Soul Food, Food for the Soul

SABBATICAL NOTES. 7 JUNE 2014. SATURDAY. N2. 
Soul food. Food for the soul. 

THREE WEEKS into the Castille-Aragon culinary culture and I was over the hill. 

There are similarities, true, and I looked around, and I failed most of the time. 

My first ritual of the morning was to listen to the brrrr of the coffee grinder, and I failed in all the mornings I was in Spain. 

I failed in Switzerland too. 

The brrr of the coffee grinder was a constant at home, with the first-born, a coffee addict, serving as the high priest of coffee addiction and in that ideology we call coffee consumption. 

As was my custom, I brought Nescafe 3-in-1, those illusions packed in a sachet that are more sugar and chemicals than coffee, that aroma veritably concocted from some Philippine scientists' wild imagination on how a real brew would smell. There is over-aroma in this and thus, you must suspect what you are sipping. 

But despite this, I knew that Spain would be cold, and that I had to bring these, just in case. 

Plus tee. 

Plus some Skyflakes.

Just in case. 

By the third week, I have been having nightmares about sinigang and tuyo. 

When the Guran family invited to have dinner with them, I said right off, 'Please, please, please, I have been suffering from this colds, and would you please, please, cook whatever sinigang you can cook. I still want to live and see all these beautiful things Madrid can offer?'

By then, I had taken the plane from Valencia to Madrid, and had ran around to see what beauty I could digest. 

MADRID/