Pinoy Food Lab

Since the New Year kicked off I have been experimenting on my favorite Filipino dishes guided by a cookbook I inherited from my sister Odie who is blessed with loads of talent in the kitchen, who in turn inherited this talent from an old maid aunt who passed away long before the "birthing" of my so-called interest in cooking.

The recipes are simple and idiot-proof, thank God, that even kitchen ignoramuses like me have no recourse but to do everything right. The only drawback here is that everything is written in Filipino—Tagalog, actually—and I have, on several occasions, encountered unfamiliar words that I just try to decipher through the context that they are used. Of course, it doesn't help to have an Ilonggo for a husband. 

My first attempt was the picadillo. It's a dish of Latin American origin that has been Filipinized by Maya (meaning, the olives, capers and chili have been omitted) and family-ized by Odie who added malunggay for nutiritional value.  

The almondigas was not entirely new to me. I tried cooking it as a college kid but it never turned out great. I'm proud to say things have changed for the better...

My nilagang baka was good enough except that we had quite a hard time chewing the beef. My fault. I should have used the pressure cooker but I had no idea how it worked!

My pork sinigang was better than all my other experiments. Yum!  

But my twice-cooked adobo was the best of them all! The toasted garlic were so delicious I couldn't believe I ate them!

Now I think I'm beginning to fall in love with my lab. And the conclusion? I'm slowly losing my fear of the kitchen but surely gaining weight in the process!

Go Mango!

I actually made my first mango cream pie from a buco cream pie recipe I found at the back of the crushed graham pack I bought from the grocery store. It was a simple matter of substituting buco with mango.

My first attempt was for a hotpot dinner with friends where I prepared everything myself, including the drinks. It turned out okay, really. One of my male friends was just about to say how surprisingly good it was when his slice flew from his plate straight to the placemat! The crust was, to be honest about it, not very cooperative with the fork...


With a few tweaks here and there, my mango dessert has grown more "cooperative" and yummier with every try. So yummy, in fact, my husband gained 5 lbs. in a week's time!

Conquering the Galunggong

I am proud to announce that I have advanced from gigi mangler...


...to a competent enough gigi handler.


Yes, I cleaned them all myself. This time without fuss. Without any cuss words. Without a single gigi head out of place.

Something Fishy

After much furor and a handful of errors, my fledgling chef career has reached its lowest point. I came from the grocery store and brought home a small plastic bag of galunggong, among others, to cook sometime in the middle of the week. Incidentally, I googled galunggong or gigi for short and learned that female gigi is hard-tail mackerel in English while male gigi is round scad. Of course, I had no way of telling the gender of the bunch of dead fish lying on the kitchen sink so I'm not going to refer to these in English for purposes of this entry but will instead use the fish's popular nickname among us Pinoys.


It was my second time to buy gigi and the first time was uneventful as it should be. And so nothing prepared me for the shock of finding my gigis unready for the freezer, uncleaned, complete with all their insides that should have been taken care of by the grocery staff. I was in panic mode! My husband was not there to do something or, at the very least, to listen to me curse. I had never cleaned a single fish in my life before and had no idea how to do it. All I knew was that there was icky stuff to take out of it and that was it. But I just couldn't bring myself to do it! Gore has never been my kind of thing. I watched Kill Bill with eyes closed for the most part of the movie. I dropped out of B.S. Biology knowing I'd never have the stomach to open up a frog. So how? How on earth could I possibly pull this one off?


I took a deep breath, tongs in one hand, plastic covering the other, I tried to extract whatever needed extracting but everything just won't come off. So I did away with the tongs and gave it another try with my kitchen shears. When that still didn't work, I settled with my hands.

Only when I was over and done with the job did I really stop to look again at the poor gigis. It was an appalling sight! One fish's body gaped open as if it was attacked by a wild animal. One seemed to have lost its head to a vicious encounter with a psychopath. And the rest looked like they were abused, mauled, tortured by a person who had gone amok.


I was home alone and was near tears. By the time my husband showed up, I was in a foul mood and I refused to speak to him until I fell asleep. It took me quite some time to accept that I just did not take to cooking—and other related tasks—like a fish to water.