Comfort Food

It wasn’t always easy for us growing up. My mom lost her job a few times because of some office politics. My mom is a single mom as my biological father left us when I was 5. The last time she lost her job was about 11 years ago. We had to make a lot of sacrifices. I stopped school to work, I quit my medications because they were too expensive, etc. Aside from that, we didn’t get any help from relatives who, when my mom still had a job were all relying on her to feed their families and basically live. We had to struggle, we had to endure daily hardships. I was in-charge of grocery shopping and cooking food and of course, I had very little budget which I would have to stretch until the end of the week. There were times when I would skip a meal just so we can still eat at night or the next day.  This went on for 8 years. It was very hard but with God’s grace, we overcame.

During this time in my life I learned a lot especially when it comes to stretching meals. Here is an example.



It looks weird, I know but it’s delicious. I used pasta for this which I cut up into smaller pieces. I then cooked it in chicken broth and added veggies. It’s your usual sopas but with pasta noodles. I served this with some sweet, sticky sesame chicken:

Looking back, sometimes I still think how we made it through. There were days when we only had 100 pesos and I would have to find a way to make a meal out of it for the next several days. Come to think of it, our lives only got better just 2 years ago. That’s when things started to turn around for us. I’m really glad that that chapter in our lives is over but I am also thankful that we went through it because I really learned a lot and yes, I became much, much stronger.  I am no stranger to hardships but that was really tough. We are still experiencing a lot of ups and downs but at least there is always food on the table and the bills are always paid on time and everybody is healthy.