Pre-Christmas Food Shopping at the Malabon Wet Market

Yesterday morning I decided it was a good idea to go shopping at a different location.  Try the Malabon City wet market for a refreshing change.  My objective was 2 fold:

1. To get horse meat, as this was the only reliable place where they sold horse meat every single day.

2. To get ocean shrimp; since for the past 2 months ocean shrimp had been absent in my 2 nearby wet markets.

Me and my assistant left the house around 7am.  We brought with us 3 Styrofoam containers for our meat and fish and some recyclable cloth bags for the fruit and vegetable produce.

Malabon City wet market did not let me down.  It showed how much better quality sea food was thriving here as they were brought in via “baklad”… men in boats.  These could be fishermen who dumped their catch directly here in the market.  So they’ve got superior fresh fish with a good variety.  I’m just careful though which sea food to get as Manila bay and surrounding waters are not really that clean.  So clams and mussels for me are blacklisted.  But oysters from Bulacan were still okay for me.

What was astonishing were the prices of squid!  Why they had perfectly fresh fat squid with eggs and they were sold at 320 per kilo!  But the top notcher goes to the still alive clear squid with the changing colors that sold for 400 pesos per kilo!  The most I could do was beg for a 2 inch long live squid I could taste.  The seller said yes and I happily munched on that 2 inch live squid.  Totally delicious.  I rewarded her by buying some fresh yellow to steam 4 pieces of ready to steam “bacoco” fish.  We slightly steamed it, brains and eyes still raw and it was delicious.

I also got 5 “tabo” units of oysters.  I got a whole 1.6 kilo barracuda, some 4 large pregnant espada fish, and some tiny shrimp called alamang.  I also got some 1 kilo of yellowish ocean shrimp!  And 1 piece, just 1 piece large ocean prawn that was selling at 850 pesos per kilo, and that 1 piece cost me 120 pesos… and I ate it on the spit.  Sweeeettttt!

We were able to get horse meat.  2 kilos for adobo.  6 kilos for horse tapa.  and 1 kilo a mix of heart, liver and pancreas.  No more brain and no more marrow available.  My suki Bebot was in a selling frenzy… no time for chit chat.

We got other things like patola vegetable, some kamias, some calamansi, some wansoy, onions and not available in our other markets was some 7 kilos of pico mango.

At home for lunch we served up a lunch extravaganza:

– raw ocean shrimp to be dipped in paombong vinegar
– raw oysters and some grilled to open oysters
– slightly steamed fish
– alamang small shrimp with kamias and tomatoes… but my father in law preferred raw small shrimp with calamansi

In the evening we had our first great success with adobo horse meat.  We boiled to tender goodness for 5 hours in a put the 2 kilos of horse meat and we consumed it all in one evening.  Used Ilocos garlic.

The new maids were amazed how the family was able to consume all that raw ocean shrimp.  They haven’t had raw ocean shrimp in more than 2 months so it was a refreshing treat.

This christmas evening we will be serving seared horse tapa.  It is just horse meat thin steaks with some salt and pepper.