Value meals
There’s a running joke in our house that we have our very own “combo meals.” My brother, JC, brought it up years ago, when we were all still living at home and enduring week after week of the same menu. Don’t get me wrong—the food was pretty good. But there’s only so much tapa (combo 1), nilagang baka and fried hito (combo 2, or what I think of as the Saturday Special), and party spaghetti (combo 3—you know, the Pinoy kind with hotdogs) one could ingest. “Experimental” wasn’t part of our household’s culinary vocab.
I thought I was so sick of all this, until I went abroad for an extended period for the first time. After days of eating British food (mostly fast food because everything’s so damn expensive), my family and I jumped at the chance to eat a home-cooked meal at a fellow Pinoy’s home. I don’t remember exactly what we had—I think it was nilagang baka. But I do remember feasting on the perfectly cooked rice. I surprised myself because I never thought of myself as a rice person…until it was taken away from me! And so it was that the best meal I had during that leg of our Euro tour was something so Pinoy. It just goes to show: Even for our stomachs, there’s no place like home.
P.S. To address the topic of the week: My all-time fave is adobo. I like eating it with bagoong. I’m weird that way. (I also microwave bananas to make them mushy—like pie filling—or eat them with condensed milk, snack on Milo and Ovaltine powder, and used to eat spaghetti noodles with nothing but grated quick-melt cheese. One of my brothers used to eat ice cream with rice, so I think I’m still within the realm of normal.)