What are the main staples or ingredients of Filipino food compared with other Asian foods?
TC: I love Filipino food. Filipino is a lot of pork, and fatty pork at that, so that’s why I really don’t eat it that often. It’s very dense, heavy, salty and savory, but it’s delicious. My grandmother makes a mean pork adobo. You chop it into square cubes and sauté it with garlic, soy sauce, vinegar, peppercorn, Chinese spice. Then you’ll have that with chicken long rice, which is long glass noodles, those clear noodles, with a chicken broth, and it’s somewhat moist but not necessarily soupy. Bitter melon is supposed to be very good for you, and I remember growing up eating that. We also had mung beans—it’s a pasty sort of bean side dish. We had a kalamungai tree in our yard, and I used to go out with my great grandmother and pick the tiny round leaves off the tree. We cooked that with onion, garlic and mung beans. ET: It sounds like much of what’s behind your diet is simply eating more of what is good for us and less of what is not. TC: I read a piece on how diet and the science of n
