Friday, July 04, 2008 Roperos: Life less costly By Godofredo M. Roperos Politics Also
TRUTHG to tell, the people I circulate with in my hometown—and many of them are government workers who are used to simple ways of life—are doing everything to overcome the rising cost of living.
They turn to veggies for nutritious hot soup, even if it is only malunggay and alugbati. Accompanied with dried fish, it comes out as a delicious meal, enough to give us the strength to pull the blanket over one’s body and keep the cold night breeze away.
One of the resurrected wartime meals I had in my childhood was the sinaksakan, the meal the governor introduced recently with sweet potatoes.
In those days, it was not so much the camote than the ripe or green bananas we call cardaba that was mixed with the milled corn grains. Rice that time was cooked only during special occasions, such as weddings, baptisms, etc. Or used to make puso or hanging rice.
One of the things I was not able to try then was eating yellow corn. Called makyaw, the native variety had a smell that the older folks who tried it, rejected. It was not until I started raising chicken that I learned that yellow corn is highly nutritious.
Recently, with the price of rice going up to P40 a kilo from only P25 or P26 a couple of months ago, I tried makyaw.
It costs only P24 a kilo (the white corn grit costs P32 or P33). The current variety has a new taste and without the disturbing smell of old. It looks so yellow having a plateful of it is like having a plateful of the yolk of hard boiled chicken eggs. Taken with inun-unan and perhaps a cup of hot chocolate, one could have a simple but very satisfying breakfast.
Of course, you could have either white rice or yellow corn lugaw (porridge) instead of cooked rice or yellow corn. It can also go with “washed” salted bulabid immersed with vinegar and spiced with hot pepper, some onions and garlic.
Indeed, the price of almost everything we need to survive, except life, has gone up. One can lose life for an outmoded cell phone. But I feel quite enriched to rediscover the things we had during the hard life of the last war.
Right now, when one’s income does not increase with the rise in the prices of basic commodities, it becomes imperative to look for means to make every peso (no longer centavo, excuse me) count, and to make every single grain of rice stay in your plate and not fall off to the floor, like when we took things for granted before.
