Lola’s recipes (Grandma’s recipes in Tagalog) is not a recipes website. It was created by Nicky Mariano as a way to preserve knowledge about Filipino cuisine and Filipino food culture. As a millennial who spent her early childhood in the Philippines, she has vivid, nostalgic memories about helping the adults cook using Lola’s recipes and the importance of mealtimes and food in the Filipino culture. She draws upon this knowledge as she writes about Filipino food in this website.
Our Story
Lola’s Recipes was created by Nicky Mariano out of necessity. As someone who has lived outside the Philippines most of her life but still maintains a strong connection with her family in the Philippines, she wanted to preserve the Filipino culture for herself, but also for her daughter. But how does she do that when she doesn’t even know the first thing about cooking the simplest Filipino foods, like tuyo, or talbos ng kamote?
These are foods that she grew up eating, both in the Philippines, and in Canada, where she now resides. However, she has always depended on her parents and aunts to cook the food for her, and when she moved out on her own, she realized just how much she did not know about Filipino food culture. She knew how to eat it, that’s for sure. But making it? Well, that’s a different story.
So she sought out to learn how to cook Filipino food. She searched for Filipino recipes online, and to her delight, there are many websites that teach how to cook the food that she grew up eating. However, she found out quickly that if she wants to know if you can substitute cabbage for kangkong in sinigang, well there’s not much information on the internet about it.
But from experience, these are the simple questions that young Filipinos who are just learning how to cook might ask, and there’s not much information online about these just yet.
That’s when this website was born. The goal for this website is to be a resource for young Filipinos (and non-Filipinos) who want to learn how to cook Filipino food. It also aims to answer simple questions about substituting ingredients for something that’s easy to come by in whatever country someone might be. Because we all know that saluyot might be abundant in the Philippines, but is very difficult to find in other countries.
Another goal of this website is to provide background information about Filipino food, Filipino food culture and ingredients, so that the culture, art and significance of Filipino cuisine does not get lost amongst the younger generation of Filipinos who have strong cultural ties but may not have grown up in the Philippines.
So, if you do find that you have a question about Filipino cuisine that’s not answered here, send me a message and we can research it together!