Children often play with their food, and you have to admit too that, as a kid, food is just one of the many things that bring out your curiosity.
Sometimes the way you play with your food becomes an eating habit or routine that, until now, as a grown adult, you likely did because it reminded you of your happy childhood.
Pinoy food and snacks are just fun, especially when you’re enjoying them together with your siblings or friends, but which of these food habits brings out that inner child in you?
1. Making a chicken skin wrap
The golden, crunchy, and flavorful chicken skin is what most kids desire as their lunch or dinner because once the meat is gone, the skin wraps up, literally.
Chicken skin wrapped with leftover rice or a side dish and then dipped in a glorious amount of gravy completes the chicken meal because, as a kid, you’ve imagined it as a tortilla wrap or sushi nori.
Recently, this food habit gained its hype on Tiktok as the famous Filipino Jollibee Chicken stole hearts globally, becoming the famous “Chicken Skin Hack”.
Youtubers such as ‘Zach and Tee’ tried the hack by wrapping their Jollibee chicken skin with adobo rice, while “The CrunchBros” wrapped theirs in spaghetti, but they both never forget to dip it with the signature gravy, just perfection.
2. Eating the cheesecake top last
While cupcakes are either bought fresh in-store or for baking, in the Philippines, mini stores or sari-sari stores sell packaged cupcakes, and kids look forward to the sweet and cheesy top of the packed cheesecake.
It’s quite common for Filipino kids to eat the crumbly cake bottom first before the cheese top; the texture is soft, and when eating, it really feels like a cheesy fudge.
A Pinoy TikToker named Marco Antonio showed his own way of eating the cupcake, scraping off the cheesy top, molding it into one big circle, almost like clay, and then eating the cake before the molded top.
While some Filipinos have their own version of eating the famous cheesecake, the cheese top is the last one to go.
3. Mixing two sachets of Milo
Before becoming coffee lovers, Pinoy kids had the chocolate drink Milo while pairing it with their breakfast because of its signature tagline, “beat the energy gap.”
To really get the chocolate flavor, most kids would mix two sachets of milo, and at the time, the packaging design had famous Filipino athletes to inspire young kids to become ‘champions’ in sports or physical education.
The most famous one was Japoy Lizardo, the actor and Taekwondo athlete who was a fan favorite amongst children, and most of them would only drink milo if Lizardo was on the packaging.
4. Punching straw on the juice pouch bottom
It was truly a struggle for some kids to punch the straw in the small hole of the juice pouch; sometimes the straws bend or don’t punch through, even if you’ve exerted so much effort.
Punching through the bottom, however, can be quite messy, but it really gets the job done, doesn’t it? Plus, it’s quite intriguing to drink from the bottom of the juice pouch.
Adults also usually do things for themselves or for kids because you get to drink almost everything. When drinking from the actual punch hole, the juice gets left behind in the crumpled corners of the bottom.
5. Cheese rings used as actual rings
Here comes more cheesiness! A children’s play wedding isn’t complete without the gorgeous cheese rings, just the perfect size for the fingers of a little kid.
This cheesy snack has also become popular with many Filipino kids because of its odd shape and fun to eat when there are a lot of cheese rings on each finger.
It’s also something that most Filipino kids do when sharing the cheese rings with their sibling or friend; to be sure they have equal amounts of rings, they have to count by wearing them on their fingers.
6. Eating the wafer stick’s chocolate swirl first
Probably the most beloved cheap chocolate snack for Filipino kids is the chocolate wafer stick with a chocolate filling that is sometimes used as an edible straw for shakes or chocolate drinks.
But what fun would it be to eat the chocolate swirl part first, right? Biting the chocolate to get a clean wafer, and wasn’t because of OCD but a challenge pinoy kids do with their friends.
If you accidentally break the wafer stick or expose the chocolate filling, you’re out of the game. It really takes a while before you master the wafer skill.
There’s nothing to be ashamed of when you still have these food habits today; it only means you still relive the childhood memories, and you can challenge your friends or pass them down to your own children because food is really such a wondrous thing.
Photo Credit:
https://twitter.com/japoy_lizardo
https://twitter.com/japoy_lizardo
