FN Blog - Seven heads are better than one!

It’s always a dilemma, taking foreign friends and business associates out to dinner in Manila when they request to eat typical Filipino food. I can’t really think of Filipino restaurants where the food tastes authentic and where the ambiance is devoid of singing cooks and waiters or a family fiesta, which are fine if that’s what you’re in the mood for at the moment. It can also be disappointing to step into the latest hoity-toity Pinoy (con)fusion restaurant because you can’t help but compare it to the familiar traditional tastes in your head.

They say that to eat the best Filipino food, you have to be invited to someone’s home. It’s true. Every single time I am invited to my boyfriend’s Lola’s house to eat, the food is excellent—whether it’s sinigang, tinola, pochero, I have yet to taste better Pinoy food in any restaurant. AW’s late Lola Ata put up the famous Bungalow restaurant in the 60’s, and they still do catering today. Sarap!

I used to take it for granted, but now I realize how great the food at home was while I was growing up, thanks to our yaya, Yaya Ising or Yaying for short, who joined our household as a young girl and devoted her life to us until we left the nest. My mother was a career woman, so the kitchen was Yaying’s turf. Reared on Pinoy newsprint cookbooks like Mga Lutuing Pilipino, she became quite a master at cooking classic Pinoy fare.

I can still remember the taste of her delicious home cooking in my head. After I graduated from college, I was privileged to be under her culinary tutelage during my three-month period of unemployment before my very first job at SGV & Co. when she gave me a crash course on the basics: beef steak, adobo, caldereta, menudo, mechado, sinigang na spareribs, and her specialty, her unparalleled pancit bihon. Embutido and pochero had a higher level of difficulty.

Yaying visited me at the office in 2004.

I recall being amazed at how easy it was to cook, and how much fun I had in the kitchen. I didn’t realize most Pinoy dishes had the same hallmarks: gisa, gisa, gisa, bawang and toyo or patis. I didn’t cook again until I reached my thirties, when I rediscovered the joy of cooking. (I adopted an “I’m such a modern woman, I can’t be bothered to cook” attitude in my hectic twenties). I stopped eating red meat and chicken in 1991, so I made some variations on her recipes with seafood and vegetables, like Bangus Belly Bistek (which I first tasted in Cabalen), and Adobong Sugpo (found the recipe in an old issue of Expat).

Here are some other Pinoy-inspired kitchen experiments I’ve come up with, mostly using dried fishy things in jars (Hey, I’m still a busy woman!):

bangus-red egg-pomelo-spinach salad
Toss: spinach, tomatoes, pomelo bits, red egg, bangus belly bits and basil leaves.
Dress with a mixture of: yogurt, soy sauce and calamansi

bangus-red egg on spinach pasta
Sauté in olive oil: garlic, bangus bits, chopped mushrooms, sliced black olives, chopped tomatoes, torn basil leaves.
Add cooked spinach pasta, top with red egg.

tuyo penne
Sauté in olive oil: garlic, tuyo bits, chopped mushrooms, sliced black olives, chopped tomatoes, torn basil leaves.
Add cooked penne, toss.

I eat out more often than I can cook, so when I hanker for Pinoy comfort food around town, these are my favorites:

1. The seafood sinigang and fish-eggplant torta at Sentro.
2. Ratatoy, Café Juanita’s version of ratatouille, which uses tuyo and cilantro.

3. Pity they closed down, but I used to love

the halabos na hipon sa tambo at Uva

and their ubod-pomelo salad

4. The best laing I ever had was at the Misibis Resort in Bicol. No photo of the laing, just Misibis:

5. I love the food at Ugu Bigyan’s Pottery Garden in Tiaong, Quezon. Ugu cooks the food and does the marketing himself!

Ugu’s halaan soup served in Ugu’s pottery

6. A recent stay in Casa San Pablo in Laguna brought back childhood breakfast memories:

sinangang in banana leaf, dilis, scrambled eggs with onions and tomatoes, tsokolate eh

7. Call me biased, but M Café has great Pinoy-inspired dishes. We always end up bringing our foreign guests and balikbayan friends there. My favorites are:

the sinigang teapot

tuyo caprese salad
(What can I say, I love tuyo! I think I would die without it!)

and their soft shell crab with aligue rice

AW says I’m the most matakaw girlfriend he’s ever had! I wanted to sock him at first, but I realized he really meant it as a compliment. Although I’m not so happy that my katakawan is starting to show, I can now say that eating well with the love of your life is well worth it—just make sure you can un-entwine yourselves from each other’s arms after every food coma and drag yourselves to the gym!