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!

Dating a Filipina means Texting = Communicating

Dating a Filipina means communicating with her a lot. Have you heard that Filipinos text so, so much? I know someone whose network service company actually contacted them to STOP TEXTING. You wonder how Filipinos could actually text so much (think: 100 texts a day is nothing), and here is how it is done. A person would "buy" or have enough credits on his cellphone to get a service that allows him or her to text UNLIMITED number of texts in 24 hours. Or in 48 hours. This is fairly cheap, something like 50 cents USD when converted. And that person can text all day, all night, to everyone he or she likes. Now you might wonder, what the heck would a person text 20 people to, all day? It would be "forwarded" quotes, jokes, stories, whatever you can think of. You'd get a text, and it would be a joke, one-liners, or a full story, it doesn't matter! And this person would forward it to all of the people in his phonebook, which is basically most of the people he knows. That's how Filipinos get to be one of the top people in the world for the amount of texts that they send out in the day.

Of course, it goes to show that if your Filipina is surrounded by people all texting and clamoring for texts, she would be too. If you're in the US, and your service carrier allows texts from abroad, you'd be sure that your Filipina girlfriend would be texting you every now and then to say hi, hello, and to tell you what she's doing at the moment. And since you're dating a Filipina, you're expected to text back. Or else she'd think you're ignoring her. Sometimes it makes men think that Filipinas could be clingy. Could be true, but also because well -- we just love to text. Regularly.

Now you might ask, "why don't you get emails on your phone instead?" Well because, we can't. Very few people get their emails on their phone because there would be very few people who has phones that allows that kind of feature (those would be high end phones, and on another topic, how expensive cellphones are over here). And those that have those phones might not know how to workout getting their emails on the phones directly. So we text and text. But mostly, people over here have phones that are just used for texting, and not going online on your mobile. Just a fact. For example, I just barely got a phone a week ago that allows me to check my emails using Wi-fi. I used to have a Nokia phone that just allows GPRS.

So text your Filipina girlfriend, or better yet, don't forget to call her, even just to say you're thinking about her but can't really talk at the moment. It'll take a minute.

Want to know more about Dating a Filipina? Read the rest of the articles on this blog. Thank you!

Dating a Filipina

If you're an American dating a Filipina, the schematics of the relationship would be a bit different because of the cultural gap (no matter how slim it is). I have started this blog as a resource to the countless men out there who are interested in dating a Filipina, and most especially are dating a Filipina right now. Of course, it might be true that "True Love Conquers All," as the saying goes, but I'm sure there's a cultural gap, or just some little question that you want to be cleared that you don't want to piss your Filipina off by asking her. This blog is about everything Filipina, why she does this and that, why she loves this and that -- and fundamentally, about Filipino culture in general. Hope you have fun reading the content, as I am already having fun thinking about the things I want to write about!

Want to know more about dating a Filipina? Please do read on!