My Life, My Food, My Places

Bread is a serious issue for the Parisians! We learned very fast after moving in our apartment in St Cloud, that bread wasn’t just bread. The first days we bought bread everywhere we passed a bakeshop on our way home from the Metro station. I think it was the third day after we moved in that I met my neighbor, in casu the very friendly elderly woman whom lived on the ground floor, greeted me ‘bonjour’ when I came in with my bread. And after some small talk about where we were from -ah! Des Belges- she asked me ‘the’ question: where do you buy your bread? And that moment I learned that bread is a serious matter for a Parisian! She explained me that you have to pick your Boulangerie (bakeshop) and stick to it. The neighborhood Boulangerie is more than just a place to get your bread, it’s a local institution with their own protocols and like the local Brasserie (café/coffee shop/restaurant) the place to go as ever...

Our mothers always told us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and that we have to be sure we include all food groups or the ‘pyramid’: bread or cereals, fruits, dairy,… But breakfast traditions are different. In Belgium we were used to eat ‘heavy’ breakfasts with bread, butter, eggs, cheese, and ham. The British eat baked beans, eggs, bacon, mushrooms, black pudding, toast and marmalade and in Scandinavia fish is on the breakfast table. But not in Paris! Breakfast in Paris is, like lunch, mostly an ‘outdoor’ activity. Only few families have breakfast together during weekdays as most schools offer breakfast for the kids before classes and the parents have ‘something’ on the way to the office. During my stint in Paris, I usually took my breakfast in the bar/restaurant Le Barbusse in front of our office building. In every neighborhood with offices or workshops there are plenty of those small neighborh...

Filipinos are people with a big appetite. Average, people on the island eat five times a day. It all starts with breakfast over a snack around 10 am to keep them going till lunch. A merienda, or afternoon snack, will bridge lunch to dinner. Filipinos are fervent rice eaters and have with a consumption of 118 kilos per capita/year(babies and children included) on of the highest consumption in Asia. Rice is ‘the’ staple food for breakfast, lunch and dinner but also for a lot of snacks they eat between the meals. A basic breakfast is simple: rice, egg sunny side up or scrambled and soy sauce. Next to rice Filipinos are huge egg eaters and consume minimum one egg a day. A lot of mamas buy eggs with a complete tray at the time. Talking to the locals I found out that the most popular breakfast is rice with bulad (fried dried fish) eaten with vinegar and fried egg. The fried fish is salty, the vinegar sour and they accompany this breakfast with hot chocolate made of local...