Epiphany in steam and sea

What's that?

It is indeed disconcerting when you think your dinner is climbing out of the biggest stockpot you have--especially when that stockpot is a little more than a foot across.

In fact, this is what the stockpot had in store:

The problem with this photo, mainly, is that there is no way to impress you with the scale of this creature. I tried taking photos of my hands next to the crab, but my hands are scrawny as it is anyway, and short of putting it right next to my head for reference there's really no way of convincing you that this beast is nearly 14 inches across. That claw? In diameter, it has to be at least four inches.

A friend was wonderful enough to bring this crab from Pohnpei when he visited a month ago. The crab has been sitting in my freezer for a month, while in the meantime I borrowed a crab cracker and agonized over when to spend the necessary hours savoring such an ungodly animal.

Never mind that when I finally opened the freezer bag last night, I had a mild panic attack, seeing as I have never actually cooked shellfish before, and it was already in the stockpot steaming away for nearly 15 minutes before it occurred to me to look online for instructions on how to not die from eating self-prepared shellfish. The thought of potentially effing up meat that goes for about $20-25 also made me slightly anxious.

I'm still alive--and not drowning in sorrow from throwing away $20-25--today so I didn't mess up, thankfully.

In fact, I was truly overjoyed to be able to capture in a few photographs what I can't call anything less than a food epiphany. I've had two before: one while eating lobster for the second time in my life at a lobster supper on Prince Edward Island (with its fresh hot rolls and melted butter, bottomless bowl of clam chowder, and blueberry pie with real cream whipped cream for afterwards), and another that involved a Muslim Chinese beef dish with coriander seeds and cilantro after an eight year stint in vegetarian naivete.

Things that I learned throughout this experience:

1. I will never be able to again have a first time eating crab from Pohnpei,

2. Claws and legs are absolutely worth the effort of gnawing away; it's about enjoying the sea water within and the firm texture of the flesh. However, if you only eat the legs, there are no words to describe your loss in neglecting the more tender and interesting body meat,

3. A ball-peen hammer is a reasonable substitute for a crab mallet,

4. Despite a genuine commitment to make sure that the intended dinner did not die in vain or wastefully, and given that the five foods on this planet I just don't like include kidney and liver, it is sometimes worth wasting a little bit (in this case, crab lungs) so as not to spoil the entire experience,

and,

5. Despite 2 1/2 hours of committed eating, slurping, picking, and smacking, it is reasonable to expect that one will, at the end of such an effort, be as hungry as one was when one started.

However, it was worth every second. The crab did not die in vain. Its shell and leftover parts (minus those suspiciously textured lungs) will be resurrected in stock, and maybe I'll end up keeping part of that claw as a memento for what is really, truly great food.

Håfa i mas bunitu na mångga gi Guåhan? (Could you be the most beautiful mango in Guåhan?)

Probably not. For one thing, you're a bilembines (star apple). And as confused as I am that you're around (considering that my grandma's tree fruited something like two months ago), I would still consider chopping you up, sprinkling brown sugar, and roasting you in the oven. If only the oven didn't create an ungodly unfathomable heat around 4 in the afternoon...

Håyi hamyo?



Yeah, okay, you're definitely contenders.

Ya hamyo?



I am impressed.

Given my bloggy keen interests in plant life, don't worry, ti kumakaduka yu' (not going batty/fuminihi). It's just that once I abandoned the greenery-starved regions of Sanlågu where I rode my bike, I picked up new interests.



Hågat's Mango Festival 2009 was two weeks ago. Unfortunately the photos of the bob-for-mangoes didn't turn out, and technology has yet to evolve a simultaneous web and smell-o-cast of the mango donut demonstration pavilion, but you'll have to take my word that kimchee mango pickles are gof mångge'.

Given that the backyard banana trees are doing wonderful things by not dying on me (unlike the Indoor Bonsai Ficus Number 1), too bad the bananas themselves continue to curse my existence. Blech. One day I will in fact be able to eat a banana.



