Emergency
Filed under The Mommy Journals • Tagged: consumer prices, cooking, culture, domestic helpers, food, public transport, rice, society
At 10.30 a.m. today, one of the house helpers came up to my study to tell me that we had no more rice to cook for lunch. Wow, and I was hoping for a leisurely day. We had a huge bowl of leftover stir fried beef and vegetables that I cooked for the kids’ packed school lunch and it was just a matter of one of the house helpers cooking the rice and that was that. I was expecting that I wouldn’t need to do anything in the kitchen until later in the day when I have to prepare dinner.
I debated for about 10 seconds whether to send the house helper to the market to buy rice then quickly discarded the idea. A trip to the market for a kilo of rice will make the price of rice go up by 200%. Why? Tricycles cost, dear. Forty pesos each way plus forty pesos for a kilo of rice. These small, noisy, polluting tricycles dictate the price around here because we’re far away from the route of jeepneys and buses.
Besides, both house helpers are kitchen-handicapped (I don’t require kitchen know-how when we hire house-helpers). They can’t cook (well, they can cook rice and fry fish). They can’t tell one variety of rice from the other. And many of the rice sellers in the market are wily. Not wily in some good sense but wily as in they cheat. If they think you’re clueless, they’d give you the worst variety of rice and charge you for the price of the best. With the price of rice these days, my goodness, who wants the aggravation? So, it didn’t make sense to send any of the house helpers to the market. Speedy buys our rice in bulk and he can do it on his way home from work today with no additional transportation cost.
So, I went down to the kitchen, opened the cabinets and tried to decide how I would deal with the situation. I could have a sandwich, no problem, but the house helpers… well, bread for them is a snack but never a main meal. They have rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday. Perhaps, it’s a remnant of life in rural Philippines where rice is eaten three times a day and even most snacks are rice based.
But noodles appear to be an acceptable substitute for rice for these young women. What I did was to boil egg noodles in leftover onion soup from last night’s dinner. Then, I dumped the leftover stir fried beef and vegetables into the hot noodles and tossed everything until the beef and vegetables were reheated. And that was our lunch. Then, I talked to Speedy on the phone to say we need rice tonight. It’s an emergency.
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[...] done that before and it wasn’t even related to an attempt to dress up the leftovers. You can read about that in The Mommy Journals. But if there is no leftover stir fry, is there no other fast and easy way of [...]
We feast everyday!
When there’s someone like you in the kitchen….what emergency? The challenge of preparing a meal minus some key ingredients! Creativity at its best Connie!
Panic can push creativity to the limits, hehehe Honestly, naloka ako kanina
Recently I was talking to a Sudani and shared that he has a Filipino friend who is very well-organized at home and… “hey, he eats rice thrice a day”. =)
LOL so it’s a mark of being Pinoy na Pinoy.
It happened to me: I was very hungry at that time, but I still managed to cook and prepare side dishes,Darn when I opened the rice cooker There is no cooked rice and there’s no rice in the rice dispenser either and it’s already 2 oclock.I ended up eating ramen
You should introduce them to couscous. Itty bitty pasta with rice textures. Bongga sila
Your helpers sure are lucky!
Edgar, if this had happened around five years ago, I would have probably done the same. But we don’t buy instant noodles anymore…
Dex, they didn’t like couscous.
Sayang nga eh, so expensive. And I loved that it took all of 2 minutes to cook.
Hey, that looks pretty great for a last-minute lunch.
This looks superb and I would prefer this for lunch too.
Yan ang mahirap pag me katulong, problema din ang ipapakain sa kanila
B, I think it works both ways.
Thanks, Asianmommy.
Julie, totoo yan. We had a house helper before who wouldn’t eat beef. But she ate corned beef.
I just can’t get worked up over the rice crisis….I could go a year without eating rice and not complain hahaha
Me too. As long as there is bread and noodles…
The first time we visited my parents (and the first time she was in the U.S.) after a week of all-American food she demanded we go find a Chinese restaurant cause she was having rice withdrawl — and it wasn’t easy to find in my white bread town