The Adobo Road Cookbook. Marvin Gapultos

      FROM BLOGGER, TO FOOD TRUCKER, TO AUTHOR: MY FILIPINO FOOD JOURNEY

      My earliest memories of Filipino food aren’t the kind that I fondly recall. It's true that like most Filipino-American kids, I enjoyed eating lumpia, pancit and garlic-fried rice—the trifecta of crowd-pleasing Filipino food. But my fondness for Filipino food stopped with spring rolls, noodles, and rice. When it came to the dishes my mother loved to cook and my father loved to eat, soulful dishes like pinakbet, adobo, or sinigang, I protested at the dinner table like any reasonable child would—I cried. Loudly.

      No, I wanted to eat pizza, and burritos, and hamburgers, and fish sticks (oh, how I loved fish sticks!). I wanted what my friends at school were eating. I wanted the food I saw on television. At the time, as far as I could tell, Magic Johnson drank 7UP, not calamansi juice. Punky Brewster shared a plate of pasta with her dog, Brandon, not a plate of pancit. And I was certain that Hulk Hogan’s mantra of training, saying your prayers, and eating your vitamins had nothing to do with the fermented shrimp paste that my mother claimed would make me a strong boy.

      My mother made sure my two brothers and I were fed, even if it meant learning completely new Western dishes to satisfy her young ones’ palates. Ever accommodating, she also made sure to cook a separate Filipino dish for her and my father to eat. Otherwise, my dad would have protested like any reasonable grown man would—he surely would have cried. Loudly. Like father, like son, I suppose.

      Mind you, these dual dinners didn’t last forever. As we got older, my brothers and I gradually began to appreciate Filipino food. However, I didn’t fully realize how much I loved my mom’s Filipino cooking until I moved away to college. In college, I began to miss the smells of steamed rice and piquant adobo—the smells of home that I once ignored and took for granted. Soon enough, the doldrums of dorm food made me see the error of my ways; I had no choice but to eat pizza, and burritos, and hamburgers, and fish sticks (oh, how I detested fish sticks!). So weekend trips back home became more than just a chance to do my laundry for free—those weekends became savored opportunities to eat as much of my mother’s cooking as possible.

      Despite the rude culinary awakening I experienced in college, it took a few more years, and another change in my life, to trigger a deep, hands-on interest in Filipino food. The trigger? Marriage.

      The woman I married isn’t a terrible cook. In fact, my wife is a great cook. But it just so happens that my wife isn’t Filipino. No matter how delicious a chicken piccata my wife could make, it wasn’t chicken adobo ! So whenever I had a sudden urge for some home-cooked Filipino food, we either had to drive a couple of hours to my parents’ for dinner, or my cravings simply went unsatisfied.

      It wasn’t long before I figured out that it would be more convenient to learn how to cook Filipino food on my own, rather than trekking out to my parents’ house every week for dinner—besides, my dad might have started charging us for groceries.

      So never having cooked a Filipino dish in my entire life, let alone even assisting in the preparation of such a dish (I rarely helped my mom in the kitchen as a kid—I watched cartoons), I set out to learn about the food of my culture. My crash course in Filipino food started with basic questions over the phone to my mother, my grandmother, and my grandmother’s sisters (“The Aunties”): “What kind of meat do you use in lumpia?”, “How long does it take to cook pinakbet?”, “Will bagoong (fermented shrimp paste) kill me?”

      When phone calls weren’t enough, I found myself in the kitchens of my mom, my grandmother, and my aunties, learning alongside the women of my family who, combined, have hundreds of years of experience honing and perfecting our clan’s specific recipes. After much encouragement, I learned to be patient in the kitchen, to trust my instincts and my taste buds, and that no matter how utterly funky a jar of bagoong smelled, its contents were indeed safe to eat.

      Now armed with the secrets and sage advice of my family, I began cooking and experimenting with Filipino ingredients—to varying degrees of success, of course. And to document my new culinary trials and tribulations, I started the food blog Burnt Lumpia (at the time, I was such a novice Filipino cook that I always burned at least one spring roll when making a batch, hence the blog name). What initially began as a means for me to record my recipes, Burnt Lumpia inexplicably became an entertaining distraction for other Internet foodies as more and more people began reading my blog on a regular basis. I like to think these readers were laughing with me, rather than at me, as I posted stories of my trial-by-fire in Filipino cookery.

      As I posted different Filipino recipes on my blog each week, I was ecstatic to find that my readership included not only Filipinos, but readers of different tastes and ethnicities as well. Ultimately, I wanted to urge everyone interested in Filipino food to ask the same

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