Until then, I stick to the left side of the table. Or maybe at a house somewhere in Sinahåña or Chalan Pågo, where the despondent owners of a mango tree put a massive sign out front begging people to take them off their hands. This story might be apocryphal, but I'm willing to keep driving to determine if it is so.

Empanåda

If there is one thing I craved while in Sanlågu, it was Chamoru-style empanåda. I had grown up only knowing these kinds (on the rare trips that my grandmother made to Sanlågu, carrying bags of frozen ones in her suitcase), so it was quite a shock when I got to Los Angeles and had my first taste of Filipino empanadas.

For those of you who have never tried the ones available in Los Angeles, Filipino empanadas are filled with chicken or pork and baked in a slightly sweet bready dough. I assume that variations include baking the fillings in flaky pastry dough and frying the things, but I never had any prepared that way in L.A.

I had tried some empanadas from some South American countries (I can't remember which ones now because it was more than a year ago) at Empanada Mama in New York: cheesy and tasty. You can also find recipes for nouveau varieties --like those for fillings with goat cheese and dandelion greens in the Los Angeles Times, which, frankly, sound sort of silly.

And so, the first morning I awoke in Guåhan, the first thing I did was get myself over to the Aguon store in Barigåda and get me two empanåda and a King Carr ice tea...



... and promptly, a little heartburn, too, because I wasn't exactly used to eating a spicy deep-fried something at 6:30 a.m.

But i kirason-hu, a little more clogged for the wear, nonetheless appreciates the goodness that is a Chamoru empanåda. As you can see, it's 1) deep-fried, 2) consists of a corn-based dough as opposed to all the other wheat-based ones I've tried in Sanlågu, and 3) orange, courtesy of the ubiquitous Chamoru spice, achiote seed. From the picture, you can't see that 1) it's got perfectly crunchy edges, and 2) it's warm, having been fried probably not less than an hour before, but probably less than even that.

And on the inside?



That's either toasted and ground rice or toasted cream of rice boiled with chicken stock and enhanced with bacon (or chicken), lots of pepper, and more achiote seed. Also notice that the outer dough has broken into individual crispy flakes courtesy of a deep fry job well done.

Simple breakfast bought for about $1 each from the Aguon store. But of course if you're not here, you can always try making them yourself (look under "Meat").

Kaffo' and pahong (pandanus fruit)

While wandering on a northeastern beach, I came across a plant I'd never seen before. And it was sprouting what seemed to be a big fruit, so naturally I had to do some research.

A person in our group said the fruit was edible, but that it could make one's mouth itchy. I didn't bother to find out.

However, it turns out that this fruit is from the pandanus plant (pandanus fragrans) and is in fact edible, eaten most notably in Kiribati and the Marshall Islands. It's ripe when the those pod-like parts, called phalanges, separate, pop out and turn orange.

Obviously this fruit isn't ready for picking, then. If you look closely on the left side of the fruit, you'll see it beginning to turn slightly.

The phalanges then can give off a sweet smell. You can apparently eat them by boiling them or scooping out the pulp within, and they contain seeds--which themselves contain oxalates and are the little buggers that can cause itchiness or irritation when ingested (though they're not supposed to be toxic). [Note: the kaffo', eaten by fanihi/fruit bats, is different from fadang/federico palm seeds, which was theorized by Oliver Sacks (Island of the Colorblind) to cause the infamous lytico-bodig disease. Sacks thought that the fadang-eating fanihi concentrated the seed toxin within their body fat, which then transferred to Chamorus when they ate the bats.]

So if I happen to go back and get a ripe kaffo', I guess I'll be trying out this recipe, courtesy of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community's (2001) publication, The Fruits We Eat. I've paraphrased the exact directions, but here's the main gist:

1. Boil phalanges. Alternatively, you can also pound the crap out of them.

2. Remove pulp.

3. Strain out the seeds. The resulting juice should be thick.

4. Dry the juice on leaves in the sun or over a hot stove, in either small cakes or as a large rectangular one.

5. Flip it over, dry some more, and then cut.

Some variations include adding coconut milk or grated coconut to the juice itself. It's supposed to taste like a cross between coconut and almond, so maybe it would go well with a tumbler of... rum?

