Bol-anon

In (warm) summer afternoons, who can resist the halo halo? Wikipedia defines halohalo as "a popular Filipino dessert that is a mixture of shaved ice and evaporated milk to which are added various boiled sweet beans and fruits, and served in a tall glass or bowl." But my favorite halo halo in Bohol, for quite a number of years now does not have those boiled sweet beans. It does not even have ube haleya or leche flan. It's just tons of diced fresh fruits interspersed with shaved ice, bathed in milk and topped with your favorite flavour of ice cream. For several years now, nothing comes best to me than Garden Cafe's halohalo. The restaurant, run by the IDEA Philippines, an NGO working for the welfare of deaf-mute, is located right next to the St. Joseph Cathedral in Tagbilaran City. It has been renovated and "re-themed" since it opened more or less 20 years ago, but the friendly service, and the halohalo still remains the same and to my liking. However, it ...

I miss barbecue. Whatever the world may call it.... anticuchos, kebab, souvlaki, kalamaki, satay, brochette, yakitori.... and though the word may take to mean either the process or the finished product (and sometimes a party in the garden under the heat of the summer sun), barbecue will always mean to me those thin slices of lean meat in bamboo sticks, cooked above coco charcoal in the streets fronting Tagbilaran.... the infamous Sky is the Limit. Sky is the Limit for me, is home to the 2 peso pork barbecue, the 3 peso grilled chorizzo, eaten with the 2 peices of 1 peso "puso" (hanging rice as they call it). Its the source of a poor student's meal at night time (they open from around 6 in the evening to dawn) and an unfailing rescue when one doesn't have the time or the strength to cook after a tiring day. I went home last June and apparently, a lot has changed in Tagbilaran even in just a year. When the Philippine Institute of Development Studies wrote some five to t...