STREET FOOD...SLURP!

As the name implies, food that you see in the street, STREET FOOD! And I tell you, people love them!

You see newly cooked (or being cooked right then and there) pica-pica’s that you can serve at home, but still it is different when you stand there outside and skewer them as they cook deep fry to your preferred wellness. Fish balls, squid balls, chicken balls are the most common. Dipping them with a choice of a sweet sauce, sweet chili or vinegar mixture, you wait for your turn as one individual after individual enjoy this all day treat. This has been going on since I can remember, but additional choices came in the 90’s adding to it fried tofu, kikiam, one day old chicken, kwek-kwek (chicken egg or quail egg in flour) and variety of entrails that not everyone favors. From chicken gizzards to liver, clotted blood, pork ears and snout, chicken feet…none went to waste, and surprisingly, many can agree that they taste really good!

This is known to each and every Filipino…that any one who do not know the existence of this mass treat is NOT a Filipino!

ROAMING TREAT

Not because we call it “dirty ice cream”, it is dirty! A funny name for a food, more so to a delight enjoyed mostly by kids…but truth is, it is a nickname to Sorbetes. This has been with us since the 1920’s, when people with a single centavo can still buy something with it. This ice cream that roams the street commonly in the unholy hour or siesta time of 1 o’clock to late afternoon is in a colorful container that calls you with the tinkling sound of a bell.

Balot comes next to that in the evening. A known exotic food that other countries cannot comprehend why anyone would eat, being an embryo of a chicken. Thinking about it that way, it is revolting. BUT it is just an egg with a few days more but not before time to hatch. It truly is full of wonder tastes like no other. If you would rather do so without looking at it, by all means use a spoon and eat in the dark, because not being able to try it even once, I may say you missed half of your life!

Taho is another awaited treat that starts roaming the street at early dawn. Breakfast to many, snack to others. A healthy food being soy, added with the sweet taste of melted sugar and those cute little sago’s children loves.

Varieties of roaming delights come and go, but these three have been known for decades, and up to present being enjoyed by the Filipinos.