Weekend Pastime

estuary rich with oysters, crabs and fishes

My kumpare was telling me a joke while I was eating my breakfast of laswa and pinamalhan nga bilong-bilong in their carinderia. The joke has no relation with what I’m going to blog but because it made me smile, it would be sayang if I’m not going to share it with you.

The Pope

The Pope was getting into his limo one night when he turned to the limo driver and said, “Before I die, I would love to drive this beautiful limo just once.”

“Well, here,” the limo driver says, “Take the wheel, Your Holiness!”

Further down the road, the limo is stopped by a policeman who looks in the window, goes back to his squad car, calls dispatch and says, “I just pulled over someone real important and I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, who is it?” his dispatcher says, “The mayor? The governor? The president?”

“I don’t know,” the officer responds, “but the Pope’s his chauffer!”

Go figure and tell me the answer.

The Oyster Farm

This is a follow up to my earlier post “Aphrodisiac for Appetizer”. I discovered an oyster farm somewhere in Dumangas in one of our weekend food trips. I got curious because ever since I started to love eating those exotic talaba, I really wonder how and where they grow.

farmers checking the oyster beds

I went to a small hut by the river where there were people inside sorting the newly harvested talaba and asked them a few questions. According to them not all estuaries (the wide lower course of a river where the tide flows in, causing fresh and salt water to mix) in Iloilo have larvae of oysters which mean not all rivers in Iloilo are perfectly suitable for the production of oysters.

Oysters start from an egg which either fertilized in the water or in the shell in the case hermaphroditic species. Then it develops into a free swimming larva, which eventually find suitable sites on which to settle, such as another oyster’s shell. Attached oyster larvae are called ‘spat’. Spat are oysters 25 mm or less in length. Many species of bivalve, oysters included, seem to be stimulated to settle by the proximity of adults of their species.

during low tide oysters can be seen hanging from bamboo poles

When oysters grow to a considerable size, farmers gather and tie them with rattan strips and hang them in bamboo poles submerged in water for one and a half years until they grow to market size and are eventually harvested for sale. In other countries, they keep them in boxes or bags to protect them from predators. It can grow rapidly in warm brackish water above 50°F or 10°C. Healthy oysters consume algae and other water-borne nutrients, with each filtering up to five liters of water per hour.

Some types of oysters are highly prized as food, both raw and cooked. Other types, such as pearl oysters, are not commonly eaten. The great pearl oyster, from which the pearl is obtained, is a large (12-in./30.5-cm) tropical species.

Oysters can be easily contaminated by pollutants in water. So, before you buy be sure to know where they came from.

boat load of unsorted talaba

talaba being sorted for sale