Filipino Food Cooking
Filipino Food Recipe and Pinoy Cooking Style
Filipino Everyday Dishes
There is not much difference between the mid-day and evening meal in this country. In fact, more emphasis is given to the midday meal. Soups are served as the first course of the formal luncheon or supper. For ordinary family-eating-together soup appears at the table, not always as a first course but as a substantialmeat or fish dish with broth. For this season I placed no distinction between soup and main course in this chapter.
Filipino Fiesta Fare
Filipino hospitality is a legend. A Filipino thinks nothing of starving himself or getting into debt to be a perfect host. Fiestas in the country call for lengthy preparations. These, often, are occasions for working-together days and nights ahead, for killing the fatted pig and chickens and setting a lavish table from break-fast to the wee hours of evening. For a fiesta is also a special occasion for thanksgiving.
Filipino Breakfast and Merienda
Breakfast in the Philippines is a heavy meal which sometimes consists of rice and fish, chocolate, salabat or coffe or it is made up of native kakanin such as poto, cuchinta, suman and tea, chocolate or coffe. Bread and butter has taken the place of the kakanin in many moderm homes. But in many a heart lingers the nostalgia for something at one with the long ago. Come the Misa de Aguinaldo and the old longing comes back for an early breakfast of steaming hot bibingka and fragrant pandan-flavored tea. Merienda is as traditional in the Philippines as the Four o’clock Tea is in England. Its part of a pattern of easy, casual living. It means friends dropping in for a friendly chat after the fiesta. Its eating together perhaps something left-over from breakfast or something just cooked in the airy, spacious kitchen where life hereabouts always revolves.
Filipino Sweets and Deserts
As in many parts of the world, sweets and desserts punctuate luncheon and supper in the Philippines, to make them the truely enjoyable occasions they are. here, too, meals are not the only excuse for regular dips into the candy jar. A drink of water at anytime of day is a healtyenough excuse for a sweet nible. The sweets jar is also the Filipino hosstess favorite resort when friends drop in unexpectedly. Consequently, sweets-making has become quite an art in many parts of the country and espicially so in Central Luzon. More than just luscious confections, the resulting work of art shows marked traces of Spanish influence.