 Hello everyone! My name is Julianne Davie and I'm a 2021 SFPL Yell Intern. And today I'll be showing you all how to whip up some delicious Halo-Halo as a way to celebrate the Filipino culture and cool off during the summer's heat. But hold on, you're probably wondering what the heck even is Halo-Halo in the first place. Well, let me give you all a little background story right before we get to whipping it up in the kitchen. Halo-Halo is a Filipino shaved ice dessert or snack that is wildly popular in the Philippines and to many Filipinaics all over the world. Its original Tagalog pronunciation, Halo-Halo, translates to mix-mix because you're supposed to mix all of the ingredients together in the dessert to eat it. But Halo-Halo itself goes way deeper than when it's generally thought of as a mere Filipino beverage. Like the dessert itself, there are many layers to its important history such as its true origin that often goes unrecognized. What do I mean? Well, let's take a trip back in time starting way before World War I. During the mid-1800s, the Philippines was initially presented with ice by Americans. In 1848, ships storing ice from the Winam Lake Ice were imported from America to the Philippines. Fast-forward to around five decades later, the year of 1902 came when America built the earliest ice plant in the Philippines, the Insular Ice Plant. Then prior to World War II, the Philippines was introduced to some of Japan's cultural dishes, including kakigori, a Japanese dessert mainly consisting of shaved ice, dressed in syrup, and condensed milk. Kakigori was then modified by Japanese farmers with an addition of red, kidney, and mung beans. It attained a new name for its nuluk, which was Mongoya. Soon enough, Mongoya shops filled every nook and cranny of the Metro Manila area of the Philippines. Then after the Japanese occupation period and the Second World War ended, the Filipinos were finally liberated from the Japanese settlers who are now departing from the Philippines. On the larger scope, the Philippines as a whole was mostly left in distress and destruction, only receiving economic assistance from America to rebuild the country. But through smaller lands, there were Filipinos who also took the opportunity and the high demand that Japan's Mongoya previously held in the markets. The Filipinos used their inspiration and took the initiative by putting their own twist on the dessert, with adding various ingredients over the years to fit their likings. This eventually led to the beautiful birth of Halo-Halo, whose popularity began to take off from there. Although, if you are lost in the Halo-Halo of all this history, basically, the newfound abundance of ice from the Americans, as well as the popularization of cultural desserts by the Japanese, enabled Halo-Halo to start taking form in the first place. However, despite how Halo-Halo doesn't originate from the Philippines, the Filipinos are as much of an essential part in creating Halo-Halo, as they are the main cultivators of its newly unique qualities, like its special ube yam jam and ube ice cream that set it apart from other similar desserts in its neighboring countries and is a dessert that just overall screams Filipino pride. But that's enough chit chat. Now you know more about the astonishing history of Halo-Halo, and I know you all want to get to Halo-Halo-ing already, but before we begin, let me clarify that the way I'll be teaching you all is not the only way to do it because there are many different versions on how to make Halo-Halo. And to finally get us started, some of the materials we'll need are an ice shaver with a bowl or a blender, a cup, bowl or glass, whichever you prefer, and a spoon. And as you all learned earlier, Halo-Halo is made up of various ingredients. The ones I have today with me are what my family usually uses to make our Halo-Halo, and you can purchase most of them separately in jars from your local Asian market, but I got mine from the Pacific supermarket. The ingredients I will be using are mungo, which are red mung beans, sweet and makapuno string, which are coconut meat or coconut spore, some kaong, which are sugar palm fruits, then nata de coco, which are coconut gels, samsago, which are sweet and tapioca pearls, some sweet white beans, some ice, evaporated milk, but you can also use regular or condensed milk, ube halaya, which is purple yam jam, some leche flan, and then ube and or mango ice cream. And finally, langka, which are candied jackfruit. Now we'll start by grabbing a cup, a bowl or a glass with enough space for all the ingredients. The proportions of the ingredients are mainly based on your preference and the size of your container, so put however much you want and how much you can for each of these ingredients. I'll just be putting about a spoonful, if not two for most ingredients. Anyway, now let's pour in some of our red mung beans. Next, you can put in that sweetened coconut meat. Then we can go in with our palm fruit, after with our coconut jellies, then the tapioca pearls, which can be microd for two to three minutes before being put in, and our white beans for the final ingredient under the ice. For the ice, we can step away for a bit and start putting in a handful of ice cubes into an ice shaving machine or a blender. I'm using a manual ice shaver and I'm going to put a bowl under to catch the shaved ice while spinning it. But if you're using a blender, you can just place the amount of ice cubes you want inside and hit that mix or ice crush button until the ice looks pretty crushed. Let's now pour all that shaved ice into the cup. After, we can go in with our evaporated milk over the ice. But like I said earlier, you can also use condensed or just regular milk. Then we can grab a scoop of our ice cream to place on top of the ice. Then another scoop, but this time with some purple yam jam. We can then go in with a slice of leche flan. And finally, we can top up the whole dessert with a few slices or just one slice of langka. And there you have it, your homemade jala jala. All you have to do now is jala jala it all up and start grubbing. As we come to a close, I wish you all can leave with just a little more recognition of the beauty within other cultures and can be found among their food, which we enriched ourselves with today through one of the most enjoyed Filipino snacks. We also discovered that jala jala is more significant in many other ways than we previously thought. Not only is jala jala a token of the great impact that different cultures have had on each other throughout food history, it is also a reminder of the great perseverance of the Filipinos during the Japanese occupation. You can't forget about the adaptive creativity and the effective entrepreneurship that they demonstrated when they allowed the jala jala to rise to its prime and its fame. So I hope y'all enjoyed learning how to prepare the comfort snack of the Philippines and uncovering its interesting backstory which not many people are aware of while they're indulging in the snack. And the next time you want to scoop up your own jala jala, feel free to invite some of your ka-pamiliat ng kai vegan, show off those new eye-shaving skills and your new knowledge by sharing the same fruitful story. I also recommend you to try out other different versions of jala jala where it's available at your nearest Filipino cuisines. That's it for me for today and I thank you all for tuning in and appreciating one of the many Filipino traditions and their simple, sweet yet significant beverage snack, the one and only jala jala.