EmbutiDonya

L BE INTRODUCED SOON. Please direct / private message if interested or SMS / Viber 09175946452. The Birth of EmbutiDonya...

I’ve been cooking Embutido – a Filipino variant of meatloaf -- for over 28 years now. Without fail, for family and friends, -- always during the Holidays. For whatever reason though, last Christmas, I couldn’t get myself to follow my own tradition. Maybe it was because so many things happened that year: Our dear dog Paige went completely blind, I became a grandmother, my youngest graduated University, and somewhere in between, our family all found ourselves seeing each other only on the weekends because we had different work shifts and weekday living arrangements. With so much going on, I decided all I wanted was a slow December where I could order-in food for Christmas, and spend time at home. I should have been more careful about that last wish. The country went on lockdown and my family did what everybody else had to do: Stay home. In the beginning it just seemed like a long weekend on steroids, and I reveled at the chance to binge-watch How to Get Away with Murder. But the months came and went quickly, and before I knew it, August had arrived. Two of my kids were celebrating their birthdays, so at the last minute, to add a cheery Holiday whimsy to the celebrations, I decided to cook Embutido. At this point, everyone in the family had watched all the Netflix we could stand and we’d all decided we would make better use of our time by joining the online selling bandwagon. For our first foray into the world of cyber-entrepreneurship, we offered perfumes. With our first batch of orders -- on a whim -- I threw in an Embutido as a freebie, fresh from the recent birthday celebrations we just had. Customers liked it. Not being sure if they liked the Embutido because it was free or because they just genuinely liked it, I took a crack and posted on the community groups I belonged to that I was accepting stand-alone pre-orders for Embutido. The initial batch of orders were made by trusting friends and colleagues who probably placed them on the sheer basis of our good relationship. -- But then again, that’s how all businesses begin, right? -- After the first delivery on August 13th, the orders kept coming. I decided to register my small, home-based business with the Department of Trade and Industry, just to be sure I had dibs on the Business Name. From there, EmbutiDonya was born. Why “EmbutiDonya” is a story that deserves a separate telling. -- More on that in another post. People say out of adversity comes opportunity. I was recently retrenched. One of 11,000 who were displaced not by the pandemic but for other reasons. But like our dear Paige who is a distemper survivor, my family and I are Pitbull Strong. Maybe this will be an in-between-jobs gig. Or maybe, just maybe, it might become my very own EmbutiDonya Food Empire. Keep the orders coming.