Foodie Me

         Grade school years were our food times. I and my siblings would come home from school dashing through the door and aiming for our favorite nook-out – our mother’s kitchen. Our main target: the calories in the “tampipi”, a handicraft out of bamboo stems thinned to be woven and intended as a food keeper. Each of us, ditch our backpacks aimlessly somewhere in the living room; take turn in raking out his or her fork from the drainer to pick on the merienda and find his or her comfort seat around. 

        On weekends, Mama would call on us to help her make “taputaps,” her delicacy out of raw cassava sliced to be sun-dried, ground into powder, mixed with grated coconut’s milk and sugar, molded into fist-sized mounds, flattened and wrapped with sashes of fresh sugarcane leaves and then steamed to cook. 

        In a few blinks, I had to pack my bags and leave home in search of independence. College life is a transitional stage. It is when you get to wrap up your bed, breakfast and bathroom woes all in a span of fifteen minutes. You know you are in a ten-door bathroom for a fifteen-door dormitory catering to tens of dormitorians. Before you make a screel at the queue of next-in-line users, you forget your shower in a while because your class is a minute away. Your noodles waited to coldness as you step out of your doorway and go racing with the wind, sometimes with mismatched socks. Reaching your classroom, your friends start to pick on you for your bicolor footwear but you tried not to mind them. Then you move back from your chair and really had you to get back for you realize you have not with you your written report that cost you your precious zzzs. The growling tummy just won’t get tamed by shifting your sitting posture, crossing legs over after the other and rubbing your belly. So you sneak into a piece of hotdog by the food stand by the gateway of the campus. Over the days, I wrestled with food choices that I had to make juggling piles of school requirements and other tons of extra-curricular engagements. I could have been a better student should I have dunked those junkies off my meals and be stuffed with the bright colored crawlers at the backyard back at home. 

        Food is a far cry necessity of life. The plight of Pablo scene and a.ll those tragedies that we have conquered, people plea for “real” food that is more than just calorie-giving. 

       In Mama’s way, no special occasion should we only be lavish with food. Lavish to her in a better sense is lavish with nutrition. As commercial vinegar is banned in our kitchen, her calamansi makes an original kind of adobo. Fried foods are disgust to the family. So our unpeeled sweet potato and potato, cassava, banana, eggs, and longganisa go boiled and broiled. Lemon, santol, karamay, and pineapple and ginger fresh from the family’s yard yield the lime juice, fruit jelly and jam and ginger tea on another no-class days for following mother’s colleague’s recipes. Rainy days bring the fields green for our mother’s weed toppings on meat-based soup. All these fulfill her omnivore housemates’ yearnings everyday. My tastebuds in the longest time has been missing my mother’s skeptical culinary ways.