My Life, My Food, My Places

Food, an important issue in the daily life of the Filipinos and surely also for the expats living on the island. For our fresh food we can only go to the market because the island doesn’t have any supermarkets as there are in the city where you can by different meats, cheeses and a variety of fresh vegetables. The offer in the market is very limited and offers only the basic veggies the islanders use to prepare their meals such as eggplant, onions, bitter gourd, some string beans and pumpkin. Completed with some local greens. Meat is limited to pork, very fat pork meat except on Sundays where there is some beef. Only problem is that the beef has not matured and the butchers don’t know how to cut the meat. Chicken, pork, beef and the fish are put on open benches without any form of refrigeration. And flies are always around. But as everyone on the island, three times a week I go to the market to see what ‘goodies’ I can buy. Every time I buy at the same stall run by a y...

When we lived in Paris all of us had, during the weekdays, lunch outside. My wife had her lunch with her colleagues at the school she worked as assistant teacher, the kids in school and me in the simple café/restaurant Le Barbusse across the street of the bank. Le Barbusse, by the way the same place I had my breakfast or at least an espresso in the morning, offered every day choice of ‘Plat du Jour’, mostly one fish dish and one meat, poultry or in wintertime a stew. The Plat du Jour are simple, rustic, grandmother–style dishes prepared with seasonal products and offered at a very competitive price. And they are not only prepared ‘grand-mother style”, they are grand-mother serving sizes and quality also! The variety of the dishes, the fact you can choose makes the Plat du Jour very popular and appreciated by the regulars.  In fact, most neighborhood restaurants like La Barbusse make their business with the regular customers of the offices in the street passing by f...

Writing about my memories on the horrible school canteen of my youth I remembered ‘Jacques Soup’. He was a soup merchant selling fresh soup out of his car from door-to door in the small town I lived. And he delivered also the soup at the school refectory. And I remembered that his car had a huge bronze bell to let the house wives know that he was on his way and that they had to prepare their pots and be standby at their door! He was always dressed in a spic and span white coat complete with shirt and tie. But that was almost all I got out of my deep memory as help was just around the corner.  I emailed the ‘Aarschot Historical Society’, whom has as objective to keep the history of our small town alive for the generations to come and the next morning I had a reaction and a few hours later a second one, with picture this time. The next morning a new update. One of the board members of the society had contacted, the daughter of ‘Jacques Soup’ as everybody called him wit...