Filipino Cuisine- My Favorite Dishes -An Update

Pompano-One of Favorite Fish Besides Bangus  

Dr. David B. Katague frequently used his platform to archive traditional family recipes. He felt a deep responsibility to document these heritage meals so his children and grandchildren-who grew up in the United States-could maintain a tasty, tangible bond to their Filipino culture and identity

As a chemist, he often appreciated the delicate balance of flavors that define Pinoy cooking: the perfect marriage of sour, salty, and savory components.

🌟 Dr. Katague's Top Favorite Heritage Dishes

In his culinary essays, Dr. Katague explicitly highlighted a select group of traditional festive foods that defined his family gatherings:

Fresh Lumpia (Lumpiang Sariwa): Unlike the crispy, deep-fried variety, this version uses fresh, thin egg crepes wrapped around a mixture of sautéed hearts of palm or mixed vegetables. It is always topped with a rich, sweet, garlic-infused soy sauce and ground peanuts. 

Chicken and Pork Afritada: A comforting, home-style stew where meat is slowly simmered in a rich tomato-based sauce alongside tender potatoes and bright green bell peppers.

Shrimps and Mixed Vegetables in Coconut Milk (Ginataang Hipon): This dish highlights the coastal flavor profiles of his homes in Marinduque and Iloilo, combining fresh seafood with vegetables poached in creamy coconut broth.

Pancit (Rice Noodles): A mandatory staple at any major Katague family gathering, representing long life and good health.

Lechon (Roasted Pig): The undisputed king of Filipino celebratory food, featuring a whole pig roasted over charcoal until the skin achieves a glass-like crunch.

Dinuguan: A deeply savory, traditional pork blood stew cooked down with vinegar, garlic, and green chili peppers.

Chicken Relleno: A complex, labor-of-love party dish involving a completely de-boned whole chicken stuffed with a seasoned mixture of ground meat, raisins, eggs, and sausages. 

🎨 Passing Down the Cooking Legacy

For Dr. Katague, blogging about food was a form of cultural preservation. He loved seeing his four children adopt these exact heritage meals as their own favorites. Because his family operated the beachside resort Chateau Du Mer in Marinduque, many of these classic flavor profiles also influenced the welcoming, festive hospitality they extended to visiting guests and relatives over the decades

Meanwhile, The Ox tail Kare-Kare Gives Me Pleasant Memories of My over 63-years of Marriage ( Macrine's (RIP) favorite Recipe on Special Occasion).

Few things say home to a Filipino quite like a steaming bowl of kare-kare. This rich oxtail and vegetable stew, swimming in a thick golden peanut sauce, is the kind of dish that turns an ordinary Sunday into an occasion. Served with a spoonful of salty bagoong on the side, it is comfort in its purest form.

Kare-kare is a labor of love. The peanut sauce is simmered slow, the oxtail cooked until it nearly falls off the bone, the vegetables added just so. It is a dish for gatherings, for fiestas, for the lola who insists you eat one more helping. Every family has its own small twist, and everyone is sure theirs is the best.

Food like this carries more than flavor. It carries memory, region, and generations of hands that learned the recipe by feel rather than by measure. A single bowl can bring someone halfway across the world right back to a childhood kitchen. That is the quiet power of Filipino comfort food.

Lastly, An Ilocano Dish_ I have to learn to Love It Too

Pinakbet is bitter, funky, and deeply Ilocano. It has never apologized for any of that.

The dish comes from the Ilocos region of northern Luzon, the homeland of Larry Itliong, of the Sakadas, of some of the hardest-working people the Philippines has ever produced. Pinakbet from the Ilocano word "pinakebbet" meaning "shrunk" or "shriveled" is made from the local vegetables of the Ilocano table: bitter melon, eggplant, okra, squash, tomato, string beans, and sometimes pork, all cooked down together with bagoong, the fermented shrimp or fish paste that gives the dish its deep, funky, irreplaceable flavor.

Pre-colonial Ilocanos were already cooking these vegetables together before Spain arrived. The name and the bagoong are indigenous. The vegetables are native. The dish is as old as Ilocano civilization itself.

The bitterness of the bitter melon is not a flaw. It is the point. Ilocano cooking does not disguise its ingredients. It lets them be exactly what they are.

For Ilocano-Americans from Daly City to Hawaii to Seattle, a plate of pinakbet is not nostalgia. It is the taste of a people who survived everything and kept cooking.