All We Want for Christmas: What Gifts to Give Filipino Foodies?
For commercial reasons, Christmas comes early in the Philippines. Carols start playing in shopping places as early as September! We have no idea if there’s a science to it but most shops perhaps find that Mariah Carey or Jose Mari Chan’s classics induce shopping behaviors, with feelings of desire to shower our loved ones with holiday gifts.
For us though, the real Christmas-y feeling is felt when the evenings and early mornings become quite chilly. The streets leading up to churchyards are lined up with makeshift sheds for charcoal ovens and tube steamers filling the air with aroma of rice cakes: bibingka topped with salted egg and butter, and purple puto bumbong with freshly grated coconut.
We wish we could wrap these tasty thoughts and send them over to you, but for now, we hope these gift ideas would do to help make our foodie friends giddy this season:
Cooking sauces for nanay/ mama/ mom whose kitchen always smelled of fragrant soups and stews. Our Adobo Simmer Sauce comes in a little sinamay bag, available for a limited time on lazada.com.ph. For our friends in the USA, you can shop for individual cooking sauces and spice mixes from your favorite Filipino and oriental stores. Enclose them with happy thoughts, these gifts of sauces will be most memorable.
A gift pouch of Sinigang Paste set of 6’s to make nostalgic sinigang broths, for someone who is going to a place where there’s no unripe tamarind because lemon as substitute just won’t do. This particular gift buri pouch comes with a notecard for gift-giving, available for a limited time on lazada.com.ph.
Instead of cloying choco candies, how about dark cacao champorado for the lover of chocolate? It’s always a good breakfast or snack, keeps one’s bittersweet craving satisfied. Our classic champorado is now available in select stores in the USA and Australia, while our heirloom rice variant is available at Seafood City (USA). So friends in these areas, be sure to check out your local Filipino and/or oriental shops.
If you ask us what’s the best thing we could get for this season? Well, apart from new camera lenses, and the cookware we’ve been eyeing online, it’s cheesy, but all we really want is for you to share this newsletter to a friend, who might just need a little perking up in the kitchen, wherever they may be… Manila, New York, New Castle?
Because all these food, gifts, and stories don’t matter at all if we didn’t have people to share them with.
Cheers from Mama Sita’s Kitchen!