McDonald’s lost me at breakfast when it ceased offering tapsilog, but it’s right across where I live in Cebu, so when I’m feeling lazy, which is most mornings, that’s where I go. If asked, I would be hard-pressed to name you one item from its current breakfast menu (it’s that unmemorable), even as my memory of that tapsilog grows more romanticized. Was it that good? I seriously doubt it, but it makes me wonder sometimes.
“Manang,” I tell the help, “can you get me some of that, uh… you know, that leaf from the garden?”
“That that?” Later: “You mean this?”
“That.”
“Look!” I exclaimed as we made the turn into the Bato public market. “Old-fashioned hotcakes!”
I was wrong. They were hotcakes, sure, just not the kind we used to get at the town plaza back in the 1970s: honeycombed (via waffle iron), bright yellow, dredged in sugar, then folded into a quarter circle. Gummy rather than fluffy (from cornstarch, I had been told), I would probably have had one and then promptly forgotten about it, but until such time I was in the grip of nostalgia.
When our old refrigerator finally quit on us, my mother replaced it with the biggest model she could find. “Let’s see you fill up this one,” she said.
I thought she was throwing me a challenge. I was wrong. She was talking to herself. That thing was full in no time — the freezer alone with her stash of nuts, which she has no use for (I’m sure of that because I asked her and got the Shrug). Ma’s never met a nut she didn’t like. Especially when S&R holds a sale.
And you thought I was kidding about those bagels. I was, actually, until I mentioned having a recipe or two bookmarked, which I wasn’t sure about, to be honest. So I looked and there it was. And then I just had to make it.
With her latest lab results in, my mother had asked me to stop with the baking. For the first time her fasting blood sugar count was higher than mine. Just by a negligible point, mind you, but still. She fingered bread as the culprit.
Where I live, it is impossible to find decent crusty bread. One or two bakeries make baguettes — French bread, they’re called. The French would be insulted, tough and desiccated those things are. If you need bread to go with pasta or make sandwiches, the only other alternative is spongy American bread. Most people have no problem with that. I don’t. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not really that big a deal.
