Adobo

Back in high school, adobo was almost staple in our diet, just like rice. But we weren't complaining. It's good that we still had pork in the table, because that means we had money. If we had more, then my aunt (who acted as our guardian while my parents worked in the middle east) would buy chicken, mix it with pork, and cook it in soy sauce. Sometimes, we had vegetables prepared as in adobo, like the adobong sitaw. When we visit my other aunt who lived in a nearby town, she would skin frogs (the edible ones, because some contain poison) she bought in the market and used them as her main ingredient.  You have to use your hands if you are finishing a plateful of adobong palaka (frog adobo) as forking through the small and thin bones to separate the meat takes a long time. When my mom came home to settle here for good, she brought with her variations in the traditional recipe, complementing soy sauce with oyster sauce and adding pineapple chunks to make it sweeter, completely discarding laurel leaves (bay leaves) in the process.