maalat: (Tagalog, adj.) Salty.
With the grocery closed and the refrigerator lacking any fresh or frozen ingredients for a decent dinner, Paulo decides to eat tonight what he was planning to have for breakfast in the morning: two hotdogs with rice and a boiled egg. He boils the hotdogs in a pot with the egg while simultaneously reheating rice in a tupperware, then drops the boiled hotdogs into the tupperware with the rice, and pours a small mountain of salt (for the boiled egg) onto the overturned tupperware lid. He carefully balances the overturned lid atop the plastic vessel, then places the freshly boiled egg beside the small mountain of salt.
Wrongly balanced under the weight of the egg, the lid promptly flips upright into the tupperware, scattering salt all over the hotdogs and rice.
Paulo proceeds to eat the newly salted meal anyway. He will no doubt notice the aftereffects of his increased sodium intake at his next date with a sphygmomanometer.
Update: Okay, a bit of explanation. As with most Asians, Filipinos eat lots of rice, and one of our preferred quick-cooking meals is any kind of processed meat served with steaming hot white rice. Hotdogs and ketchup are an old classic, but longganisa (linked sausages), beef tapa (cured fried beef), tocino (fried sweet pork) Ma Ling (pork luncheon meat with toxic lead and mercury additives), spam, and bacon are also popular favorites. When combined with a fried egg, the suffix “-ilog” is added to the name of the dish, a play on “itlog,” which is Tagalog for “egg.” Hence you have dishes called tapsilog, longsilog, tocilog, spamsilog, dogsilog, bacsilog, malingsilog, and so on. (Okay, I made up the last four three two.)
