My Alternative Binakoe

I am in a hurry. My contemporaries in the seminary announced (through SMS, of course) their "unannounced" visit too late. "Al, can we pay you a visit today? We are passing by your place in route to Boracay and have decided to while the hours. Leaving San Ag palang kami." "Copy", I texted back, calculating the time to prepare them something that will delight their palate. I gave them the direction to my place and went about salvaging what are frozen in the ref.

It has been a habit of mine to dress a couple of native chickens during weekend and froze them for some proximate future use. That day, I was fortunate that those were still intact. I thought to myself, the couple will do. I took them out to thaw and searched the orchard for some young bamboo culms. I knew what to do in such extraordinary time: Alternative Binakoe. My way.

Anaea-taea is an herb that emits an anise-like scent
and tastes like a mint.

For such dish, you will need the following:

1. Medium-size pressure cooker
2. Newly felled bamboo culms, transformed into slats short enough to be put inside the pressure cooker; washed thoroughly
3. Several stalks of lemon grass, washed

For ingredients, and the manner of preparing it, follow my instruction in my other entry on Binakoe (just click on this link)

Set the fresh bamboo slats horizontally inside the pressure cooker. Put in all the ingredients seeing to it that the lemon grass covers the meat thoroughly. To give it a distinct contemporary taste, add a few leaves of Anaea-taea. Seal the pressure cooker and cook for about half an hour to one hour, mindful of the age of your fowl.

    When my long lost brethren set foot on my door, the sweet and fresh smelling aroma of the Binakoe welcomed them and set the ambiance despite the noon day heat of summer. As they feasted, we recollected those bygone years inside the antiquated stone-carved Monasterio de Guadalupe our forebears had constructed late in 1601. Someone mentioned of the artworks once hanging in its wall and wondered of the association I had with some bamboos to Augustine's Credo ut Intellegam principle.

I was about to give them an extemporaneous sermon on the matter but I warned them that Boracay is still roughly two hours ride from my place. Unless they prefer missing Anne Curtis sand bathing in the sugary white beach....

That freed them from the spell of the "lotus charm" and got ready to head off northward...to contemplate on the wonderful miracles of God, of beholding his master pieces like Ms. Curtis laid out on that fading island where its original settlers are becoming marginalized.

Rowing Down the Jal-o

The water is silent. Deep. It betrays movement. It hides the strong current that runs underneath the aquamarine surface.

Life sometimes is the water that runs silently. It is a movement; a jibing and tacking of some exiled souls.

Tonight, the angel announces: Be at peace, sojourner. Your boat is approaching a bend. For awhile, your are no longer exiled, rowing alone in the river of life. The dawn is about to break. I got for you a boatman who will journey with you to the next embankment.

While on your own, follow the North Star. She will guide you in the pitch black of the night as you navigate the shoals and the sandbars.

Then on the sixth month of the year, you will be reunited with the boatman of your soul. You shall once again row along with the Katilingban and the boatman will lead you home to your community.

Approximating Binakoe

Binakoe is definitely an Akeanon dish popularly known throughout the Philippines as "binakol". The net is rich with information on how it is done but always falls short of its spirit. Most surfers encounter clones which definitely alienate them farther off from its true nature and deprive them of the chance of feasting on this rare delicacy the way Datu Puti had it in his time.

Nemo dat quod non habet. That's the rule. Nature without spirit is ironically unnatural. Factual but not real. Bereft of its true essence. Artificial. An imitation. Preparing 'binakoe' without understanding its philosophy is deception. You cannot cook something which in the first place you do not understand.

Binakoe dates back to the pre-Spanish Panay settlers when cauldron was a very rare commodity. It has been handed to us by the Ilayanons who introduced us to a couple of variety of preparing it. I for myself witnessed and feasted on them during my visits in upstream Jal-o, notably in Dayas and Benitinian years back. When in Dayas or Benitinan, a visitor is asked by the children with this riddle: "What would you make of a fowl when you are tired of eating it grilled but find yourselves in the middle of nowhere with nothing but salt in hand and some wild herbs to collect around?"

