I Don't Know How to Cook

This weekend I was planning on cooking, but I didn't. I couldn't decide what to cook and I was craving some home cooking. You know - the stuff of my childhood like Mungo and rice. When it really comes down to it, I can cook like 3 things from my childhood (1) egg rolls (2) bifsteak and (3) adobo. And, I can only cook the chicken adobo because my beef adobo turns out rock hard.

How sad is it that I cannot make something simple like mungo or nilaga? I blame it on the fact that my mom didn't really cook. Actually, I can't blame anyone but myself. My lola and lolo lived with us while we were growing up (big surprise) and she cooked everyday. She made longanisa from scratch and I remember sitting on the kitchen floor watching her stuff the pork casings by hand. She didn't use a meat grinder or food processor either; she would chop the mean and mix the ingredients by hand.

Yes, I have a Filipino cookbook but everyone knows that pancit is a personal thing and all pancit is not created equally. I could ask my aunt to teach me how to cook, but like all Filipina aunts she would just say, "Eh - it's easy. Just a little of this and a little of that to taste." I think the cooking thing is a birthright like being able to point to something with your lips. I think maybe I need to go on the Internet and find a Filipino cooking class. One that caters to daughters that never learned how to cook Filipino food properly.

Family Still Confuses Me

I am so excited to contribute to the Filipina Moms Blog.  Contributing to this blog means that I get to talk about things in my life that are very Filipino.  Being a Filipina and being raised in a very Filipino home mean that my upbringing was not like a lot of my friends.

For example, not being able to leave the house or watch television on Good Friday or eating rice with every meal.  Sometimes I wonder if the kooky things that happened in my house were just quirks of my parents or if they were truly part of growing up in an immigrant household.  To this day, some of the kookiness remains even though I am a 30 something mother of 2 toddler boys with a husband and home of my own.

Case in point, my relationship with my parents.  This year has been very rocky.  Earlier this year I had a disagreement with my mother, which means my father decided to put his 2 cents in.  In the end, I stood up for myself and my mother got upset and my father got very VERY angry at me.  So much so that heated words were said by him.

Normally, I would take those heated words with a grain of salt, but for GODS SAKE I was a grown up and I took those words literally as any normal adult would.  As a result, I did not visit my dad for Father's Day - I DID call - and I haven't set foot in their home since.  The boys do see their Lolo and Lola at least once a week, but David takes them there.

Normally, I would let the entire thing blow over and at some point in time, all of us would pretend that it never happened.  Actually, we would pretend it never happened until the next blow-up.  I wrote about this in my personal journal (Chicago Chick) and received a lot of e-mail on how this was normal for a Filipino dad.  Is that really true?  I always thought that it was just my dad's personality - that he was overbearing and controlling.  I never thought that my parents refusal to see me as their grown up daughter and their insistance on seeing me forever as their CHILD was a personality thing.