To die for

Concepcion Arguelles Vda. De Cruz, that’s the way my maternal grandmother signed her name.  She would use a pen with black ink and rehearse a few times before laying it on paper and signing beautifully, the curves and the periods on her letters just so.  I grew up mostly with her.  My mother lived in the same house, but she was always out working during the day, teaching at night, being mom over the phone.  Now that I am old and they are both gone, I often look back on my childhood and analyze it.  Now I see that my mother was my best friend and my grandmother, Lola Ching, was my mother.

Lola — that’s what she was to me — taught me how to cook, how to smell food instead of tasting, to check if it was properly seasoned.  I was allowed to smell food in the kitchen but never at the table.  At the table, smelling food was considered very rude.  She taught me how to sew on her sewing machine.  She made delicious sandwiches for me to bring to school.  When Toto, my cousin who lived with us for a while, and I came home from school, we would always have wonderful merienda to fill us up.  It was Lola who taught me how to eat well.

Once a year our cook, Trining, would go home on vacation.  Lola by then was too lazy to cook without her assistant.  So we could go to Aguado Street across Malacañang every other day to pick up our rasyon.  I don’t know how to spell it, but it sounds like the English ration with a short “a.”  This was a home that sold food to other homes that needed to buy home-cooked meals, because they had lost a cook or their cook went on vacation or no one could cook at home.  We brought in our fiambrera, a layered aluminum food container, and had it filled with food. 

That was a big house and more traditional than our house in Sta. Mesa.  The food there was quite good, too.  It was decidedly home-cooked.  Adobo was sour, as it should be.  Adobo is a vinegar dish.  I will never understand how it has gotten so sweet these days.  It tells me that we have gotten so ignorant about our food’s culture, its stories.  To me that is so horribly sad because Filipino food is the most delicious in the world.  It mixes Asian and Spanish cooking and emerges with a distinctive flavor of its own.

I don’t know why lately I have done nothing but eat and write about it.  Well, it is my birthday month so I have been out a lot eating at different delicious places of various price ranges.  It suits me just fine because most of the time I live alone.  I don’t cook anymore because it would be a waste of my time to cook just for me. But I find I long for the food of my childhood and I wish I could find a place where I can buy the food I loved when I was a little girl — delicious, genuine, simple, everyday Filipino food.

Then one day, Tina Tan, my restaurant partner in Lily Pad once upon a time, called me and invited me to lunch with her at Carica, on the corner of Bautista Street and Gil Puyat Avenue, once Buendia.   She served tinumok, a kind of laing or taro leaves cooked in coconut milk; lechon kawali, whose skin was so wonderfully crisp; fresh lumpiang ubod and marvelous duck adobo.  All of the above served with ginataang santol.  “My niece, when she tasted the food I will sell here,” Tina gestures to the rest of the tidy room, “said ‘it’s to die for.’  So I’m calling my new deli To Die For!” 

For me, now a condominium dweller without maids, living alone, without husband or children, this is the perfect answer to my prayers. It is what I would call a Pinoy — short for Filipino — deli, short for delicatessen, now the substitute for the old big house where we used to pick up our rasyon.  The food is sold to you in plastic containers, the replacement for fiambreras, and it has the home-cooked flavor you loved as a child.  I bought one chicken kaldereta, one ginataang kamansi, one ginataang santol, one pork adobo and one paksiw na bangus and paid P640.  That’s food for one whole week for me.  It has never been this delicious before.  And it is the ideal Pinoy deli with paksiw na bangus with sili and talong — really and truly to die for.

I think I might even invite some of my friends to lunch at my house and just send for this delicious food. They will be so impressed. 

I suggest you go there and look at the place yourselves. Bring at least P1,000 to spend because you will want to buy so much food.  It’s everyday fare, but it is delicious and reasonably priced.  And your family will love truly Filipino food just like my beloved Lola, whom I so sorely miss, used to cook.

It’s at the very corner of Buendia and Bautista with a maroon and white awning.  Just ask the security guard where you can buy food.

* * *

Please text your comments to 0917-815-5570.