Cooking a Binakoe the way our forebears did it.

The answer to that is of course, "Binakoe."

BINAKOE – HOW IT IS DONE 

Ingredients:

       1 dressed native chicken (preferably one year old or younger-talin o sueog) cut into bite-size pieces

       1 big onion, quartered (sibuyas)

       1 piece ginger (about the size of your thumb, peeled and pounded – pinaepag nga euy-a)

       1 teaspoon, black pepper (whole - recado)

       1 piece dried bay leaf (dahon it recado)

       Lemon grass (enough to seal the mouth of young bamboo internodes – tang-ead)

       Salt to taste (asin)

       (You may also mixed some Aeabihig leaves or fruits to give off sourly taste to your viand)

  

Pre-cooking Preparation:

    For Variety One – You will need one or two cleaned young bamboo culms* taken out of a newly felled down bamboo and cut to about ½ meter from each node. The hollow internode is where you put in the meat** already mixed with the rest of the ingredients. Seal each culm with the washed lemon grass. Place it perpendicularly near a fire for about an hour, regularly turning the culm to even up the heat and to avoid burning the inside of the internode.

    *Butong is the better alternative than the kawayan and the rest of the bamboo varieties as it is juicer. 

    **The dressed chicken, prior to cutting it into pieces, is pounded softly as if being beaten down, thus the term, binakoe. The wisdom behind this practice is to make the meat tender but firmer. It helps also in removing those sticky serum-like strands that enveloped certain parts of the muscle structure of the meat.  

Binakoe cooked on a young coconut drupe.

    For  Variety Two – one or two young coconut fruit (also called 'butong' in local dialect). Do not remove the coconut husk. Use a crosscut saw in opening finely the top of the young coconut. Discard the juice but leave the endosperm (the young coconut meat or drupe) untouched. On the hallow space of the fruit put in the mixed ingredients and the meat, capping them with the lemon grass. Replace the top of the young coconut to serve as cover of the lid. Cook it directly on fire for about 1 to 2 hours. 

Feast on it with you bare hand and match it with bisaya (upland rice variety). You won't regret scaling the heights to Benitinan or Dayas. Those are just bonus besides the opportunity of communing with nature at its best. 

Those Star Apple Trees Whose Branches were Filled with Saliyaw

"When you start felling down pine trees in the City of Pines, you are slowly felling down that city's identity.  When you rob the saliyaw of their thriving ground, you rob lovers of their beloved." 

The sad incidence in Baguio City where so called developmental change being introduced by SM Management within its property that alarmed several environmental groups has reminded me of three seemingly unimportant realities of the bygone years of my town. They may be regarded as insignificant although I suspect that they have had touched and influenced quite a number of persons over the years. These three realities were as follows:

• Those sweet-smelling Saliyaw which used to thrived on Star Apple trees around the then town plaza;
• An unassuming young Franciscan Nun (God bless her soul) who came by for some brief passing moments to introduce and conduct workshop to several youths on theater arts (PETA); and 
• Gary Granada's Paligid 

OF SALIYAW AND STAR APPLES
       There was a time when commuters from far-off Iloilo or Roxas City, on their way to Kalibo, would note upon smelling such unique sweet scent in the air that they were passing through Balete. The odoriferous perfume permeating the darkening sky served as balm and reassured the weary travelers that they were nearing their destination. To trained nose, the sweet scent comes from the blooming Saliyaw (an indigenous/wild orchid) thriving on the many Star Apple Trees in the Balete Town Plaza. To many of us who got used of their presence and odor, they were just ordinary and irrelevant. Yet those were the years when Star Apple trees were still adorning and giving off shade to the park benches around the plaza--and giving off free milky treat to kids during its season--when Balete was identified by outsiders as a Saliyaw-smelling town by the dusty road connecting Kalibo to Iloilo and Roxas City.

