AFTER the Christmas feasts crowding the past year, the most tell-tale signs that we haven’t been good boys and good girls, are our waistlines and the higher numbers on the weighing scale.
Personally, I was tempted to indulge in meat-eating and downing glass after glass of sugar-laden soft drinks. I could have kicked myself for allowing my weak flesh to give in. My flesh was weak, and so was my spirit.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I had to shop for new innerwear one size higher and if I actually had to kick myself, I couldn’t sit down for a week.
To assuage our guilt feelings, the New Year always promises new beginnings. Gym memberships are usually up in the first two months of the year or even on the third in preparation for beach bodies.
Also, we promise to diet (again). The good news is that we do not need to starve ourselves. Many restaurants here now offer healthier choices.
There’s a small one down 6th Street in Bacolod that offers home-cooked style lunches. Twenty-Six Herb Garden is owned by Dr. Anabel Villanueva who is an advocate of backyard farming to reduce carbon footprints, and raising and buying local produce. In fact, the 3,000-square meter where Twenty Six Herb Garden stands has been converted into an organic garden.
The restaurant offers lunch “turo-turo’ style. Many of the ingredients used for the dishes are from the backyard garden. My lunch of one-and-a-half brown rice, laswa, dinuguan, a slice of boneless bangus in tausi, a glass each of roselle and dalandan juice, costs only P223.
The bowls are rather small but I understood why – to avoid wastage. The eye can trick the brain sometimes. What we perceive as inadequate turns out to be just right for our appetite. Sure enough, what I ordered for me and my mother was just right.
The menu varies everyday at Twenty-Six Herb Garden and is a well-balanced one. On the day I lunched there, they also had paksiw na bangus, puso ng saging salad, and beef tips. For dessert, my choices that day were cassava cake, kamote delight, and fresh langka.
Occasionally, the kitchen offers rabbit stew; this must be the only food outlet in the city that does. Rabbit meat is popular in Europe and whenever Doc Anabel advertises that it is available, the meat sells out quickly usually bought by expat chefs. It’s healthy meat, actually.
The restaurant has only a few tables. Despite its size, it was able to convert one corner into display area for produce from the family farm – papaya (P60/kg.), lettuce, kamote, and even cherry tomatoes. There are bottled products, muscovado, starter kits for an organic garden, and (I overheard someone) yogurt.
If you ask permission, you can visit the backyard where a myriad culinary herbs (hence the resto’s name) are grown. And where the rabbits are raised. But I wouldn’t look at the rabbits, if I were you. They’re just so cute that you couldn’t imagine them being culled for lunch.
Well, here’s to a healthy year ahead of us!