Eat with your hands. It’s liberating.

Chef Joelen Kenny – of What’s Cookin’, Chicago? – cooked up a Summer Kamayan Pop Up Dinner that miLam hungrily attended. Jeff (the Chef), Keith (Art Production), Kristen (our new manager), Mario (the Muscle, personal security),  grabbed a six-pack of beer, a couple hard ciders, jetted off to West Town, and ate delicious Filipino food with our fingers. I was delighted to try things I’d never eaten before, like jackfruit. We all found something to love about the feast.

Eating with your hands doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all.

There’s etiquette. Some of it, you’d guess if you’re civilized: wash your hands and don’t be the first to dig in. Try not to drop food down your shirt. There are some things you’ll have to be taught: scoop the rice with your fingers, roll it into a ball. Dip your ball into whatever sauce interests you, and grab up a bit of whatever else you want to eat with it. It’s polite to stop eating while there is still some food in the banana leaf’s landing strip, but you should make a point to eat all of the rice that you’ve served yourself. After dinner, your host will send you home with a baon (leftovers). Don’t even attempt to say no; anyone who is one or two degrees of separation from immigrants of nearly any culture know this instinctively.

A few things that interested me, but turned out to be inconsequential (far as I could tell) are:

• Often, in eat-with-your-hand cultures, there’s a prohibition against eating with your left hand, regardless of your handedness. The reasons for this are interesting; look it up if you’re curious.
• What plagues me about Indian food came up here, too: I’m always afraid that certain sauces go with certain foods, and that someone in the know will see me unwittingly putting unlikely things together. Well, it turns out that other people don’t really pay as much attention to my personal food choices as I like to think. I’m so jaded by my experiences with the paparazzi, who incessantly chase around obscure food bloggers.

We sat next to the Filipino Kitchen bloggers.

Conversing with them was as much fun as the food! The informality of kamayan encourages friendliness; we were grateful for that. The FK folks filled us in on details about the foods and had us laughing all night. We’d love to hang out with them more.

Summer Kamayan

Want to check out some Filipino food? Keep your eyes peeled for the Kultura Festival that Filipino Kitchen is presenting on October 4th in Logan Square.

♠

Credit for all images on this page: Make It Like a Man! Hover over images and/or green text for pop-up info. Click for joy. This content was not solicited, nor written in exchange for anything.

♠