Dating a Filipina means Knowing What She Can Cook: The Most Common Dishes in the Philippines

If you're Dating a Filipina now, hopefully things will go great with you two lovebirds and you'll eventually settle down and be married. Yay for you and your Filipina! You have to get used to her cooking, which is very different from what you have been used to, most probably. Filipinos in general, LOVE TO EAT! We express our love through cooking, and feeding everybody within a two-mile radius. If your Filipina can't cook to save her life, she probably grew up with maids and "yayas" (another topic in the near future), and I guess you could work around that. But she probably can cook, or is cooking for everybody in her family. Here's a list of the most common dishes in the Filipino household:

1. Steamed Rice - Okay, so not technically a dish, but I have to mention this one. Get used to buying rice from the supermarket, because she would be wanting steamed rice for EVERY meal. You having pork chops for dinner? She'll have rice with it. Having chinese noodles? Weirdly enough, she possibly might have rice with it as well. Get used to it. ;)

2. Adobo - I'm sure you've heard of this one. It could be pork Adobo, or chicken Adobo, or a mix of the two proteins. Cooked in soy sauce, vinegar, crushed garlic, peppercorns and bay leaf, everybody that has been in the Philippines has probably been introduced to this one. We have shirts over here that says, "I eat Adobo."




3. Sinigang - this is the Filipino version for stew. Protein could be beef, pork, or a type of fish. This is a soup that is fundamentally sour either because of a tamarind (classic version) based broth but guava and calamansi could also be used to make the soup sour. Filipinas usually cook this one when the weather seems a bit cold. Well, cold for us tropical people.



4. Tinola - also a soup, with the main protein chicken, and served with unripe papaya, chili pepper leaves, ginger and onions -- this is the Filipino version of the chicken noodle soup. Not very similar to it apart from the using chicken as protein, but because it's what you cook when someone in the household is sick. The soup is good for colds.




5. Menudo - reel your thoughts back from Ricky Martin and those boys, it's actually the name of this pork dish. Cooked with pork liver, potatoes, red bell pepper, chickpeas, raisins, tomatoes, garlic, paprika, and a kind of sausage called chorizo Bilbao, this is a really colorful dish. You might not think all of those things go together, but they amazingly do.




6. Beef Kaldereta - my favorite dish of them all, this is a delicious dish made from liver (yes, that liver again), tomato sauce, green and red peppers, cheese. I always joke that I don't really need the beef, I just need the sauce part of the dish with rice, and I'm good to go.

This is it for now. Keep reading this blog on Dating a Filipina and I'll be sure to add more common dishes soon. Ciao for now!