CNF Writing Exercise: Exercise on Rhetorical Techniques

Chelsea Elizabeth Naredo
2 min readApr 21, 2021

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The topic of cooking nilaga in our household always had a follow-up question: Do you want normal nilaga or do you want nanay's nilaga?

You see, my mom has a different version of cooking this traditional beef soup. It wasn’t all just a boring, tasteless water-cabbage-potato concoction. It still had those basic ingredients of course, but why stop there? My mum’s version involved sauteing, tomatoes, a couple of unpeeled saba, and a steel fork.

It started in her Bicol hometown, apparently. My grandpa cooked it for their family, and my mom learned to enjoy eating and cooking it as well, learning the weird tips and tricks along the way.

"The beef must stay inside the boiling kettle for an hour, and chuck a fork in there to make it soften faster," My grandpa would say. Then after the beef finished boiling, it would be time to sautee the onion, garlic and tomatoes, tossing the beef in there as well before all of those make their way back to the soup pot.

When it is just about done cooking, my mom would ladle out some of the soup and make me taste, and thinking about how this tastes right now actually makes my mouth water. She would serve this in a bowl of pure delight and I would eat it with gusto, every single time. It always contained the perfect amount of saltiness, a little bit of tang, and the beefy undertones within the broth always sparked joy.

Is this weird? It may be, to someone unfamiliar. Does it taste amazing? It does, and it is all I have ever known since childhood, which is why the answer to the follow-up question will always be "Nanay’s nilaga, please." And it’ll stay like that for as long as I have the pleasure of eating my mom’s dish.

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Chelsea Elizabeth Naredo
Chelsea Elizabeth Naredo

Written by Chelsea Elizabeth Naredo

Unti-unting humahakbang papalayo sa mundong nakasanayan.

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