A cooking philosophy

PinoyCook.Net is a Filipino mom’s collection of recipes. My collection. These recipes are variations and modifications of dishes and techniques I learned from my grandfather, grandmother and father. I am not a professional chef (I’m a lawyer, sshhhh…); I’m a home-made chef–a mom who enjoys creating new dishes for my family and friends. These are recipes for dishes that are meant to be eaten; not table ornaments to be ogled at. You won’t find recipes for fancy dishes on this site, just honest-to-goodness, but never plain, lutong bahay (home-cooked meals). The photos are of actual meals from my family’s dinner table.

Most Filipino cooking and recipes websites divide the recipes by regional origin. I purposely refrained from doing so. The most important reason is that, except for a few, the recipes in this site are not exactly traditional recipes. They are based on traditional recipes but I have modified them in one way or another based on the following considerations:

1. Health

2. Current economic situation

3. Lifestyle

While traditional Filipino dishes require much time and effort to prepare, the idea behind these recipes is to achieve comparable quality meals in less time, with less hassle and expense. What for? Well, because lifestyles are changing. Independence, self-reliance and wise spending are good rules to live by these days.

More than that, with the belief that there are no strict rules in the kitchen (except health and sanitation), and that the only limitations are one’s imagination and creativity, these recipes are the result of years of adventurous experiments in techniques and combinations of ingredients.

I have my own categorization for my Filipino recipes. The ones whose main ingredients are native to the Philippines, and are based on traditional Filipino recipes, are what I call modernized traditional Filipino recipes. The ones that have foreign-sounding names are what I call modern non-traditional Filipino recipes. While they extensively use ingredients that are not native to the Philippines, I still consider them as Filipino dishes because we have adopted them and transformed them that they have become part of Filipino life. Much like the Americanization of Italian pizza, there is also a Filipinization of Italian spaghetti, Chinese pancit and American burger. We have even modified the taste of hotdogs to suit our palate. It is this ability to retain-some-adopt-some that has always made Filipino food unique. We have been doing this since the pre-Spanish era when we first adopted the cuisines introduced by the Chinese, Indian, Malay and Arabian traders.

The recipes in PinoyCook.Net were first published as part of The Mommy Journal in E-Tiangge.Net, my first domain. The Mommy Journal was my first weblog, or blog. When I found working with a Windows platform too limiting, I switched to Linux. The archives were subquently transferred to Neo-Cooking, a free subdomain in Blogeye, a U.S.-based site running on a Linux platform. The recipes in both sites were thereafter transferred on a subdomain of Houseonahill.net where it thrived for a year and eight months. On December 3, 2004, the recipes–numbering more than 500–found its own home in PinoyCook.Net. About time.

This page was last updated on December 5, 2004.

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