Best Breakfast Ever – Silogs

Forget Belgian waffles, fluffy buttermilk pancakes, brioche french toast, omelettes, country sausage and whatever else most people eat for breakfast. In my book, there’s no better way to start the day than with a silog, a Filipino breakfast of garlic fried rice, topped with a couple over-easy eggs and your choice of sweet or salty meats.

Filipinos love to combine words and names (don’t you know someone somewhere named Marivic?). Silog is a suffix referring to the fried rice (sinangag) and the eggs (itlog), and the dishes are named accordingly: tapsilog (tapa, the original silog) tosilog (tocino), adobosilog (chicken adobo), longsilog (longanisa), SPAMsilog – (SPAM!), litsilog (lechon), friedchixsilog (fried chicken), etc. etc.

I normally go to Cherry Garden Filipino Chinese Restaurant when I get a craving. I always have a hard time deciding between the tocino (sweet cured pork) and the longanisa (sausage akin to chorizo or linguica). The first time we went, I found out they had two types of longanisa, sweet or garlic. I had never had garlic longanisa before, so I ordered that and fell in love with it. My wife likes the bangsilog, which features bangus, the Filipino milkfish. She’s also had the pusitsilog (dried fried squid), and the jefroxsilog (dried fried sole). As you can she, she’s much more adventurous than I am!