Foot and Fire

ADOBO NGA TAKWAY For Ilonggos, this is a vegetable delicacy. Slimy with smooth texture, it's almost melt in the mouth vegetarian experience of adobo. But personally, there is no other vegetable that could effectively evoke childhood memories of five siblings simultaneously as strong as Takway.  With Tatay as our team captain then, we used to gather around a kalalaw to keenly peel off the brown layers of each strand of takway, a long growing extra root of gabi, because the peeled ones in the wetmarket are too little for our appetite that we have to peel our own so we can eat in gusto. It was like a fiesta at the house when we had this .  Too bad for me today; adobo nga takway goes well with lots of rice and I just had some with a mere half rice. 

For lunch today, we had laswa. We mixed all solid vegetables available: papaya called kapayas here, squash or kalabasa, okra, takway (gabi roots) and saykwa or patola and the green leaves at hand: malunggay called balunggay here and saluyot called tugabang. The secret addition is the lemon grass known as tanglad here and some dried fish. .N.B. the ingredients are actually flexible; compare this laswa with my previous post.... Match this vegetable soup with fried fish and rice... Perfect!