MEDIUM RARE

Summer – it may be hot and dry, but there’s no better time than now to bite into a crunchy fruit sweet with the juices of nature. Cook is ecstatic that singkamas are so cheap, ₱40 for a bundle of six pieces, that she finds it a mystery that not more people are buying them. Too cheap for the snob’s taste? Perhaps the fruit (English and Spanish translation: nabo) could be given a more glamorous name like avocado (₱200/kg!)? Cook’s recipe for singkamas salad is a winner at home. Cut the singkamas vertically (shaped like fingers), drizzle with salt, vinegar, sugar, add a touch of color with chopped leaves of cilantro and thin slices of tomato. Voila! a summer masterpiece that goes well with the simplest fried fish, galunggong or whatever. Galunggong, by the way, was ₱300/kg last week. Partly because it’s almost Holy Week, seafood is more expensive than meat. Besides, you know what they say, that meat does not cool the body but increases body temperature. Who wants extra heat in April and May? Just between us, what you read here about food will never land in the food pages of our Lifestyle section. The news as reported by Cook has not been verified by DTI, and where a recipe goes with it, it has not been tested by chefs nor tasted by reviewers and tasters. Caveat emptor. Another herald of summer is watermelon (pakwan), as full of watery goodness as a glass of ice water. At ₱35/kg, watermelon by its name speaks for itself. What else can you do with watermelon but to simply enjoy its sweetly watery juice? At least it has more juice than santol. You don’t even need to refrigerate pakwan as nature has provided it a skin thick enough to shield it from the heat of the sun. Surprises of the season are kamias at the incredible price of ₱20/kg and cilantro at ₱50. And you and I thought kamias had long ago disappeared from public view while cilantro used to cost as much as ₱300 to ₱600 a bundle! (What’s life without cilantro?) Simply stated, savor summer’s harvest before the typhoon season starts and prices jump like fish trying to leap out of the fisherman’s net.