I’ve blogged about this before. There are some New Year traditions that is truly unique in our country. We got to have sweets (any kind) pancit (Chinese noodles) for long life and of course the 12 fruits that represent the twelve months of the year. We all prepare this for the traditional Media Noche which is the New Year’s equivalent to our Noche Buena, the Christmas Eve meal. Add three or four dishes of baked ham, baked macaroni, lumpiang Shanghai (spring rolls), embutido and menudo. The latter is a Spanish recipe which we inherited from our ancestors just like embutido. Just prepared the spring rolls, they are ready for frying. Wanna know how spring rolls would stay crispy for long? You put a little amount of bread crumbs on the wrapper before you finally roll it. The embutido is ready for steaming. We don’t prepare chicken meat during new year.
Splurged a little on twelve kinds of fruits. Believe me, they are more costly than before. Just went to the wet market this morning to buy all these.
I saw Japanese pears which are not normally in the market at any time of the year so I bought some too. Other round fruits which are locally grown abound in the market. Honey dew is also grown here and it is sweeter than cantaloupe melon. I didn’t buy grapes. I find them too sweet. I wonder what the vendors would do with all those fruits once January 1 is over.
This reminds me, I just bought watermelon sinigang mix a few hours. I needed to buy more ingredients for my pasta dish so I went to the supermarket this afternoon. The first time I tasted sinigang with watermelon was a few years ago in a high-end restaurant somewhere in Quezon City. Sinigang is a Filipino soup or stew which is sour and savory. We normally use tamarind fruits to make it sour but there are now so many variations of the dish. You could also use guava to flavor it. Pork, fish, shrimp could be cooked as sinigang.
How do you spend the New Year? There are designated places where they could use firecrackers to meet the new year but I still see some households with their stash of it.
Dreams And Escapes 
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