AUTOTOMY

The favorite cooking onion is a small purple bulb. You can fit five to seven of them in your palm. Tomatoes hardly get larger than a plum. Even fruits are small. There’s a baby banana called the senorita, which when ripe is about as long as your index finger. Take the calamansi as well, the national fruit. It’s sort of like a lime, or maybe a lemon, or maybe a very tart orange. It’s only a little bigger than a marble. A rare few grow to golf ball size. It has a thin, green skin, which sometimes turns a little orange around the top. The pulp is usually a yellow orange color. It’s best not to peal it, since it’s so small. Slicing off the cap seems to work best for getting the juice, but since it’s packed so full of seeds, you have to squeeze about 30 of them in order to get enough to mix a drink. But even though it’s small, it has a lot of flavor. It’s the same with the onion. Even though it’s small, it produces the same amount of tears as large white ones. And the senoritas, though they are small, are the sweetest.