For my 22nd birthday, I tried to be radical. That is I tried not to conform to the usual idea of a birthday.
FIrst the weather was already agreeing with me. April 29 dawned with several low pressures headed for Bicol. (Of course, this is a bit inaccurate but indulge me). So I was facing my natal day without the usual sunshine and humid hot air that accompanies it. Instead there were strong winds and heavy rains to the point that I almost forgot it was April. I though it was August already.
So when asked what I wanted to serve on my birthday, I said, well, it doesn’t really matter. I clearly told my family that I would treat them to Yellow Cab, which will open sometime next month, I hope. My siblings were of course excited but my mom, who doesn’t like pizza, was not.
So you could guess who insisted that I serve something – at least the usual spaghetti, my favorite food of all time, on my birthday. Yet stubborn as I was, I would not relent to shelling out cash to spend for my birthday celebration.
And since it was not quite salary day at that time, we were really down to canned goods in the house. Not to mention that no one was really feeling up to the challenge of going to the market to buy anything worhwile to eat due to the bad weather.
And so everything looked like there was a storm. We had a storage of canned goods and the winds were howling outside the house and the rain pouring on the roof. But my mom was not to be thwarted from her plans of decently celebrating my birthday with at least something.
So she determined to cook GOTO. A befitting dish for the weather, she said. And since we really didn’t care, we just let her make her “special” GOTO. Don’t be deceived by “special” though.
What we didn’t expect was that she was going to cook so many!!! As in so many!!! A large cauldron was filled to the brim! And since there were just four of us who would eat that, we literally had GOTO for breakfast, lunch, dinner, breakfast and lunch. And for snacks in between – if we could muster that! Remember it was stormy and we really had no other option available – my mom I think made sure of that or else she feared her GOTO would go unnoticed on the subsequent meals.
By lunchtime of April 30th, when the GOTO was almost gone, I was already beside myself with craving for the usual birthday fare — cake, spaghetti, ice cream, chicken, the works. Good thing my sister, who is a birthday cake junkie decided to surprise me with a RED RIBBON cake on the afternoon of my birthday (she achieved this without leaving the house by merely calling up her bestfriend who lives quite near the city proper to buy and bring the cake to our house.) Yet apart from that, there was still no spaghetti or chicken or any thing!
So since April 30th was pay day, I couldn’t resist shelling out money to spend for some traditional birthday fare.
Bottomline, I still served traditional birthday food – a day after my birthday and afterwards a cauldron of GOTO.
And to this day, my stomach still couldn’t muster the sight of GOTO — with EGG or without EGG.
***
Look out for the post on the EGG. ☺
