Freebie anyone?
In this time of crisis, who would not want freebies? Well, Donald doesn’t want it. 
Last Monday night we had champorado (chocolate porridge) for midnight snack. Since it has long cooking time like the other dishes in Cafe World, we usually fix a pot-full of champorado and just put whatever is left in the fridge to make it handy when somebody craves for it. We only have a little of it left today and Ella decided she wanted that for her afternoon snack. Although it is easy to get it in the fridge, she has to get some sugar in the store to sweeten her champorado because we ran out of it. Last night I had a bowl of it too but I put some honey on it but she doesn’t like the taste. We are not big consumers of sugar. In fact one kilo could last a month or so. We just use it for champorado and our occasional hot chocolate drinks during cold days. Honestly I prefer sugar too but this honey is so good.
So Donald gave out instruction to buy half kilo white sugar. She repeated it before leaving and came back to announce there is no white sugar…..only brown sugar. If you are not from here you might wonder why we have two colors of sugar. White or granulated sugar is highly refined sugar that is priced higher while brown sugar is coarse sugar that is mixed with molasses. Ella was sent back to buy the brown instead and she brought home a pack of brown sugar with FREE ants. Donald was a little pissed because we don’t need freebies like that. 
Well after three trips to the store to get sugar, she was not in the mood for a champorado anymore.
We went out to get some groceries in the nearest grocery store in Mintal just before dusk and purposely I did not glance at the price of sugar. I saw in the news that the sugar price shoot up to nearly P60.00 a kilo (around $1.36) and that almost gave me a heart attack. It is more expensive than a good variety of rice! I think we better consume the huge bottle of honey and hopefully by the time we are down to its last drop, sugar price has gone down.
February 5th, 2010 at 3:02 am
We buy white and brown sugar… I use brown sugar in hot cereal, and for baking cookies. (Both white and brown sugar go into homemade cookies) … I don’t know how much a kilo is. We buy a 5 pound bag of sugar, and unless it’s Christmas (and I’m doing a lot of extra baking), then it lasts a long time.