Kain na! (Let’s Eat!)

It was noisy. The staccato of Ilocano, the singsong of Tagalog, two native tongues of the Philippines cut through the din and paired with the comfortable rhythm of Filipino English. This, all punctuated with laughter, was the chorus that greeted us as we arrived at the 63^rd Annual Filipino Community Harvest Dinner, a fiesta to celebrate the Filipino pioneers who settled in the valley and built this community Hall on South 2^nd Street in Wapato in 1938.

The smiling faces of the ladies in traditional garb welcomed us and promptly ushered us to the tables of food. It felt like a typical Filipino party:  meet then eat, so on to the food!

At the helm of the buffet was a battleship-sized rice cooker holding enough steamed jasmine rice to feed my family for generations. Running out of rice at a Filipino gathering is, after all, unthinkable.

The table was laden with dish after dish from my childhood growing up in Manila:

Chicken adobo – a tangy chicken dish braised in vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, bay leaves and whole peppercorns, its sauce meant to soak into the hot, sticky rice. I have many fond memories of my mother and aunts swapping recipes – there are hundreds of variations – and arguing the merits of each over the other.

Calderetang baka – a Spanish-inspired beef stew slowly simmered in a tomato-based sauce with potatoes and peppers. The Wapato version was excellent, the tender chunks of beef contrasted nicely with the crisp red and green peppers.

Pancit bihon – rice noodles stir fried with carrots, cabbage and green beans.

Lumpia – crunchy deep-fried spring rolls filled with vegetables, best eaten with a splash of garlic-infused vinegar.

Lechon – this conjured up memories of many Christmases past, of a whole roasted pig sitting atop the buffet table, the mastery of the dish judged on the basis of how uniformly crisp and deep red-brown colored the skin was, in contrast to the moist, pale meat underneath. The obligatory lechon sauce, a sweet and sour brown gravy, rounded the dish out.

The dessert table was a colorful array of different kinds of kakanin – delicacies made from sweet rice (bibingka), rice (puto), and root vegetables (cassava cake). Seeing the puto made me wonder if I’d somehow missed the dish it is often paired with, a savory stew of meat simmered in a rich, dark brown gravy of (brace yourself) pig’s blood, garlic, chili and vinegar: dinuguan.

After double-checking the main buffet table, I figured they’d decided against serving a dish that was best eaten and not described, when out of the corner of my eye I spied a small table by the kitchen, a single black crock pot sitting atop it. I lifted the lid, and was pleasantly greeted by the familiar dark chocolate colored stew. Dinuguan!

The sounds, the smells, the friendliness of everyone; for a while, I forgot I was in Wapato and felt like I was 7,000 miles away in the Philippines. “Back home,” I would have said a few years ago, but this valley is home now, and I’m glad that this Filipino Hall and all its wonderful people (and food!) are here to make it just that much more colorful.

I love my home.

Guest Writers:  Jocelyn and Manuel Pedrosa collaborated this week to bring us their experience in the valley. They have resided in the Yakima Valley for nearly 20 years; arriving via Chicago and Amsterdam from their native Philippines. Manuel is an IT guru for a medical technology company and Jocelyn is a pediatrician. They are the proud parents of 2 teenage daughters.