Food

Cooking My Way Back To Manila

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I love traveling. It’s an opportunity to experience the local culture, and of course, the local food. Since returning from Manila, I have really missed Filipino food… That’s the one sad thing about traveling — you have to leave the food behind. And in an area like Boston, there aren’t too many places with authentic ethnic food.

But now we live in the age of the internet where you can find authentic recipes after a Google search and a few clicks! If Filipino food couldn’t come to me, I was going to MAKE IT come to me.

My friend, Andrew, and I decided we were going to cook different cuisines together once a month, and our Filipino dinner was the first. He decided to make Chicken Adobo and I made one of my favorite vegetable dishes, Ginataang Gulay. “Adobo” is a Filipino-style marinade, which consists of vinegar and soy sauce. It’s a popular cooking process used with other meats such as pork and seafood. Some consider Adobo as the unofficial dish of the Philippines. “Ginataang” also refers to a preparation method, which means to cook in coconut milk. Since “gulay” is vegetables in Tagalog, the Ginataang Gulay dish was literally mixed vegetables stewed in coconut milk.

I’m not going to endorse or recommend any of the recipes we used because we had to alter and combine bits and pieces from multiple recipes to make it work. With that said, the dishes turned out delicious and were pretty close to the authentic stuff I had in Manila. Sure, it may not have been the real thing, but that’s the beauty of food — it brings back the old like good memories, and infuses the new to make it your own.

If you know any good Filipino restaurants in the Boston area, please let me know. But until then, I will continue practicing my Pinoy cooking skills and one day impress my Filipino friends.