HOME for the Holidays

For Filipinos, noche buena (christmas eve) and media noche (new year's eve) dinner are BIGTIME family feasting and dining events! And if eating is involved, shopping for the feast is done a day or two before. And in the Philippines, its the worst day to go supermarket shopping as the stores will be jampacked with people and the cashier check-out qeue will be the longest for the year!

This year, my fam had catered lunch party at home in Cebu so we dont have to kill ourselves cooking and doing supermarket shopping. A word of advise, one has to book a month before with the catering service to ensure availability. For our annual Bandillo Fam get-together we got our usual caterer Maria Lina and booked for 50 pax last Dec 24. Our party had the usual kiddie and adult games and ended with gift-giving!

Since my husband and I were leaving Cebu to spend New Year in Iloilo, we needed to be smart once again ... we did media noche shopping 2 days before at our local Gaisano Fiesta Mall in Tabunok, Talisay City Cebu. Yup, we were there at 930am to escape the crowd but lo and behold ... a qeue was already starting at all the check-out counters! We were late! But never the less, we came prepared with our grocery list. So far, the store had a very good assortment and NO out-of-stock situation on major media noche items. Hurrah! We were out after an hour. Media noche for the Lapus Fam is ready for cooking!

As I left Cebu for Iloilo to spend New Year with the Baluya's, we needed to be smart once again! We brought in Cebu lechon (roasted pig) from our suki Mang Boy to Iloilo -- and did our supermarket shopping Dec 30 at IS Mandurriao.

Since I'm in Iloilo for the next few days, allow me to write several posts about this beautiful city in the Visayas.

Mrs Jane B.