Corn ka d’yan
I’m having my late lunch as I post this. Trying to revive my food-photo blog today as I try this exercise my friend and I talked about yesterday about Stephen King’s advise saying “just write everyday” which I first heard from the late National Artist for Literature NVM Gonzalez. May tama sila, ano? So here goes.
It’s a crime for me to forget my food blog because this is the original project spawned from my (previously) one and only mothership blog, Leaflens. But because life got in the way of a lot of things these past few months, I kinda neglected this one. But don’t worry; I’m back.
And thus, this entry.
I am in my faculty office right now where I am typing this. I just bought a few items at the university’s shopping center, particularly from my two favorite outside stalls there, the manong who sells mais, or corn, and the manang who sells deep-fried things in a bilao or flat basket, usually sweets like bananacue, but I buy fried vegetable lumpia from there.
This is how I get the corn on the cob after buying it for 17 pesos:
Now skewered in a super-thick barbecue stick, still individually wrapped. And now I’m eating it like there’s no tomorrow, meaning super-messy, just like how I did when I was a child. Eating it this way made me flashback to some bits and pieces of my life. Yes, food sometimes does that to me; they are like keys opening time-space portals that prompt me to travel back in time and reminisce, or think about not-so-nice things and find the hidden lessons of that episode.
With corn, I remember how exciting it was when, growing up, the street vendor pushing a small cart with a huge container of corn on the cob would pass by my Lola’s house and shout “Mais! Mais!” and I would jump excitedly to catch the vendor, to hopefully buy one corn. Sometimes, my Lola would also shred the corn from the cob and mix it with some malunggay leaves picked from our tree and cook it just like that. It was a meal by itself, and I loved it.
During high school, when I stayed with my parents in our new house, my Mom would buy corn by the bulk every Saturday when she goes to the market. She preferred to cook it on her own, adding some sugar on the boiling water so the white corn would taste a bit sweet. During those days, there was no proliferation of the sweet yellow corn yet so we all ate the white kind, which is what I prefer, actually. But they yellow will do, too.
Not only does my Mom cook our own corn but she also livens up our favorite meal with it, the Sunday menu, or my Mom’s version of nilagang baka, named that way because she used to prepare it during Sundays only, a highly-anticipated dish in our household. She breaks the cob into smaller pieces and lets it cook with the dish. Yum!
So imagine my horror when someone told me I couldn’t eat corn inside the car or inside the house because its smell was repugnant. I had an ex-girlfriend like that, who just outright dismissed my love for corn without even bothering to ask the history behind why I like it. But I guess not everybody is interested in the reasons why you eat some things.
It just dawned on me how corn is connected to two of the most important women in my life — my Lola and my Mom, who both took turns in taking care of me as I grew up. My Lola’s now in the heavenly cornfields while my Mom is still happy to prepare Sunday menu when my current girlfriend and I request for it.
And now, I try to avoid people who hate corn.
