Cuisine of Quezon

Cuisine of Quezon is not as rich as say the other provinces but it can hold its own it taste of rather than in quantity of dishes.

The most famous amongst Quezon’s dishes are pancit habhab (the act of eating directly from a plate or leaf without using one’s hands or utensils) also know as pancit Lucban, longganisang lucban and the colorful yet tasteless kiping which is basically rice flour colored and formed using a leaf as a mold.

Lucena and Tayabas (there isa a debated who started which first) has its lechong lugaw which is a lugaw topped with lechon and adobong lechon.

Then there is Lambanog which is common in coconut growing provinces such as Batangas and Quezon and another beverage is Nipa wine aka tuba ng sasa which is basically fermented nipa sap.

Lucena also has its love affair with noodles like Lomi and its famous Chami which right now I am missing terribly.

Lucban’s Sausage aka Longganisang Lucban

Longganisang Lucban is a sausage native to the Quezon Province in the Philippines and as it is named probably originated in Lucban, Quezon. The recipe is designed for a long shelf life and basically the sausage is self contatined since you don’t need oil to cook it.

The commonly this sausage is manufactured lovingly in the towns of Sariaya, Tayabas, Lucena and Lucban in either backyard industries or large scale operations.

The usual recipe would be like this , do keep in mind recipe varies from household to household

1 kg of cubed (as opposed to chopped or ground) pork with fat.

¼ cup of oregano extract (can be more or less depending on taste)

1 teaspoon of paprika

1 teaspoon of salt

1 cup of chopped garlic (acts as the preservative)

Sausage casing (pork intestines preferred)

How to cook

Get a pan place the sausages in it and add water till the sausages are half covered. Boil the sausages and prick them so that the casings won’t explode. Cook till the water is all evaporated and what remains is the oil from the sausage.

Longganisang Lucban is best eaten hot either in itself as a viand or part of the infamous longsilog(longganisa, sinangag at itlog). Some prefer to dip it in vinegar with garlic though my personal preference is to dip it in brown sugar.

Dreaming of Lucena’s Chami

The reason I hate travel is because of noodles. Don’t get me wrong I love noodles (pancit) but I want it cooked the Lucena way.

Chami is like lomi with less broth and it is cooked stirred fried and has become a signature dish of areas near Lucena city such as Tayabas, Sariaya and Pagbilao.The noodles used are fresh egg noodles and usually pork or chicken stock is used to flavor it during cooking.

I won’t get into its origin and how it is cooked because there are hundreds way to cook just like Adobo, every household have their own way of cooking it.

It is a shame that wikipedia has an entry for Lomi but none for Chami. Hope somebody updates wikipedia soon

Internet woes in Lucena City

WTF has happened to Lucena City’s Internet after sales service? This question right now is ringing in my mind on how and why it is easy to buy DSL connection in Lucena City but after it is sold where is the fucking service?

Let me try to make a brief of the problem that giving me the fits. Lucena City is located in the Province of Quezon and currently its capital. Since the age of dial up it was there were many ISPs in Lucena that were homegrown (franchises or independents). When DSL came these homegrown players died off since they could not compete with the giants PLDT and Digetel.

Now a lot homes in Lucena either have DSL, dial-up and/or wireless internet connection. So a couple of enterprising persons decided to try and create several outsourcing business which required a STEADY and CONSTANT connection. Examples of them are a defunct medical transcription service , Qtech a Business Process Outsourcing, and several small call centers.

Realizing that I would be spending most of my time going around the world on errands I asked my mother to get a DSL line from PLDT for the house so I can email or message all my concerns to them. So they did just that. It got installed and lo and behold it sort of worked. The hitch however is that they have not activated so I waited for several days but still no activation.

One day I needed to have a message sent to the house and knowing that PLDT has not activated the DSL over there I decided to contact my friends at Quezon-tech aka Qtech and then I saw that they were all offline which puzzled me since I knew that they were subscribing to Digitel DSL so in the end I had to use other means to contact them. This scenario was repeated for two days.

When the Qtech people got online again I asked why they were offline and they said that their ISP did had a slow tech support. .

So PLDT has slow tech support in Lucena and Digitel has slow tech support too. OMG. How does an outsourcing business survive in Lucena? Most outsourcing business start with a small bandwidth usage but later they require more and more bandwidth which is used to do their day to day business activities. Most outsourcing business depends on the reputation they build up. A delay on delivery can affect one’s image and I doubt that majority of the contracted parties will take “my ISP is down” as an excuse.

Can I conclude that these companies are not really interested in the welfare of their customers?

links of mentioned companies are :

http://www.qtechbpo.com/

http://www.scribetech-ph.com