Greetings to all! How is everyone dealing with a beautiful 87 degrees weather today. Finally , we can say summer is approaching here in east coast area and its time to hide all the jackets in our closet and welcome the rays of sunshine in our skin!
You are probably curious why I posted a picture of a fish with a lot of spices on top of it and to be ready to be cook on my blog. Here's a little story of a town in Philippines called "Bulacan or Bulakan". Which came from the word "bulak" which means cotton in tagalog language. There is no relation of cotton and fish on a menu and being cooked on this town other than it became one of the central trading commodity of natural resource in history when Spaniards came to conquer Philippines on 16th century.
Dead fish floating in the water? Oh no! What happened to this fish? It could be a lot of many things that can happen but one of the reason is a drastic change of water temperature that turns to be deadly on a fishing habitat. It is also a not so good news to a fisherman when they see their livelihood floating around the water and definitely will turn into a waste.
But not to the locals of Bulacan, who don't want to see any natural resource food go to waste.
And with that situation the two photo I posted above is captured picture through a television and a short story of how a fisherman still use a dead fish as a cuisine and cooked it and serve it to the community who is open and willingly wanted to try the unique menu.
Lumlom is what the local called it in Bulacan which means incubating something in Tagalog. It could be an egg or anything that you can think of to preserve something.
It is one of many place in Philippines where there's a lot fishing area in the vicinity and it is one of the livelihood for the locals to feed their own family. The fisherman will capture the dead fish and will bury it in the mud for hours and will cook it using different spices , so the rotten taste can be hidden while eating the fish.
Local people say that they use this method back in the days because fridge is not available and this is the only way to have food save.
The meat of the fish is still hard since it died in a natural cause, fisherman bury it in the mud for a few hours to have the meat tenderize and when they cut the fish in half, it is easily detached to the fish bone.
Ingredients for this menu:
any type of vegetable leaf ( to place as a cushion for the fish meat, so it wont stick to the cooking pan).
Garlic (the more garlic , the better to hide the smell of the fish)
Round black pepper
Vinegar
Kakang gata ( coconut milk)
and then simmer and its ready to serve.
I, personally didn't try this menu , and also, I am not a fan of eating fish .I found this menu quite interesting due to the fact that we all know this could be something dangerous to ingest because of the fish being dead in the first place and being buried to a mud before it is cooked.
If ever you have an experience an out of this world menu, please comment below and share it with us,
I would like to thank @forsakensushi for taking the pictures from his phones and sharing it with me ( my phone is a little bit damage when taking pictures and is out of focus when capturing photos). Thank you for all of your support and greatly appreciated everyone that read my blog. I, also wanted to thank the person that created the video in Youtube channel about how the history of this cuisine originated. after watching that short film , I truly feel there's so much to on our planet.
Have a blessed day everyone.
