The storm came and left our place wet and muddy. It made me miss the weekends where the weather was cooperative, sunny. That's why we were able to go to the beach on Saturday.
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Thanks to my sponsors, you guys rock! Check their profiles guys! Click each photo below:Sundays, or should I say the weekends are mostly spent with the family. It's always the case for our family. Either we go somewhere like the beach or the mountains to get these kids moving or we stay at home and fellowship.
Every family is different and there's no such thing as a perfect one. Every member has characters and certain traits that are surely imperfect, there are disagreements, even conflicts, tears may be involved at some point but the most important thing is forgiveness.
Investing in the family is very important especially that we have kids who are very attentive to what we do. My niece is already on her way to entering the teenage phase and she is vocal in asking many things about the family, what happened and why. It's important for us to be role models for them and we are investing in making memories that they will surely hold on to, that they can also apply in their future family.
Time with the family is definitely well spent time. Thus, for Sunday, we thought we must eat out. But because of the pandemic, we decided to just do an alfresco type of Boodle Fight in the comfort of our house.
It was four in the afternoon when we agreed about it. The weather was still very nice, it was the golden hour at that time. We asked Amie who just celebrated her birthday to prepare together with our new working student, Jonalyn.
Amie works for my sister in law but she is not new to the family, this lady had been with us since she was eight years old. She was kind of adopted in an informal way, we were neighbors back then and they usually don't have any breakfast or lunch on their table, since she would often stay at our house to watch television, my parents felt pity for her and considering their situation, they decided to keep her and let her stay in the house.
Her parents and sisters moved to a distant area so she goes home once in a while. My parents had always encouraged her to study college but she refused, she graduated grade school and high school while staying with the family. She told us she is not interested in studying college although my parents were willing to support her. She wants to work instead. So she ended up working for the family, she takes care of my nephew Seth who needs special care.
We wanted some barbecues for this but we don't want to grill anymore so we just bought some from the market. My brother happily bought them and they also got some watermelon and mango. Amie cooked adobong manok. This was cooked in a way that the adobo has oil in it and so when eating the rice during the Boodle fight, it won't be too dry.
Is it your first time to hear about such? For those who are not familiar with this, here's an explanation from Wikipedia:
Kamayan (Tagalog for "[eating] with the hands"), also known as kinamot or kinamut in Visayan languages, is the traditional Filipino method of eating with the bare hands. It is also used to describe the Filipino communal feast (also called a salu-salo) where food is served on banana leaves and is eaten without utensils.
Filipinos love eating bare hands, in some other countries, this may sound absurd or unsanitary but we sure feel like we are more connected to the food when done so. However, we understand that it's a pandemic and we must be careful with getting in contact with anyone so that's why we just stayed indoors and do this with the members of the family alone.
Our simple Kamayan or Boodle Fight consisted of just plain rice spread throughout this small table, of course, there are banana leaves first, the leaves were cleaned, and then goes our market-bought barbecues, there's intestines, liver, pork meat, and gizzards. And then the adobong manok were placed in bowls. There's shrimp too from lunch. The fruits made the table lively because of their color. And that's our dinner!
Everyone came into the table, made sure our hands were washed clean, there's a faucet nearby to our table so we can easily wash if needed. This was our garage, we first planned to do it in the garden area but changed our minds thinking it might rain anytime, plus there were still bats flying and we don't want any of our food to be contaminated with their waste from above.
Have you seen hundreds of bats flying? In our town, there are hundreds of bats who fly every single day to the mountains to hunt and eat. They start from around five in the afternoon until seven, and they pass by our house all the time, we would usually observe them as they fly. One of our market's mural paintings is about these bats. By the morning, they'll go back to the main town, there's a bat cave somewhere where they stay to sleep and rest then goes back to the mountain by the afternoon to eat, it's their daily activity cycle.
So going back, after saying our thanksgiving, the Boodle Fight starts. I super love the adobong manok and I ate a lot of rice! I am a hungry breastfeeding momma. What I like about eating together with the family is that we get to talk to each other about anything and everything, we laugh together.
After more than 30 minutes, we were done, only a few handfuls of rice were left, all viands were eaten, there were still pieces of fruits though. But all of us were full! We ended it with some ice-cold soft drinks.
The advantage of eating this way is that we don't get to wash a lot of plates afterward. And the leftover, we can't keep that anymore since we ate with our hands so our backyard chicken had a feast too!
If you are asking about the kids, well, they were done with dinner first. They just stayed inside the house except for Matti who joined us but didn't eat anything, he just sat next to me and observed. He ate a few watermelon and mangoes though but he was already done with his meal before we even started.
That's it. Have you tried Boodle Fight before?
Thanks for reading!
xoxo,
mommy jean of momentswithmatti
Love harder than any pain you've ever felt.
Mayu jud ang kaon ani sis ,wala pajuy hugason😁