PIO's Lunar New Year Celebration

Our department (Public Information Office - Navotas) had our own lunar new year celebration, we even did ours prior to everyone else (Chinese or not), as Friday (Chinese New Year) was a holiday, we had our feast a day earlier, the last working day of January.

All of us decided to have lunch at the office to celebrate and, of course, to bond a little, with a hundred pesos per head contribution we were able to cook up a feast, not literally though, it was Kuya Josel's mother-in-law who did all the cooking and made our gastronomic fill possible.  Thank you po *channeling Chichay of G2B*, I'm a fan of the show, in case you care to know, hurhur!

Century Egg courtesy of Mickee

slabs of Lechon Kawali

The juicy and crunchy story:  Our simple party was four days in the making, a few of us suddenly had this craving for liempo / lechon kawali, and then those who have heard was inspired to crave for the same thing, hahaha, so a plan was made, 'patak-patak ng 100 pesos tapos bibili ng karne at ipapaluto sa tindahan nila Ate Mari at magse-celebrate kami ng Chinese New Year,' it was like hitting two birds with one stone, we got to eat what we want and we were able (hopefully) to shoo away the bad vibes in the office and welcome the good ones.

The push-and-pull over who's in or out, who wants to pay their share and who doesn't took a day or two until we finally gathered enough money to buy raw meat in the not-so-nearby public market.  It took us two market trips, and several indecisive moments before we finally settled on buying 3 kilos of liempo (pork belly), talk about cholesterol overload.

Look below, that is what you call heaven on earth, a perspective I'm sure is shared by other food junkies like us.  A dozen or more slices coupled with white steaming rice and you'll get full gastronomic delight, rawr!

Lechon Kawali

And as we have more money to spend, we decided on having a kilo of Hamonado, too. Yummy!  The sauce was to die for, I even took home the remaining sauce and used it as a meatball dip.

Hamonado

Hamonado slices

The lucky few who got included in the photo op, it could be a coincidence that we hit the lucky number 8 or a premonition of good things to come.  I'm hoping for the latter *fingers crossed*.

Lucky 8