IT was the right time to arrive for breakfast, early morning. From the Cagayan de Oro airport, we went directly to the venue, a wet market which residents have named Cogon.

Several long tables and chairs were set for diners—those who go there to break their evening fast and tourists like us who heard about their great breakfast.

We didn’t know what to expect. Would we have the pancakes that were cooking on a big griddle, colored too yellow to be considered delicious, much less safe? But our guide just kept on walking past the pancakes to a row of tables.

One vendor looked like she owned the particular station we gravitated to. She was pouring milk into a cup of chocolate drink, pouring from the can quite high, making like an Indian chai wallah or tea vendor. Later, she took a big batidor (wooden stirrer) and placed it inside a huge pot, not a tea or coffee pot but a huge one. She started to stir to make a frothy beverage, a more down-to-earth way to make latté.

Watch how she does the take-out chocolate, we were told. She took one empty can of milk that had its paper label removed and the top cut off with a can opener but leaving a tiny piece still attached. In that empty can she placed the chocolate order then closed the top. A great recycling example.

‘Puto maya’

With our chocolate, we ordered puto maya. One of the vendors put it together expertly. She scooped out the sticky rice concoction from a pot, placed the portion into a banana leaf then wrapped it into a triangle. It went very well with the chocolate beverage.

Puto maya, the way it is cooked at the Cogon market, uses both white and violet sticky rice steamed and then steamed again with ginger, grated coconut, sugar, salt and water. The aroma is certainly of ginger but the distribution of flavors is so controlled, the rice cake comes out a bit bland. That makes a good counterpoint to the sweetened chocolate drink.

Puto maya reminds me of another breakfast, this time in Bohol, at a resort called Jul which unhappily is no longer there. But it was very different from the Cogon version because it was more puto than just sticky rice, white in color and with a mixture of grated coconut and sugar in between two slices of the puto.

That Bohol breakfast also included a thick chocolate drink, tsikwate, and so many pieces of dried fish, paksiw. My hosts decided to make me taste almost the whole range of suman available. I remember being bewildered by how much I had to taste in one morning.

Sea treasures

The American tourists who sat next to my table said that my food was infinitely more interesting than their Continental breakfast. It was to become even more interesting when a man brought in a basket of fresh catch just in from the sea.

It turned out to be sea urchin. A tap of the knife and a piece of the shell on top was gone. The soupy inside was waiting to be sipped either with a teaspoon or straight from the shell. When the Americans took my offer to taste the sea urchin, their faces showed how sure they were that their breakfast didn’t count for much.

I had been asked the night before if I wanted tuyom or suwake, the local words for sea urchin. When I said yes, it was like an order to get those sea treasures right away, even if it was breakfast time. I had no idea that the man I noticed diving so early was really out to do my bidding, getting my sea urchin from the sea to the table.

I’m waiting for the next breakfast adventure to beat those two experiences. Tapsilog will still do it for me if I hadn’t eaten it for one year.

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