A sweet and Happy New Year to all the readers of this website! Thank you for making 2005 such a phenomenal year for me. Dessert really does come first. More sweet things to appear here in the new year.

It’s normal to sleep away the first half of the first day of every new year. With all the ruckus and revelry that goes on the night before, people really need the time to catch up on sleep, rest their punished eardrums, and clean their nostrils of all the soot. People in the Philippines, you know what I mean.

A brunch on the first day of a new year is a delightful thing to do. Wysgal said it best when she wrote “…what better way to delineate periods of life than with the natural marker that is the New Year?”

My first meal of every new year is sweet and over the top (OTT). It’s my way of bidding goodbye to the past holiday that has seen me gorging on food that is oh-so-bad but oh-so-good. Come January 2, it’s back to my punishing gym workouts, my 5 kilometer runs, which have now become 10 kilometers, and I go back to making dust with my bike up the trails of Sta. Rosa. I’m already nervous thinking about all the pain I’m going to have to pay for eating so much.

So. This is the banana-chocolate French toast (P209) that they serve at UCC. It is in itself an example of OTT splendor: soft in the middle and crispy around the edges pieces of bread gaily littered with bananas, sprayed with chocolate sauce, and garnished with the de rigueur whipped cream. There are other varieties if banana and chocolate isn’t your thing. It comes with a free cup of hot chocolate, which is quite tasty in itself, though the server said it was “just Hershey’s.” Oy, that’s not a bad thing.