Chasing dreams ... and saging saba

Have you ever been in a dream so wonderful and real that it left you smiling and, for a moment after waking, believing that you were still in it?

I had a dream just like that last night. I resented my silly alarm clock more than usual this morning, and I actually tried to pretend that I hadn't woken up, to fool my dream into coming back. It didn't work. Chasing dreams of that sort is an exercise in futility, or at least I think so.

Now that I'm awake I don't remember much about it, but I'm pretty sure that my university friends Montse, Lucie, and Aileen were in it, and we were doing something very important, AND. I. Had. Flawless. Skin. Flawless. Laugh at me for being so unbelievably superficial, but if you saw these three gals, you'd want a naturally airbrushed face too.

Anyway, I think a waking-world equivalent to chasing dreams is chasing a taste memory. It's not quite an exercise in futility, but it sure can be frustrating. You've been there before: you taste something that enchants you - haunts you - but even if you happened to score the recipe, no matter what you do you can't replicate it.  Or you are able to make it, but it just doesn't taste the same because the people and places you associate with it are absent.  Or you simply don't have access to the key ingredients.

... which brings me to saging saba. It's a type of banana that we have in the Philippines, about 5 inches long, fat as far as bananas go, thick skinned and absolutely inedible raw, even when ripe. But once cooked, this banana turns into a delicacy, firm enough to retain its shape but once in your mouth it is meltingly soft, intense in flavour. I don't know how to describe it, but it's as if a bite of saging saba gives you a taste of the Essence of a Banana ... its soul, if it had one. You may think I've gone off my rocker, waxing poetic about banana souls, but believe you me, this banana is the dream that countless Filipino expats chase, because outside the country it seems almost impossible to acquire these fresh, and it doesn't help that we don't even really know what to call it in English: 'saging' means banana, but what about 'saba'? It's not plantain, but is it cardava? Musa? It's anyone's guess.

The last time I had saging saba must've been some 18 years ago, when my family left the Philippines to live in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Eighteen years is a very long time to drool over a taste memory. So when I saw these at the Oriental store last week, I had to snag them.

I wasn't sure if they were really saging saba, because they were a bit more slender than I think they should have been, but they were stubby enough to look like close cousins to the saba.  They were right by the plantains but scribbled on the sign was some strange name like 'bubba' or 'buka' or something like that. (And the cashier mistakenly rang them up as plantains, so checking my receipt for a name was not very helpful.)

At any rate, I waited a week for them to ripen, every day giving them a little squeeze to check, every day wondering if they would disappoint, almost every day asking my mom (over the phone!) if she thought they would be good. They were finally ready the other day: I peeled their tough skin off, sliced the firm flesh of each lengthwise into quarters, melted a tablespoon of salted butter in a skillet, browned both sides of each strip, and tried not to salivate while waiting.

Prepared this way and dipped in a little mound of granulated sugar, saging saba makes for a great snack, but we had it the way I remember it being served when I was a child: for dinner, still with the little mound of sugar, but also alongside a simple meal of ground meat sautéed in sofrito (in Filipino cooking, this usually means a trio of onion, garlic, and tomato), with white rice and a fried egg. Ideally, each mouthful should contain a bit of everything: meat, rice, egg, banana, sugar.

I know it sounds a bit funky, but the flavours and textures just click: savoury, sweet, soft, crunchy. To be convinced, you may need to find yourself a Filipino friend.  When you're invited over for dinner one day, ask for this instead of lumpia and adobo, the apparent flagships of Filipino cuisine. Some families far from home actually do use plantains as a substitute, so you might luck out. Filipinos love to eat and love to feed, and love people who love to eat. That was a lot of love there, but it's true: ask for it, and they'll gladly prepare it for you, and you won't be disappointed.

And these bananas? They tasted just like I remember. Now, if only I could buy me some flawless skin at the Oriental market ...