Silence of the Yams

I've never been a model Filipino boy. I didn't have high spiky hair in junior high. I've never worn a barong. I can't speak any of the languages, and I don't point at things using my lips. A lot of my Filipino friends would hunt me down for this next confession, but I need to get this off my chest. I really hate ube.

Ube is simply purple yam. I've seen it take several forms - all different, yet eerily the same. The flavor is very hard to describe. It's very sweet because of all the sugar they add, but it's got this distinct rooty quality to it. I've seen it appear as ice cream, cake, and gelatin covered with crumbs. I think I even remember seeing ube farm animals shaped in a manner befitting of marzipan.

Ube is also an ingredient in another Filipino dessert that I never liked. Halo halo (pronounced 'hollow hollow') is an "anything goes" melange of shaved ice, beans, coconuts, opaque tapioca balls, and condensed milk. There are so many variations of halo halo that there are no actual recipes for it. It's kind of like Japan's okonomiyaki, which coincidentally also contains traces of yam. INTERESTING!!!

It's perfectly okay to not like certain things about your culture. That's one of the great things about being a sentient life form in America. I'm sure that there are Irish people out there who hate Riverdance.