Ensalåda fafalu (banana blossom salad)

We're lucky enough to have at least 20 banana plants (apparently they're not trees, but pseudostems--thanks Wikipedia banana article!) in the backyard, which are nice to look at while I'm working from my office. Unfortunately for me, I hate bananas because they induced a vomit-y trauma in childhood. The smell alone makes me want to ralph.

So we've let a fair number of banana hands fall to the ground and rot, in part because we don't have a ladder to reach them, and in part because I just can't bring myself to look at these bunches and figure out how to use them for anything other than banana bread. However, I was at the vegetable stand and happened to see these big purple cabbage-looking things, and got totally intrigued. Because what were being sold in the veg stand were essentially these things, which hang from the bottom of the banana hands in our backyard:




Some cursory internet research revealed some recipes for banana blossom salad, which apparently is eaten in Vietnam and Thailand. The recipes I found tended to assume that the cooker knew exactly to prep blossoms, so I had to wing it the first time.

So here's the banana blossom. You can get a sense of how big they are; generally, I've found that it's best to work with one that's at least a foot long.



Get a blossom with leaves well-attached to the stem at the bottom. Leaves should have no or very little black around the edges and should be tightly packed. When blossoms are older, they also tend to give off a slightly alcoholic smell, which I don't particularly enjoy.

Peel the leaves off one at a time, removing the stamens along the way. I'm not sure if you can eat those, so if you know, please write so in the comments.









Most recipes suggest that if you eat the blossom leaves raw, you soak them in lemon juice as you trim the rest to prevent browning.

Generally, some of the recipes I've gleaned from local Filipino residents include using the blossom leaves in soups and stir-frying them with onions. Surprisingly enough, I haven't met any Chamoru yet who has actually prepped fafalu. An old Pacific Daily News article I found from the early 80s suggests cooking it with ground beef and coconut milk--which seems to be the default method of cooking in Guåhan if one doesn't know what to do with a vegetable-like substance--so maybe I'll try that later.

In the meantime, I threw together a mixture of diced red peppers, cilantro, green onions, garlic, red pepper flakes, kalamansi (the local version of small limes or lemons) juice, fish sauce, sugar, rice vinegar, and oil. The dressing resembles that of Thai green papaya salad. You can check out some recipes on banana blossoms here and here.

Otherwise, I was able to patch together a not-bad combination of shrimp with chili garlic sauce and ensalåda fafalu. Overall, the chopped leaves resemble raw cabbage most closely in texture, and have a pretty neutral flavor which will lend themselves to heavy spicing and improvisation.



My photos are obviously not as good as other food blogs, but I guess it's one more thing I can work on while here.

Gollai kalamasa (pumpkin tips)

In the interest of trying to eat a little more locally due to our lack of refrigerator space (most of the shelves are consumed by the rice and baking supplies to prevent mildew and rancidity), rising food prices, and a generally dismal state of imported produce quality, I bought some gollai kalamasa. I had never actually eaten this green before, but assumed that it would be okay in one of my favorite local dishes, gollai appan suni--otherwise known as taro leaves in coconut milk.

You can get a sense of how big the cut tips are here:





Before preparing gollai kalamasa, you first have to peel the slightly prickly skin from the stems.



As you can see from the thin threads that result from this peeling, you can imagine that this process takes a really long time. I think in the future I'll just cut off the stems since I didn't think they were particularly flavorful anyway.

The leaves are pretty large, so I would also suggest cutting them to quicken the cooking process and make eating easier.



The actual cooking process, according to Chamorro.com, is fairly simple. Essentially you boil the leaves with coconut milk, lemon juice, onion, ginger, and fresh hot peppers. You can find the gollai appan suni recipe here.



It was only after I had cooked the gollai kalamasa that I found out from locals that the tips are usually cooked in soups with chicken. Since it's a relatively tough vegetable with leaves that are a slightly furrier version of kale leaves, that would make perfect sense--but in my defense, I still think this version of gollai appan suni turned out pretty mannge'!