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 questions I did of my family. I wanted people to discover their own family’s food traditions and cultures, in the kitchen and at the table, Filipino or otherwise, and celebrate these customs to keep them alive. But I wanted to do more. Eventually, I wanted everybody to experience Filipino flavors and ingredients.

      But in order to bring a greater awareness and appreciation of Filipino cuisine to the rest of the world, I realized I needed to go beyond blogging. So with my blog recipes in hand, I opened my own Filipino restaurant—well, sort of.

      In June of 2010, I opened The Manila Machine—Southern California’s very first gourmet Filipino food truck. However, The Manila Machine was much more than just a converted taco truck serving Filipino food. It was my own mobile restaurant serving my take on Filipino cuisine. In every sense of the word, the Manila Machine was my personal vehicle for bringing Filipino food to the masses.

      Among The Manila Machine’s tasty offerings was chicken adobo, pork belly and pineapple adobo, spicy sisig, and lumpia. Also made to order were a number of pan de sal sliders—bitesized sandwiches served on traditional Filipino rolls. Not only was I able to successfully field test many of my own recipes, but thousands of Angelenos were also getting their first taste of Filipino food from my mobile kitchen. And they were coming back for more! Soon, people all over Southern California were buzzing about Filipino food, and I was the one feeding them—from a truck no less!

      At the same time, however, Burnt Lumpia and The Manila Machine both made me realize that there are so many other Filipinos who, like myself, fear losing their own family recipes and simply want to learn more about their own cuisine and culture. I also now know that people of all ethnicities want to enjoy and experience Filipino flavors as much as they do Thai, Vietnamese, and other Asian cuisines.

      TRADITIONAL WAYS ARE WONDERFUL; BUT NEW WAYS, WHEN APPLIED WITH UNDERSTANDING AND SENSITIVITY, CAN CREATE A DISH ANEW—WITHOUT BETRAYING THE TRADITION.

      —DOREEN G. FERNANDEZ, FOOD WRITER AND HISTORIAN

      This shared curiosity in Filipino cuisine, and the need to preserve Filipino culture, is the inspiration for the cookbook you now hold in your hands. This isn’t the end-all-be-all Filipino cookbook—far from it. My hope is that this book serves as a starting point that will spark a new and lasting interest in Filipino food and culture.