What’s Cooking Here?

I grew up in the province. I grew up in the smell of burning wood from my grandmother’s dirty kitchen. Her kitchen is composed of two clay stove. And they still use that kitchen until now. My first experience  in the kitchen can be traced back to gatherings of wood for my grandmother. I can still remember that as early as the sun goes up, we would pile the woods to let it dry. When the sun went down, we would gather the woods and put it in the dirty kitchen. The next day, my grandmother would cook a hearty and sumptuous dish using the woods.

One of the first food I cooked was sweet potato. After cooking, grandmother would left the charcoals and then I would put a sweet potato in there. That’s my favorite merienda, a burnt sweet potato. As I grew older, I learned some simple dishes like sinigang and how to prepare saute sardines with sweet potato tops. I also learned how to cook rice without burning it. One of my fondest memory that involves cooking was preparing Ube Jam. My great grandmother prepare this sweet using a big pan or kawa in local term. As with the size of the kawa, she also uses a big ladle (makes you think that it is a giant’s spoon) to mix it. And when she’s done with it, we would feast on what’s left on the kawa..

Now that I am a mother, I learned most of the dishes I know from my grandmother and my husband. When I don’t know the recipe of a food I like, I would text her and ask for the recipe. Hubby on the other knew more dishes than I do, so he would tell me how to prepare it. My kids learned to eat those dishes without throwing a fit. They can eat sinigang, kare kare, menudo and the likes. So basically, what you will see here is what we eat on the daily basis.

No worries as everything I will put here are tested and liked by at least 4 adults (me, the hubby and two helpers) and three kids (my boys).