines where I live, no meal is complete until someone’s popping an antacid.
At one dinner over the holidays (pre-covid), I prepared a large vat of veggie curry with adlai, a heritage grain commonly called “Job’s Tears” in the west.
“Is this it?” one guest asked.
“Yes, this is it,” I said. “But you get three bowls of it.”
That curry, made with root vegetables, okra, green beans and mushrooms, was spooned over freshly-cooked adlai and topped with a six-minute egg. Break into the egg, fold it into your curry and adlai, and you are transported somewhere warm and welcoming and cosy—maybe your mother’s womb, maybe the last row of first-class after a particularly disheartening experience at luggage check.
One particularly memorable meal lasted till early morning, with guests reheating dinner leftovers for breakfast: steamed rice became fried, dumplings popped back into the steamer, veg stuffed into the oven, the rest consumed cold, though nobody complained.
As lockdown gripped Manila, in the second quarter of 2020, residents were barred from leaving their homes, allowed only to exit for necessities. I spent those early months cocooning, looking back on previous gatherings at home: brushing against guests on my way to serve appetizers, spooning ladles of tomato stews into creamy white bowls of rice.
I never thought the day would come when I would yearn for cleanup, collecting post-dinner detritus, scraping melted candle wax from the tablecloth and collecting bottles of booze for the recycling bin.
Now, there’s no one to inflict my long-winded exposition of the magical properties of golden lugaw, a version of rice porridge that includes turmeric (hence, the amber hue) and moringa, a local leafy veg packed with vitamin C and potassium.
Lately, I’ve found myself turning to homey, humble dishes, similar to the kind of food my mom would prepare growing up. Her favorite quarantine remedy is paksiw na bangus with ampalaya. In English: milkfish stew in vinegar with bitter gourd. The broth is seasoned heavily with vinegar, an acid bite that’s both sharp and comforting, tempering the bitter gourd and offering a counterpoint to the fatty midsection of the sliced milkfish. I enjoy a sour so aggressive it forces even the freshly Botoxed to scrunch their forehead and squint.
At home, I make fish head sinigang (sour fish head stew), using various souring agents—sometimes tamarind or, for a gentler tang, santol (cotton fruit). The tamarind offers a thick, sour layer to the broth, infusing it with an almost industrial-strength power. The eyes and cheek of the fish head—its rich gelatinous flesh—is the highlight of the dish. Poured over steaming hot rice, it’s the cure for the quarantine doldrums when “Love Island” just isn’t enough.
Food is medicine, as they say. But what they don’t say enough is that sometimes a lip-bitingly sour broth makes you feel better than any barbiturate on the market.
Recipe for Dilaw na lugaw (Golden rice porridge)
This is a non-traditional recipe as the conventional lugaw has no turmeric or moringa. But this version, on a cold, rainy day, is incredibly warming and restorative.
This recipe serves 10
Ingredients:
2 cups of medium-grain rice
5 or more cloves of garlic, chopped (I like more)
4 thumbs of ginger, peeled and julienned
4 thumbs of fresh turmeric, peeled and julienned (you can sub with 2 tbsps of turmeric powder)
8 tbsps of fish sauce
8 tbsps of vegetable stock paste (or 4 veggie bouillon cubes)
10-12 cups of water (add more if it becomes too thick)
2 tbsp neutral oil
A large handful of malunggay (moringa)
Method:
In a large stockpot, saute aromatics (garlic, ginger, turmeric) in oil till the turmeric has infused the mix. Pour water, fish sauce and vegetable stock paste. Once it’s simmering, add your rice. Bring to a boil, stirring to make sure no rice sticks to the bottom, then bring it down to a simmer. This will take about 30 minutes to cook. Once it’s done, take it off the heat. Fold in your moringa and serve in bowls. Top with your garnish, traditionally consisting of crispy garlic bits (you can find this at Asian supermarkets or make your own), chopped spring onion, fresh calamansi (or whatever citrus you have on hand) and a jammy egg.