Like sneakers for chocolate

Save when it’s raining outside or when I’m down with some illness or what’s equivalent to a hangover, I try to run every morning.

Rising up at dawn to hit the road for at least 30 minutes each day is such a punishment, but a necessary one, I had to tell myself. I needed to find a good motivation as in that recent coffee commercial that asks, “Para kanino ka babangon?” I found it along the street on my way home from jogging: sikwate or pure hot cocoa and puto from a makeshift stall.

Expecting the usual clientele of dawn Mass goers from nearby church and jeepney drivers, our suki Willy Wonka assembles chairs around a long table on top of which he also stirs pure tablea with a wooden batirol in a small aluminum pitcher before boiling them into a pan over a small charcoal stove.

Next to him, his wife neatly packs small servings of puto or rice cake in banana leaf. Especially when it’s made of red rice, puto is the perfect match to a steaming cup of tablea. I take mine straight or without the usual sprinkle of brown sugar. Although, at home, when we make our own hot chocolate, I don’t mind adding a pinch of muscovado or a teaspoon of honey to both the chocolate and the rice cake.

I did that recently, when I got a small beautiful package full of fine local tablea from Alma Mia, a friend who collects paintings, runs a private hospital, and now plans to open a chocolate bar using pure Cebuano cocoa. As she promised, there was no need to blend the chocolates with a batirol. Naturally rich, smooth and silky, a demitasse of her cioccolata calda really makes you say, “Alma Mia!”

Which is the brand I would suggest for her chocolates that I hope would hit the market soon. After all, her name rhymes with tablea. Already, Juvy, a balikbayan friend, recently asked where she could find such good Cebuano cocoa, preferably in vacuum-sealed packaging so she could bring them back to Texas.

I don’t know if Juvy got to find good tablea before flying back to America. If she did, I imagine her trying to burn fats from her much-craved humba while on vacation with zumba back in the States, and capping the workout with sikwate.

Alma Mia confessed that she drinks about five cups of her own sikwate each day to go with her diet. And she recommends using coconut sugar to go with it. I should take that from a hospital owner.

Besides Alma Mia, there was my friend Glo, a lawyer/photojournalist who drinks sikwate after his morning tai chi in Davao City. I joined him and his friends once do tai chi at an empty mall parking lot early in the morning during a visit to Davao about two years ago.

After two hours of doing fighting moves in slow motion lead by a nimble octogenarian shifu, we headed to Bangkerohan (Davao’s equivalent to our Carbon Market, only much cleaner), for red rice puto and sikwate. This was just prelude to breakfast of hot noodles and tea in an old Chinese vegetarian restaurant.

The night before, I found out at Glo’s house that tea and a mix of nuts and seeds can make a light but filling dinner (the best food to pack when you climb mountains, Glo claims). That morning, my vegetarian guru talked about the health benefits of cocoa.

Wanting to be sure, I did my own research, reading chocolate stories all the way to the Aztecs who were first to go loco killing each other over cocoa. But if not for all the head hunting, most of them would have had longer lives due to a healthy heart.

And that’s all because of chocolate. Still, I’m not really a big fan of chocolate bars and candies. I find them too sweet, so I don’t fight over them with my officemates, when one of us returned from abroad bringing a pack, the customary pasalubong.

But sikwate is something else. The ancient spells of Maria Cacao or Willy Wonka make me rise from bed willing to start my day with another round of self-punishment. My worn-out sneakers can attest how far I have gone for chocolate.