Chop Suey and Halo-Halo: Stir-Fried, Then Stirred

The logo on the placemat, an M with steam rising from it, is Manila Foodshoppe’s. The chain serves Chinese-inspired Filipino food.

Odds and ends

Chop suey takes its name from Cantonese, and the name means something like odds and ends. In the Philippines it is a stir-fry: mixed vegetables with meat or seafood, brought together in a savoury sauce and eaten with rice. Mine had cabbage, carrot, slices of meat, what looked like small prawns and, I think, a fried fish ball, all under the same glossy sauce.

The sauce was thick and soy-based, and the whole bowl tasted almost exactly like chūkadon, Japan’s “Chinese-style rice bowl” of stir-fried vegetables and meat over rice.

Mix-mix

For dessert, I ordered halo-halo. Nothing was said about portions this time, and I assumed it would be fine.

Halo-halo comes from the other end of the meal, and the other end of the thermometer: shaved ice and milk, with whatever sweet things the maker has in mind. Beans, bananas, jellies, ice cream.

Mine came in a footed glass, its contents arranged in tidy blocks. There was a scoop of purple ice cream, probably ube, the purple yam; red cubes on one side and green on the other; cornflakes scattered over the lot; and a striped wafer roll stuck in at an angle.

None of that arrangement is meant to last. Halo-halo is usually translated as “mix-mix”, and before you eat it, you mix everything up. A few turns of the spoon, and the tidy blocks were gone. Properly stirred, my dessert looked a lot like odds and ends.