A Day About Food, Writing & Negros with Amy Besa

The best part of the workshop was not even because it’s free. I would have paid for it if that was the case. The best part was because Amy Besa was the instructor for the Food Writing and Food Research Workshop. The fact that it’s still free made me doubly grateful to the Negros Museum.

Amy Besa is a New York based food writer and with her husband, Romy Dorotan owns of the Purple Yam restaurant in Brooklyn, New York. Memories of Philippine Kitchens, co-authored by the couple, features Filipino cuisine and culture and won the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Jane Grigson Award for scholarship in the quality of its research and writing in 2007.

I’m not a good cook although I sometimes made successes in the kitchen specially with food that my mother used to prepare at home. But what I lack in skills as a cook, I try to make up with my skills in food writing. But my quest to improve my culinary skills doesn’t end there since I believe you can be a better food writer if you are a good cook.

Amy asked us to describe batuan in a sentence so that a reader would want to read the rest of what you wrote. She also asked us to differentiate sinigang from tinola. Sounds easy but based on what each has written, everyone has a different descriptions of sinigang and tinola.

For me and perhaps for most of us, tinola only has the basic ingredients of meat or fish, vegetables, and tomatoes without the souring ingredient. While sinigang can also be fish or meat, with more vegetables, and souring ingredient.

As for souring, can you describe how a guava, tamarind, and iba tastes like? Can you describe their flavor aside from being sour? Amy told us to learn to recognize and describe the flavors of the ingredients so that even if we don’t know what’s in the food, we’ll recognize them by the taste. She also encouraged us to do our research on the history of Negros, the local cuisine and ingredients.

Amy is also an advocate of organic and healthy lifestyle and she encouraged us to promote Negros as the Organic Capital of the Philippines. To assist us on this assignment, Chin-Chin Uy of Fresh Start Organics gave a talk about his company and on the organic movement in Negros.

It wouldn’t be a food writing workshop if there’s no food, right? Trust our Kusinero Negrense Ronnie Guance to cook up something as exotic as Pagi Burrito.  I made up that name. The dish doesn’t have an official name yet. It’s made of pagi (stingray meat), with tomatoes, basil and buffallo mozzarella on piaya-based wrap. Sorry Ms. Amy but I failed you. Words elude me. All I can say was, Namit gid!

By the end of the workshop, we enjoyed it so much we were all complaining it was too soon. But before we bid our farewell to our mentor, we were tasked to continue on the topics we worked on during the workshop which we have to submit after a week. We have a busy week ahead and we’re loving it!

Photos by Teytey Sevilleno