I have always wanted to write a book. It has been on my “list of things that I want to do in my life” for ages now. Here in China I knew I would finally have the time to do it. In fact, I started working on a novel during my first summer vacation here. The novel was a political thriller based in China, where the protagonist was a foreign student from the US who uncovered (and eventually thwarted) an evil genocidal plot by a rogue subversive group within the Chinese government. One of my favorite antagonists in the book was a homicidal, criminally insane, former world-champion Chinese female gymnast/assassin who was barely four feet tall. Her favorite method of killing people was by jumping on their backs (in a stylish “full-twisting Sukahara”) and strangling them with her powerful legs……… she was bad ass.
I’m not sure that The People’s Republic (working title) will ever get finished, but my second summer vacation was spent working on another book which I’m happy to report has finally been completed. This book is NOT a work of fiction. In fact, it is the exact opposite. As the name implies, The Enciso Family Cookbook highlights a collection of (mostly Filipino) recipes that I’ve collected from my family. It is also replete with family photos and stories. Using the Adobe desktop publishing software, InDesign, I finished putting it together into what ended up being a fine looking book, which is a little surprising given that my only previous experience with InDesign was a five-minute “how to” tutorial from our friend Nerissa.
Below is an introduction that I wrote and included in the book:
Back when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tonga, I discovered that whenever I felt severely homesick, the best cure was a little bit of Filipino “home cooking”. Of course, seeing as how I couldn’t really cook Filipino food-- because before I moved to Tonga ,all that I had to do to access home cooking was to request it directly from the source (Mom or Dad), obtaining or making food that tasted “just like home” presented major challenges for me.
I had some vague idea of how some of dishes were cooked, having watched my mom cook for us every day. I was never one of those kids that had to be dragged back into the house kicking and screaming at dinner time. In fact I was quite the opposite. I was the kid who knew exactly when dinner was going to be served and who got home early to help out with the easier parts of the process. This is how I learned the word "guissaw", which means to sauté. Mom frequently assigned this task to me because the overwhelming majority of the Filipino dishes that Mom cooked started with the process of guissawing garlic in cooking oil until it was golden brown and had infused the oil with its flavors, and then adding sliced onions and guissawing those until they were soft and clear. Beyond that, however, I never actually learned how to cook any of the Filipino dishes that Mom and Dad made for us while we were growing up.
In order to overcome my homesickness while I was living in Tonga, it was imperative that I learn how to make some of these dishes. Through snail mail communication with Mom and Dad (this was before email and each letter took an average of two weeks to arrive in Tonga) I managed to learn a few of the easier dishes like adobo and pancit. The process of learning these dishes has continued over the last several years and has eventually morphed into this project: The Enciso Family Cookbook.
This cookbook contains the recipes of most of our favorite dishes from when we were growing up, many of which we only knew by their nicknames (such as the dish we refer to as “balls balls balls”). It also contains recipes of some of our current individual “specialties”, those dishes for which we are known among our circles of friends because we tend to make them for guests. They’re our “go to” dishes, if you will. Our extended family is represented as well, with recipes that Damian and Chris recall most from their own childhoods. This book is a true family book in every sense of the word.
Putting this book together has been a work of joy. If there’s anything that we Encisos do well, it’s FOOD (both cooking food AND eating food), and this book effectively captures this in the various recipes, stories, quotes, and pictures. My hope is that this book will help to ensure that no matter WHERE we all are in this big world, none of us will ever feel homesick again and that future generations of Encisos will always be able to make these dishes, that are all such an important part of who we are.
Charles
The book also contains a brief glossary because I use several Tagalog and Illocano words that people might not be familiar with. The glossary was also another place where I could tell more stories about my family. For example:
Bagoong- Bagoong is a salted, fermented fish or shrimp based paste that is used to add fishy/salty flavors to Filipino cooking. Bagoong alamang is the shrimp based version and is the type most commonly used by Mom and Dad. Sometimes bagoong alamang is bright pink, or dull purple, or even gray- depending on the brand that you buy. As you would expect, it has a VERY strong fish smell, especially when fried (as when cooking kare kare), and can really stink up a house in very little time.
Dad tells a funny story of an event that occurred when he and a Filipino friend, who was in the Navy with him, were riding the San Francisco trolley-cars back in the 1960s. His friend accidentally dropped a bottle of bagoong which quickly stunk up the entire trolley car. For whatever reason (probably embarrassment!), Dad’s friend started to pretend that he was Chinese, mimicking the sounds of spoken Chinese, figuring to lay blame on the Chinese culture for the horrible smell in the trolley car. However, his ploy was unsuccessful. An old Chinese man on the trolley got up, pointed to Dad’s friend and started shouting: “Him lying!!! Him no China man, him Filipino!”
I submitted the cookbook to the online book publishing company Viovio, and ordered it in the 12.5 in. X 10 in. hardcover spiral bound format. I specifically designed the book for this size and format because the spiral binding will allow cooks to easily keep the book open at the page that they’ re using and the large size makes it easy to read while working on a recipe. You can check out more of the book by going to this website: http://www.viovio.com/shop/55571
While it lacks the intrigue and excitement of a political thriller, The Enciso Family Cookbook is still (at this point at least) a much more entertaining read than The People’s Republic. I couldn’t be happier with the way that it turned out. I finally--after all these years of wanting to do so-- wrote a book, which makes me really happy, but more importantly we collected and saved all of these recipes that we love!
I'm grateful for a lot of the experiences that living in China has afforded us. One of the best being that living here has afforded me "time"; time to do things that I've always wanted to do, to further develop personal interests and to identify new ones. I feel extremely fortunate because I realize that this is an opportunity that few people get in their lives. Chris will have the same opportunity when we are in the Philippines and he's looking forward to it!
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