Showing posts with label economic. Show all posts

0

Resourceful Cooking

Posted on Friday, 19 May 2017

Resourceful Cooking
By Apolinario Villalobos

With the soaring prices of various food items that include vegetables, fish, meat and spices, one must be resourceful to be able to scrimp on these. Along with the effort, one must also use ingenuity in coming up with recipes that make use of cheap ingredients and quick cooking to save on fuel, such as gas, electricity, wood or charcoal. The following are some suggested and simple recipes with cheap ingredients:

·        “Okoy” or fritter using strips of singkamas (jicama, turnip), squash and monggo sprouts (toge), flavored with dried krill or kalkag. This can be eaten as snacks or as viand (ulam).
·        Vegetable combo using all kinds of indigenous vegetables – camote tops, alogbate, eggplant, saluyot, okra, tomatoes, onions and ginger, especially, those wilting in the ref.
·        Pickled radish, eggplant, string beans, mustard or cabbage using cheap old stock of the said vegetables, the prices of which could be 50% less than the fresh ones. The mentioned vegetables can be pickled separately using vinegar and salt. As a salad, they can be prepared with slices of fresh tomatoes and onions.
·        Mashed eggplant using the old, hence, cheap ones. Boil the eggplants into soft consistency, mash and sauté in oil, chopped tomatoes and onions. This can be used as a bread filling or as appetizing main dish.

Other cheap ideas are:

·        Steaming vegetables by placing them on top of about-to-be cooked steamed rice. Remove them when ready to be served. Dips or sauce can be soy sauce mix with vinegar, chopped onions and tomatoes. This is the cheapest way to cook steamed vegetables and is more nutritious than boiling.

·        Flavoring vegetables or fried rice with the sauce of canned sardines while saving the whole fish for pasta dishes or as a separate dish sautéed in plenty of tomatoes and onions.

·        Preparing skinless tomatoes by freezing ripe ones after which bringing them out, and as they start to thaw or soften, starting to peel them. Skinless tomatoes can be frozen again to be used when preparing salad or sauce for pasta dishes, or can be mashed and cooked in oil, little vinegar and salt, to make tomato paste. The traditional way of peeling tomatoes is by soaking them in boiling water for a few seconds, but could be messy.

·        Preparing ready-to-use tomato and onion sauce using cheap old stock of the said vegetables. Cook the chopped vegetables in oil after which, apportion in small container for freezing and bringing out only the needed portion….this is a time and fuel saver.

·        Not continuously boiling monggo beans. Upon boiling, remove from stove and allow a few minutes “rest” to give the beans time to absorb the water, then return to the stove for another round of boiling; remove again…and on the third time, cook over slow fire until the beans become mashed in boiling water. This technique is best if only a single-burner stove is being used, as other dishes can be cooked while the monggo pot is “resting”.


The problem with most Filipinos today is that they refuse to think of ways to live on a tight budget, yet, they have the gall to waste food such as a spoonful or two of rice left on the plate or throw the left-over instead of recycling them. Also, they have the courage to blame the government for their travails due to low wage and soaring prices of commodities but they do not exert effort to save! They forgot the adage, “kung maikli ang kumot dapat ay mamaluktot” (one should exert effort to be covered with a small-sized blanket by lying curled on his side.)

0

The Superficial "Economic Boom" of the Philippines

Posted on Sunday, 1 February 2015



The Superficial “Economic Boom”
Of  the Philippines
by Apolinario Villalobos

One need not have to be a statistician or an expert analyst to come up with an honest view of the real state of the Philippines and the Filipinos. All that one has to do is go beyond the affluent peripheries of the cities where vast areas of slum can be found. In those crannies of the cities, one can find the different faces of poverty. Not all of those who live there are indolent. Most of them survive on hope and perseverance. It is not fair, therefore, to say that they are just idly waiting for the dole outs from the government. The president is overwhelmed by the big remittances from Filipinos laboring in foreign lands. But for the knowledgeable Filipinos, such revenue is unreliable, as it depends on the economic stability of host countries, hence, should not be viewed as a sign of development.

Surveys say that the country has gone up by leaps and bounds as far as employment and food sufficiency are concerned. Those paid guys who made the surveys must be out of their mind! They interview the wrong people and they seemed to be blind on the high prices etched on cardboards that mark bins of different varieties of commercial rice, that have not returned to their previous prices during the early part of 2014. Even local vegetables are ridiculously marked with high prices. The skyrocketing of the price of fish is crazily attributed to the cold weather! A promise was made by the government to ensure the return of the jacked up prices soonest as the price of fuel has gone down, but despite their slide, nothing has materialized out of the promise made. On the other hand, thousands of sacks of imported rice are on their way…is this food sufficiency?

Commercial and residential infrastructures continuously pockmark the landscape of highly developed towns and cities, but conglomerates that own them are dominated by foreign names, if ever Filipino names are found in incorporation papers, they are consistently the same. The country’s development is haplessly geared for the enrichment of foreign investors and few Filipinos, albeit, with foreign ancestry. It is good for the country, but not for the Filipinos whose taste of these developments are in the form of meager wages as housemaids, chambermaids, clerks, drivers, busboys, room boys, dishwashers, call center agents, and other lowly jobs, though decent. Filipinos have become servants in their own land! The government clearly failed to come up with opportunities that would make the Filipinos decently self-sufficient. Even agriculture is hopelessly neglected!

The number of scavengers that forage in the dumps for recyclable trash to be sold to junkshops, and even for bits of food did not dwindle a bit. Families relocated to the sites without basic facilities such as water, roads, and electricity are trekking back to the esteros where they were pulled out or find nocturnal comfort on sidewalks. Questions on where the budgets for habitable relocation sites went, are never answered. This government indifference is shown even by its inaction to anomalies regarding the unexplained plight of donations for victims of calamities, such as typhoon Yolanda.

Reliable mass transit system is one of the gauges for a country’s development, and which the Philippines is pitifully lacking. The aging Metro Rail Transit (MRT) and Light Rail Transit (LRT) systems are in a sorry and shameful state due to mismanagement, but which some sector claim as corruption. Every time the president speaks, promises are mumbled, to the point that Filipinos got tired of his verbal rattling. His spokesperson even shamelessly told Manilans not to rely so much on the train systems for there are options available such as buses and jeepneys. What happened then, to the ease and comfort promised by the government when the two elevated train systems were built?

With the onset of Pnoy’s departure from Malacaῆan Palace in 2016, he confidently presumes that he has delivered what have been expected of him as the president of this distraught country that wallows in poverty, unemployment and corruption. He must be dreaming!