Every time I’m in the Quiapo area, I never fail to stop over and devote a portion of my visit to the Moslem quarter. Besides a lot of bargain electronics, and DVDs, I have built a long-standing fascination with Moro cooking and its different features and ingredients.

This visit was even better because I was with my former student, now Unilever chef, Datu Shariff Pendatun III, who has carved out a rather exciting career for himself as a corporate chef

and has maintained and carried on that part of himself which is his culinary heritage.

The best time to go around shopping for ingredients and to have freshly cooked food in different Halal restaurants is between the hours of 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Prayer time in the mosque is at 12, and everyone eats normally before or, like the majority, after. A lot of regional restaurants and dishes are located around the mosque with the occasional Middle Eastern shop which sells flat bread.

Unfortunately, we missed the Tausugs who left and we were not able to eat the delicious skewered satees drenched in sauce and the spicy blackened coconut cream chicken stew called itum. So we ended up in a place called Niyalah Halal on Norzagaray Street.

Chef Datu picked an assortment of dishes and we basically ate Malay style, washing our hands before eating with them. The spicy cuisine became even more fiery, when we opened a bottle of palapa, a condiment made of stewed scallion bulbs known in Visayan as sibujing and in Moro as sakurat. This is caramelized by slow cooking and mixed with chilies; it gives a meaty taste to the food. It is a sambal of sorts and sometimes is eaten alone with rice when there is no food on the table or when times are hard. This was really delicious especially with bakas, or smoked tuna cooked in turmeric and topped with chilies and grated coconut.

One can also moisten the rice from the sauce of a dalag stew called arwan in coconut turmeric sauce known as pialam to the Tausugs. I also like the flaky carabeef or randang stewed slowly in spices and coco cream and needed loads of rice to calm the palate. To cool our palates, we had a side order of pusan or small salted pickled fresh-water fish in diced tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers in vinegar, which gave another dimension to our hot steamed rice.

Afterwards, we went around and I bought a bakas or a whole small tuna or (probably a bonito); it was about 18 inches long, well smoked and skewered on bamboo. At P 250 with all that meat in it I thought it was a real steal. I bought another bottle of palapa or that hot onion sambal for P 100 and salted lakefish for P 150. Datu told me to get a couple of packs of pratulong (fresh-water dried fish) for flavoring and tumaginting, some sort of dried dilis.

By the side of the mosque, we got some duldul or dark sticky rice pudding wrapped in banana leaf. Some other curious kakanin types were those wrapped and steamed in corn husks that I will get next time considering both hands were already full and laden with bags.

You can reach me at chefgenegonzalez@yahoo.com.