THE GIFT OF THE FRANCISCAN NUNS
      The presence of the Franciscan nuns (Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception-SFIC) in Balete was hardly remembered. Like their founder, they shied the limelight and toiled silently with the poor and the marginalized sectors--the women and the out-of-school youth. Precisely that they are remembered only by those whose lives they touched. It was when Msgr. Pedro C. Frac was parish priest of Balete (August 9, 1997-July 31, 2004) when they passed by our town. With them was a young simple professed nun who engaged the youth to task of honing their dramatic skills to come up with a stage production on the vesper eve of  the town fiesta. (I learned though that she died in Zamboanga port some years ago--an innocent victim of the violence that has been besetting that place.) Today, those youth are playing relevant roles in the society at large. I saw some of them engaging today's young ones and passing on those legacies they have had learned in their theater art workshop with the late Sis. Dulce.

The cover design of the album, Ang Pagsamba at Pakikibaka

PALIGID ACCORDING TO GARY
      One legacy Sis. Dulce had shared with the youth of yesteryears was Gary Granada. She gave then his album Ang Pagsamba at Pakikibaka which they used as a material for their production number. Paligid is the opening piece of the eight cuts that comprised the 1989 album. It is a song that is critical of the feigned development in the City of Pines and of displacement and calls on the hearer to do something to care for our dying ecosystem.

I always thought that the incident in Baguio is not an isolated one. No matter how it went and the circumstances around it, it affects us even though we are far off. We were rob of that positive association with the sweet scent of Saliyaw without our noticing it. The people of Baguio fears and are proactive about such fear of the day when they wake up without the pine trees in their midst. They are showing us the way. The echoes of their voice are relevant to our town now beset with flash floods and of the reality of our diminishing forest.

We need to do something about it. Now is the appropriate time.

Inubaran

Our Easter Feast of Inubaran

Easter remains to be the grandest and holiest feast in the entire Christian world. I have seen to it to pass on that tradition to my children. After all those meaningful Triduum liturgies had been observed and remarked upon, we cap our celebration with "exotic meal" (for those meals usually reserved during special occasions have already been secularized by the "Jollibeezation" of our eating habit). Thus for a change, I treated the kids with my special chicken inubaran.

Here is how to prepare it, just in case you are interested to experiment. You will need the following:

1 whole native chicken sliced into bits and pieces (about 600g);  banana pith* (ubad);2 glasses coconut milk (payok);  lemon grass (tang-ead);  salt to taste (asin);  vinegar or aeabihig leaves/fruit (eangaw o aeabihig); onion, sliced (sibuyas);  garlic, a clove or two, pounded (bawang);  black pepper (recado);  ginger, small piece, pounded (euy-a);  cooking oil (mantika, panggisa);dried basil or laurel leaf (dahon it recado); red and green pepper

On a cauldron:

1. Saute onion and garlic in cooking oil. 2. Add chicken pieces and saute until the meat is nearly-cooked. 3. Add the thinner coconut milk. Boil. Add ginger and the mashed banana pith. 4. Add lemon grass, salt and pepper. Add vinegar or the leaf or fruit of aeabihig (if you want this a little bit sour) or not, depends on you. 5. Add the thinker coconut milk. Bring to boil. Simmer until the chicken is tender.

 *Banana pith is the core layer of a banana trunk. Edible pith are those taken out of Saba or Pakoe variety. Chose one mature banana, but which that has not yet bore fruit. Peel through each sheath until you find the white parts. It is very tender and sweet. Grate it and pound on a pestle. After which take out the hairy elements with a clean rod. Mashed and drained it of its liquid.

My kids heard of Easter egg hunt the kids in the poblacion are excited about, but never appreciate it. It is an alien activity to them. They are grateful however to God that their Kuya Jesus is now risen from the dead. Mama Mary will be happy to know about the news while they will anticipate each year to feast on some delicacy their father will dare experimenting for their curious taste to try on.