Each one of my friends has a kitchen. Everyone, that is, except Tikya.

Tikya may not have a kitchen, but she has a commissary, which means it’s a big space where she stores enough food and provisions to feed an army. Not so long ago, Tikya – Mrs. Hernan Tiu Laurel to you – managed a restaurant that was big enough to cook and serve 600 employees of a private company.

I may be a noncook, but I can imagine that it’s easier to cook for 600 than to wash and clean 600 sets of drinking glasses, bowls, cups and saucers, plates and platters. These days, Tikya’s happy to serve UP alumni and their guests at her scaled-down restaurant called UP Alumni House on the Diliman campus.

So when she invited me and several of her friends to a party – even if I was going to be the only non-UP alumna there – I went, just to see and taste what kind of food she would be serving. And there it was, a spread of Filipino hospitality laden with a green salad, sinigang, fried chicken, barbecued fish on a stick, adobo, lechon and two kinds of dessert, alleluia, chocolate cake and “guinatan” – how many people serve guinatan at parties these days? Not until I started digging into my guinatan did I realize how much I’ve missed it, not since our big fat cook, Bibiana, left us forever, even before I became a grandmother. Food does that to me, what I call food nostalgia.

Tikya Tiu Laurel is the lady behind the brand name “Mama Rosa since 1989” on jars of pickled radish and bitter gourd (ampalaya). On a more personal note, she’s the sister of Rod Dula, travel writer and essayist whose posthumous columns she has collected for a book that she’s been threatening to publish for the last eight or 10 years. She blames the book’s editor for the delays, but that’s another story.

I keep promising myself that the next time I am with Tikya, I’d bring her to my house and show her the tree Rod gave me half a century ago, an Indian jasmine whose tiny, white, five-petaled flowers give off a delicate scent at night, even when the moon is in hiding.