I don’t like eating just for quantity. Which is why I hate carb-laden meals; you keep chasing a flavour, but you never quite catch it. Things like pizza, pasta, potato salad, and noodles. When I was a child, the only time I ate a lot of rice was when we had something like fried pork chops, and I basted my rice with the fat that was rendered from the pork and seasoned it with fish sauce. Salty and umami locked together, the silky feel of the fat in your mouth, you wanted it again and again and again.

Sad to say, I have never again dared to eat this as an adult -scared for my heart and and my veins - after my mother’s horror stories of people she knew collapsing right after eating such meals. But I’ve also learned a very adult skill- self-regulation. For how can you continue to enjoy dishes like salty adobo, pork binagoongan, curry, Filipino fried-chicken, kare-kare, bopis if you omitted the rice? But I’m more focused now on the flavour and to eat slowly. Now, I never eat more than a cup of rice with these dishes and I’m still satisfied afterwards. When faced with lechon or pork-belly, I can omit the rice altogether as long as there’s a vegetable side-dish.

The weight of a big meal is, well, heavy. The kids and I had Korean BBQ night at home on a Monday and you realise afterwards that you duped yourself into thinking that a lot of little things- pork belly, wagyu strips, kimchi, vermicelli- amounted to a little thing. But this is the effect of a buffet- you just carry on cooking and eating and cooking and eating.I was literally still burping the next day.

But today for dinner, I assembled one of my favourite easy meals- freshly cooked rice, kimchi, one duck egg and two normal eggs- yolks still runny- showered with spicy furikake. It’s a lot of little things, but it all amounts to flavours- the tangy bite of the kimchi, the velvety yolk with a hint of sesame and the sharp, cheddar-cheese like saltiness of the duck-egg.