by Lori Baltazar
It’s that one food-related thing you do every weekend that makes getting through the week worth it.
Note: M.I.Y.O. Monday stands for Make It Your Own Monday, a question thrown out to DCF readers every Monday to jumpstart the week with lively interaction. I also welcome questions and suggestions for future MIYO Mondays. Email me.
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During the week, my Bin and I wake up at about the same time everyday. We’re both early risers and discipline dictates we get our workouts out of the way first. So, with varying levels of grumbling, we get dressed and my Bin heads outdoors for his run while I head to my exercise mat and dumbbells. Afterwards, we come together for a painfully healthy breakfast of last night’s leftovers (him) and cereal and black coffee (me).
Such rigid routine is why we love Sundays so. We still get up early but on this glorious day that comes just once a week, this day celebrates a weekly breakfast ritual and one no-holds-barred happy meal (usually lunch). We’re out of the house by 7:30am and we stop by a McDonald’s to get my coffee from McCafe, usually a flat white.
Then we drive to Pan de Manila to buy a breakfast of bread rolls and all manner of fluffy, floury things. I consider Pan de Manila as the new generation panaderia, that has, in the years I’ve been patronizing it, kept up very well with the times. From just a selection of big or small pandesals, they now offer a whole wheat version, various ensaymadas, and square loaves. They’ve seemingly thought of everything too with their offerings of various bread spreads – peanut butter, coco jam, and the like – and packets of instant Café con Leche and Tsokolate con Leche. I admire the company’s drive to promote the arts by commissioning select artists to display certain images on their packaging for paper and plastic, and lately, they’ve been touting a chocolate brown recyclable bag with a calesa print. Very nice.
For our Sunday breakfast, we buy ten big pandesals; two Spanish Classics, the traditional roll now crescent-shaped but with the same bread crumb-margarine-brown sugar filling; and one Ensaymada Espesyal (larger and topped with shredded queso de bola), for Boo.
Once home, the bread sits for a spell in the toaster while we set the table. I’ve been sipping my coffee during the short ride but now I transfer it to one of my favorite cups. Takeaway cups are fine but coffee just tastes better in a real cup.
My Bin was the one who taught me the “proper way to ‘slice’ a pandesal” – with a fork, not a knife, bread knife or otherwise – “… so that you won’t flatten it,” he says, as he carefully spears the side of a pandesal with the fork, gently prying it apart. I’m fascinated by the dough’s crumb coming apart rather languidly, strips of dough stretching like melting mozzarella. Warm from the toaster, it reveals its pillowy belly, wafts of steam rise into our noses and tickle our appetites. My Bin likes to eat his pandesal with corned beef or some other canned good that we don’t allow ourselves to eat during the week, but I prefer to eat my pandesal plain. I relish its smoky flavor, a characteristic of being baked in a pugon, and between bites, I like to pinch and touch the bread’s doughy interiors. I feel the coarseness of the bread crumbs that the pandesal’s been dusted with, its now crusty top burnished from its time in the toaster.
Not much is spoken at Sunday breakfast between my Bin and me, we’re both busy revolving around our own little spheres of bready bliss. But when the last bite is bitten, the last sip of coffee supped, we look at one another – eyes bright from a breakfast of bread – and begin to talk about where we’re going to have our “happy meal lunch.”
Tell me: what is your Sunday or weekend food ritual?
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Corned Beef Pan de Sal and coffee 🙂
A big bowl of taho (to share) with breakfast (featuring leftovers):)
Garlic rice, corned beef or luncheon meat, crispy espada fish, sunny side up eggs and hot strong coffee!
Then make plans for the day!
Ps.
The way you write has always been deliciously inspiring for me. Maraming salamat!
nice, a breakfast post again 🙂 Sunday breakfast for me and my boyfriend is at the Centris Sunday Market. I miss the Kapampangan stall there selling fan-tas-tic arroz caldo with chicken’s blood and rice. they also do equally fan-tas-tic lumpiang toge. But alas, they are not there anymore and I have to find another Sunday breakfast stall.
My boyfriend on the other hand would usually have grilled fish – tuna or catfish. They have excellent grillers there as the fish aren’t slimy and cooked just right, still moist and flaky inside 🙂
My mama loves kakanin. And since Sunday is market day, she makes it a point to buy her kakanin loot to share with the family. Every Sunday morning, we are greeted with a kakanin platter: palitaw dusted with freshly grated coconut, white sugar and toasted sesame seeds, carioca – deep fried sweet glutinous flour balls with a caramel shell – on BBQ sticks, suman – the kind that is wrapped in yellow coconut fronds, and FINALLY suman sa cassava and suman sa lihiya – moss green rice blocks drizzled with palm sugar coconut milk sauce and latik. Oh and during the summer we get a Mango or papaya platter too 🙂
My Tita usually cook a more festive viands for the family that she don’t normally cook during the weekdays. May it be kalderata. chicken pastel or kare-kare. I think this tradition was pass on to her by my Lola. 🙂
My father always cooks breakfast, our staple is always the fried egg ‘malasado’ way. the bottom of the egg is crispy til the edges, but the yellow center remains oozing. The crunch of the sea salt gives another depth to the egg, a perfect match to fried rice or hot pandesal! :9
Its on Sundays that I can bring myself to eat- and enjoy- rice during breakfast with the typical pinoy pairing of longganisa & fried egg; and maybe even some kakanin, with the mandatory (haha) brewed coffee, of course. Weekday breakfasts- even Saturdays these days!- are usually a make your own, marathon- eating (or gulping?) of pandesal/ bread with some filling and brewed (some days, instant) coffee. Sundays give me and family ample time to wake up late, prepare breakfast with all the good and/or sinful combinations one can think of (rice+ fried viands, bread w/ sweet fillings/ preserves/canned goods, kakanin etc.), eat together, at a relaxed pace. Best of all, Sundays is when we as family can together look back at the week that was, and laugh over those times that we thought the world would turn over and the week would never end… as it ended, and Sunday finally came, after all!
I love this post, Lori because I love Pan de Manila. It’s the only pandesal I eat. I also love their Cheese Pesto bread and instant coffee plus the overall ambiance of their stores, not to mention the smell of freshly baked pandesal wafting in the air. How I wish they’d put tables and chairs so I can eat there and savor that smell for a good 30 minutes.