MIKI MADNESS

Today, I got a delicious invitation from my sister: Come and stay the week-end for All Saints’ Day and we’ll cook ‘miki.’

Miki?! Instantly, my food memories of the noodle soup came rushing in. This genuine Ilocano comfort food was a staple in my childhood. I’ve been longing for a piping hot bowl of this super tasty soup - Ilocano style – of flat noodles, melting soft and cradled by fiery orange chicken broth, topped with pork strips or chicken shreds and lots of green spring onions – sliding oh, so-smoothly down my throat, whoa!

I just love the flavorful blend of the homemade flat noodles with chicken skin melting almost in my mouth,thick as any noodle soup to die for.

Ilocanos are not exactly avid pansit canton/bihon eaters, to mean we are not too keen wiping out tons of pansit bihon the way other regions do, at least in my family when I was growing up. During birthdays and other family occasions, my mother didn’t whip magnificent canton/bihon recipes---she cooked pots and pots of…well, miki, what else? In fact, pansit canton was almost alien to me; I grew up wading in a river of miki!

It was this atsuete-colored soup on my birthdays, my sister's birthday, my brother's birthday and my nephew Julius' birthday, year in and out until my hair turned beautiful orange and my skin smelled of miki soup. I wish I could post a picture of my nephew feeding a battalion of his playmates with...you guessed it, miki, halleluja!

I thought then that this Ilocano version of chicken noodle soup is unique only to us Lapogenos. In fact, I believed it was invented by our incredible town cooks (who took over the grand cooking for funerals, weddings and fiestas) and perfected by Anty Liling, the undisputed miki expert in the whole of miki-town. I was wrong, of course. Fresh homemade miki, dried or packed in plastic are now sold in wetmarkets in Ilocos; it is also now a street food, popular and relished everwhere in the region. The miki of my childhood has levelled up! Yet, when I started living in Manila, I never saw my comfort soup again. Not in any eatery anywhere in the city. For years my tongue was lost in its longing to slurp the velvety-soft noodles.

Ah, but what we do in crazy moments of food craving! One day, I rushed to the SM grocery, and---for want of the genuine thick flat noodles, settled for...errr, well, a pack of fettucine pasta! (a horrendous substitute, but fettucine is flat, isn't it?) And cooked it Ilocano miki-style! Somehow I remembered the basic recipe, this way:

I sauted in garlic and onions the shredded chicken and pork (back then, we preferred pork lard for sautéing, full of deadly cholesterol but the hell, as children, it was delicious! especially when mixed with bagoong, but that's another story), I added patis to taste, cooked it a few minutes, then added the broth, put in the miki (I mean my fettucini, haha!) noodles, colored it with annatto (atsuete, which also gives the noodle soup a distinctive flavor), let it cook slowly for 45 minutes or so, not too long as to dissolve the noodles! then I sprinkled it with chopped green onions.

That was it, that quick and simple. Comfort with pleasure doesn’t have to be expensive and full of ceremonies, does it?

Of course, nothing like the genuine. Our miki of old used only a kind of herb condiment akin to green onions called "kutsay" (we grew them in pots under the shade, near the kitchen, deep moss green in color, thinner and smoother in texture). Never did my mother use green onions as substitute because the ordinary green onions have weaker flavor while the "kutsay" has a more pungent powerful flavor and aroma. In those days, miki and kutsay are a love team in the noodles kitchen of my mother, tasteless each without the other.

Then, cooking miki with green onions as substitute is like wearing a high couture gown with sneakers or…dressing up without a brassiere: the analogy maybe preposterous to you but in fact, as I, the G.I. miki addict, was chopping the green onions as substitute, I felt like a fake, I swear. You could also imagine how privately embarrased I felt when I used Italian pasta for my beloved native soup. I was hoping my townmates won't crucify me. It was double murder.

And the preparation of the dough itself is a labor of endless love. I have fond memories of this, the kind that makes you smile on a dreary rainy day. Mother and I would prepare the dough the night before; it went like this, crudely in my memory:

We mixed flour with just enough water to form a dough, sprinkled it with salt to taste, then flattened it on the table using a bottle of Pepsi. We rolled and rolled the dough into thin sheets with the fire of warriors in a kitchen battle until our sweat began to fall on the flour and my nose began to water (ooopss!) and the dough was ready to be cut into strips. And I would cut it into crazy animal shapes and my mother would slap my misbehaving hand, oh, but we had to make it uniform in width and length to be dried overnight and viola! Miki for the cooking!

Above is miki, photo courtesy of my childhood neighbor Digna Sy who tagged the picture especially for me at Facebook. My ‘kababata’ has maintained her love of cooking and she promised to cook this recipe for me and be comforted from my serious nostalgia when I go home for a visit one day. Thanks, Digna.