Mother’s Day meant food, food, food. So there we were the night before, choosing a Japanese resto for next day’s lunch. The morning after, that morphed into Fat Chef to sate the Mother’s Day celebrant’s cravings for halo-halo. Yum!
My first thought, though, was Fat Chef’s bilo-bilo, which is always worth its carbs. My bro then commented, “Oh, not abab-abab…” Below-below, above-above. Gets? Hehe.
I then told him, “Yay! I’ll write about that!” And here I am, writing about it.
My family has been my most reliable source of column material. When my sister was still here, I’d often ask her about anything under the sun—from Cagayan de Oro’s disco scene in the ‘80s, to cooking details, to the latest showbiz news. She was my Google.
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Each time we traveled and she’d recognize celebrities roaming around the area we happened to be in, she’d nudge me and say, “Don’t look and be obvious but there’s Beauty Gonzalez.” And I’d be like, ‘Beauty who?’
As Gonzalez became more popular, I always remember that clueless moment when I had no idea who she was. At least I recognized Marjorie Barretto. And she was with an infant then. The baby’s white-uniformed nannies happened to be walking right behind her, pushing the baby’s stroller, so I asked them, “Whose baby is that?” They replied, “Ma’am Marjorie’s.” My brain went, “She’s already separated from Dennis Padilla. Immaculate conception, anyone?”
Meanwhile, my sister was hiding somewhere, too ashamed to admit that this nosy woman is her sibling. She was always against my habit of approaching people and asking them personal questions. Haha. But I guess curiosity is born out of the columnist in me. Each time I saw a crowd, I’d always ask someone who looked knowledgeable what the fuss was all about. It could be much ado about nothing. But what if it’s much ado about something and I totally missed it because I didn’t care to ask? Talk about FOMO—fear of missing out.
And this curiosity led me to the low-carb diet. Had I let age and its aches, pains, and worsening illnesses take over, I would never have embarked on this lifestyle.
Fat Chef, by the way, has the yummiest carnivore dishes: sizzling beef sinigang (the family’s favorite), crispy pata, beef kare-kare, and grilled beef kaldereta. When our orders, which also had kinilaw in addition to the red meat, were already right in front of us, my bro wondered aloud: “Can we eat all these?”
By “we,” he was referring to me, my sister-in-law, and himself—just the three of us because the younger ones preferred pasta and kimchi rice. The empty platters and plates minutes later revealed the answer to his question: yes, we could. And our tummies still had room for desserts: halo-halo, bilo-bilo, and Fat Chef’s Mother’s Day special, ginanggang cheesecake, which had caramelized bananas. Yum!
Worth every calorie in the moment. But my body sent the bill later.
All those carbs caused cravings for more carbs and, of course, the expected side effects, which began with sneezing and a runny nose at first. A week later, I was already coughing.
So my new mantra is this: carbs or gym. Because there’s a great possibility that sneezing, a runny nose, and coughing can force me to skip the gym.
