In her debut cookbook, acclaimed chef Angela Dimayuga shares her passion for Filipino food with home cooks.
Filipinx offers 100 deeply personal recipes—many of them dishes that define home for Angela Dimayuga and the more than four million people of Filipino descent in the United States. The book tells the story of how Dimayuga grew up in an immigrant family in northern California, trained in restaurant kitchens in New York City—learning to make everything from bistro fare to Asian-American cuisine—then returned to her roots, discovering in her family’s home cooking the same intense attention to detail and technique she’d found in fine dining.
In this book, Dimayuga puts a fresh spin on classics: adobo, perhaps the Filipino dish best known outside the Philippines, is traditionally built on a trinity of soy sauce, vinegar, and garlic—all pantry staples—but add coconut milk, vinegar, and oil, and it turns lush and silky; ribeye steaks bring extra richness to bistek, gilded with butter and a bright splash of lemon and orange juice. These are the punches of flavor and inspired recipes that home cooks have been longing for.
A modern, welcoming resource for this essential cuisine, Filipinx shares exciting and approachable recipes everyone will wholeheartedly embrace in their own kitchens.
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My thoughts
I love trying new cookbooks and different ethnic foods and this cookbook, as part of Abrams Dinner Party, is no exception. It takes us to the Philippines and all of the delicious dishes that they serve there. So many flavors are melded together and while I am not extremely familiar with this cuisine, I have heard of a few dishes including Adobo and Lumpia. But this culture has so many more wonderful dishes beyond what we might be familiar with from what we have experienced.
I was first drawn to the recipe Food of the Gods which is a Molasses, Date, and Walnut square. This is so delicious and I feel like it is healthy when it is not when you look at how much sugar is included. But never the matter, I ate every last bite and even made a batch for my book club for our sweet treat exchange.
Outside of the wide variety of recipes, there is also history and culture presented to us. I found this very fascinating especially when it came to the language which is very gender-neutral, to kamayan which is eating with your hands versus silverware. I love the example about being out in nature and trying to set up a table with silverware just isn’t something that is done because it is more work than necessary. There is even a seasoning matrix at the beginning to educate us on what might mix well together and where they are on the sweet, sour, salty, or fat scale.
There is so much to learn from this book outside of the various dishes. This would make a great cookbook to share with the family and to have an education dinner over some traditional dishes popular in the Philippines. I think it would make for an interesting evening in any household.
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