At the Farm

I had most weekends and some of the best memories being with my Tita at her farm and seeing how and what she ate.

Nineteen acres was huge to a small girl, and I would ride that red tractor and pick fresh peaches, plums, and even bags of calamansi from the tree in back.

The mulberry tree was towering with jammy fruit (I still remember the taste), and come late Summers I would see the catkins bloom into lime-sized nuts from the the ages-old, gargantuan walnut tree in front of the packing shed…unknowingly, priceless pieces of education at that time.

All these fruits and nuts would roll down the conveyor and get packed. I’d go with her to local markets and stores to drop off her goods from the back of her truck.

As an adult, I see how special and meaningful that was. Not to mention, pretty cool of my Tita to be this woman at that time, visiting other farmers and allowing me to see the work put into it.

One time, a lizard fell from the ceiling of the living room farm house right onto my Tita’s shoulder. It was funny to me, but I still stayed in the house almost each weekend (I liked playing in the dirt).

I had to get used to the ultra-healthy meals she would eat and prepare. Though I never got used to how she could eat an onion the same way you eat an apple.

Very non-traditional Filipino food in some ways, but highlighted the healthier recipes and the common Filipino staples of fish and vegetables.

We regularly would go to the Naval Base Commissary where I could pick foods I liked and saw that she focused on everything fresh. We frequented natural food stores and I learned a lot about differences in food and how it’s grown.

I would meet farmers and noticed the workers.

I now know that introducing healthy food and letting a kid see how our food is made, and seeing the people that do the back breaking work in the process, you learn quick that it’s so much more than food.

Back at the farm I learned what the goat was really for and how the chickens were a muti-providing source of nourishment. We would have fresh eggs all the time. I could never get twin yolks at the regular grocery, but at the farm, all day long.

Until things became dustier, laden with old classic cars that had their last rides, and the rims of that Massey-Ferguson turn into weed urns.

I’m grateful for those important times, and also how it steered me into a healthy balance of what it meant to eat more natural Filipino recipes and farm fresh Asian food.

Even at a very old age, my Tita is a good representation of that balance and how it keeps the body going.

Today, I try my best to give my kids a taste of farm fresh picking, healthier Asian recipes and desserts, and being in nature’s bounty, but the times that I experienced are gone and will never be replicated for them.

So through preparing and cooking real food, it helps to keep linked to the good-past and teach them in a different way. Rice Life Foodie will be there to show my kids more and never stop exploring food. What a wonderful way to spend time.

Let’s eat!