THIS week, before heading off to that table in Rosebowl, let me just briefly pick up on the Baguio longganizas as done by the famous Alabanza Meat Store.
According to Marilou Alabanza Guieb and as written of last week, it was her mother who came up with their original recipe, and may I now here add that Marilou's mother's name is Deling.
So on to the table in Rosebowl where I was having lunch last week, which also had the gracious Rosebowl Manager Arlene Nang whose parents, Lourdes and Art, I am told by my mother, have roots in Balaoan, La Union, just as my mother does. Baguio is really just one big family, I swear.
That whole Balaoan line also includes the families of Uncle Miming Sansano, the Caranteses whose mother is Catalina Torralba, and a host of other relatives. To include high school chums Delia Agtarap Millare, whose Lola Biday is my mother's Auntie Biday, and Rey Dacones, who counts as relatives the same Lopez family of my mother's mother, named Cory Zambrano Lopez. Which, as I have pointed out to media colleague Joseph Zambrano, makes him and me cuzzes. Along with Arlene Nang, then.
At that lunch table in Rosebowl where I had shrimp curry as I almost always do when there, Arlene revealed that while her college degree is not quite food-related (haha, what else is new?), she did train in the culinary arts in Las Vegas, where her food education was earned and now continues to level up the Rosebowl food profile.
We chat a bit about Vegas as a food destination, and I relate how a buffet dinner used to cost the impossible price of USD1.00 (!) in the early 1980s. She said that those dinners now cost about USD20.00.