A Single Mother's Guide to Cooking Sinigang by Tara Tulshyan (16, Philippines)

I am trying to make dinner for you, your favorite sinigang, which breathes smoke dust and vinegar brine, fruit skins in musty bone broth: 

I. I add a scoop of fish sauce, for every time you come home with a gourd on your elbow. The molasses brown melts into the caserola, sifting through slabs of bone. ​

---

II. I start with tomatoes that glow the orange of a ripe fruit. They are the first to swell, the fish water sinking into their skins blooming in the broth, shrouding the leftover pork slices underneath, where the blood of the pig rusts grey and the fat begins to spill. 

III. The string beans and kangkong cannot blanket the hollow pork bones, so I cover the pot before they leak chlorophyll. 

IV. When I add the kamote, they roam the surface where grease streams white, the tomatoes rendering onto the grease, flushed skins wither brown. It isn’t easy for them to soften, to allow the warm broth to embrace them, to sweeten the soup that is almost a preserve. 

V. The tamarind is always last, it is what tints the soup that bites your tongue. The paste is mixed with the betadine I use to clean up fresh wounds. It is now the same color of your knuckles. It filters down to the dusted bones that you are so hungry for, the iodine coating your mouth. You think it is sour, only pricking your lips, but it is also rotting in your stomach.