Lola Cristy’s chicken adobo

Lola Cristy was unfazed and always bought skinless pieces of chicken she used in cooking her adobo. She knew her adobo would taste just as good as any adobo she cooked, if not better. During our trips to the palengke, Lola Cristy would banter, “Mataas sa cholesterol ’yan!” to the butcher who separated the chicken skin from its meat; for her, it was a no-brainer to stay healthy with the ailments that can come with her age. She walked and jogged every morning, and even went to church every day. While Lola Cristy kept her health in check and tip-top shape, the universe had other plans when she passed a few days before her birthday, sometime in July 2016. She was 81.

With her passing, grief followed the people who were closest to her. I was no exception. I knew grief would come, but I never fully understood how grief came in waves until I went back to editing this piece. “What was there left to unpack?” I asked as I wrote in length more and more about my bereavement. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, as Swiss-American psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross elaborated in her seminal work, “On Death and Dying,” are what make up the “stages of grief.” Where was I, in these stages, at the time of her death, and where am I now? But, similar to how other psychologists have criticized the framework Kübler-Ross posited, a published article in 2018 offers a different view and argues that “… these affective stages often overlap and may subside and return spontaneously in a different order…” Then, was this the case today, six years after her death? Was the physicality of her presence all I/we lost?

Perhaps these stages of grief were no spontaneity to me, but a build-up waiting to be gently broken down once these walls reached their peak. As I piece fragments of memories I shared with my grandmother, I figured that grief sits closer to me than it did more than six years ago. Today, I do not know where I am in the stages of grief or if these could pin down the well of emotions I have. There is the yearning to know her beyond the enthralling stories I’ve heard—both good and bad. Then, the gnawing sadness that comes and goes every time I visit the kubo where, suddenly, images of her are conjured: her wrinkly hands adorned with bangles and how she pushed to a corner a used balikbayan box, heavy with toys, with her sheer strength, or how she commanded in a shrilling voice while wearing her washed out blue scrubs, how to sweep the dirt off the floor properly. And, somewhere along these sentiments, there remains the space to be grateful for the bits of life I got to share with her, especially in the kitchen where I witnessed her cook adobo the most.

There’s no point in arguing whose adobo recipe is the best, but her adobo mattered. She enjoyed cooking it for us, and after her passing, to a greater extent, Lola Cristy’s adobo mattered more. It still is a pleasant conundrum trying to cook it like it tasted: garlicky, umami, seared chicken pieces simmered until fork-tender along with a thick, flavorful sauce.

As I reminisce about these kitchen tales, I remember how her simple preparation rendered complex flavors of her adobo: mince bulbs of garlic using a meat tenderizer until you could easily pick out the thin papery skin from the pasty pungent garlic. For an hour, marinate the chicken with half of the garlic, freshly coarse ground black peppercorns, and aromatic dried bay leaves. Simmer the marinated chicken, condiments, and the remaining half of the garlic in a deep pot until fork-tender. In a shallow pan, fry the simmered pieces of chicken with just enough oil until charred in the right spots. Transfer the fragrant pieces of chicken into the pot and simmer for another hour, or until the sauce is reduced. What seems a typical adobo preparation for me (or anyone, really) was a labor of love for her. Her eventual return home to Bataan came after decades of working and caring for a patient in the US. But she still did the most for the people around her. She tended to her garden and moved potted plants with her bare hands. She woke up early to jog, attend the Holy Mass, and went back home with warm kakanin wrapped in banana leaves in one hand and a tabloid in the other. She hurried us to prepare for school, prepared our meals, asked us to go with her to visit her siblings, joked around, and laughed a lot. Her genial demeanor, always with good intentions, and apologetic for her wrongs.

For years since her passing, I always confided with my sister, arguably her favorite apo, in tasting my nth attempt at figuring out Lola Cristy’s adobo. Knowing how she prepared adobo should have made it easier to crack, considering it seemed half of the job was done. But, throughout all these attempted remakes of her adobo, it always ended with us scratching our heads, realizing once again that we can never come close to how she cooked hers, nor will we ever get the chance again to hear her joyous laughter in our home. For years, without realizing it, this may have been my way of coping with Lola Cristy’s passing: cooking my way out of it or, I suppose, cooking with grief that ebbs and flows.

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Manuel Genaro de Luna (they/them), 23, resides in Bataan. They graduated from UPLB and now work in advertising as a copywriter.