Sugpo!

This morning, at 6:30, I heard mass at Our Lady of Pentecost Parish (C. Salvador Street, Loyola Heights). As is my wont when I hear mass without my husband and son but with the maids, I go to the area near the priest’s house where vendors station themselves. Today there were just two of them: a lady selling kakanin and an old man selling bangus (milkfish), sugpo (huge prawns) and GG (galunggong). I didn’t have my camera then so I was not able to take pictures. Anyway, the lady put her stuff in bilao, the old man put his stuff in three blue pails with water. The lady is a regular in the area and I’ve bought several times from her, mostly because she always gives me a smile (sucker ba?). It was the first time I saw the man with the pails

So what did I get from the two this morning? From the lady, I got the following at P10 per bugkos: suman na matamis (4 pieces), cassava (alope in Ilonggo, 3 pieces), puto and kutsinta with niyog (many in one plastic bag), and suman with latik (2 pieces). Suman na matamis is the best of the lot. The cassava is a bit tough and was cooked in brown rather than white sugar (Vir used to cook it in white sugar), the puto and kutsinta were not good, the kutsinta especially tasted like it had lots of lye(?). The suman with latik – the latik is like melted panocha, it doesn’t have the slivers of coconut which Tiya Tale, the manuglibod in Talisay/Silay/Bacolod, had in her suman latik, one of the many kinds she sold in a bilao which she perched atop her head. Plus the suman was so dense and therefore tough. I didn’t buy her ibus (suman in tagalog? not sure) which one has to eat with sugar as it has virtually none. When I do buy the ibus, I use muscovado.  Except for the puto and kutsinta, all these were wrapped in banana leaves.

Now the old man’s fare was enticing. I didn’t see the bangus because it was farthest from me but the maid said they were huge. I didn’t get any because I still have some in the freezer, bought them marinated and deboned some weeks back (oh no, i hope they’re still ok!). I didn’t buy the GG either because I have some in the freezer from months back (please don’t say they’re no longer ok). But the sugpo – that I couldn’t resist. Rationalizing, I bought them because they’re bigger than the puny shrimps in the freezer. Huge, they sold at P550 per kilo (I’ll bet the one reading this from Bacolod will make me envious by saying it’s a lot cheaper there, right? Oh well, the plane fare will make it more expensive so …).  I asked, “how many pieces is one-fourth kilo?” That’s how little I get in the grocery because I find the thing so darned expensive. I joked, “Two pieces?” He said “hindi naman, isang kilo 18 na piraso”. Uhm, that sounded reasonable. I said, “pabili one-fourth”. It’s either he thought I was joking or he misheard me or he wanted to sell more because he started putting lots of prawns  on the weighing scale. I said, “ay, one-fourth lang.” Then noticing how old and dark he was from all the hard work of selling prawns, I said, “sige, one kilo”. I then asked him what time he was leaving because as usual, I only brought P100 with me for fruits if the fruit vendor were around. I said I’d just let the maid come back to get the prawns. He said, “hindi, kunin niyo na”. I was aghast. I asked if he were sure and he assured me yes, he had been in the business for a long time and had sent his children to school using his earnings from the trade. All these years, he claimed, no one had fooled him. I jested, “ngayon pa lang?” The kakanin vendor laughed. Meanwhile, a matrona from the church got a kilo of GG. We got the prawns, left and the maid went back to pay him.

So now, I can’t wait to have lunch. Just two pieces of sugpo will suffice for me. I had the cook pack the remaining 16 pieces in bags of 4 each so we’ll have 4 meals with sugpo in the coming days, or weeks or months, depending on when I’ll remember they’re in the freezer. Only my husband and I eat this as my son is allergic to crustaceans. Wait, are shrimps/prawns crustaceans? Let me check. They are, with thinner exoskeletons than do crabs. 

Incidentally, my maids said there are several in the streets selling fish in pails but this was the first time I encountered any. They assured me the man’s goods looked fresh. According to him, he got his stuff all the way from Malabon. The lady with the kakanin said the puto was from Marikina. I’m not sure if the kakanin too, but before she had told me they were from Antipolo.

I weighed the prawns all 18 of them in the weighing scale here at home which a relative gave me back in the late seventies. They weighed exactly a kilo.

Guess what, I had the maid get the what I thought were puny shrimps in the freezer. Here they are, not so puny after all. The bigger ones sold at P578 per kilo, the smaller at P470 per. Both are catatonic from cryofreezing.