My Mom Cooks Restaurant Quality Food

Proud Son Showcasing Mom’s Talent and Love of Cooking

Learning from a Young Age

Since my mom was young, she had to learn how to cook for herself and for her sister. She was forced to move away from home in the Philippine countryside at the age of 10 and live with her older sister in the big city, Manila. She grew up loving to cook and to eat.

Developing Delicious Flavors

My mom certainly learned how to develop delicious flavors while she cooked. She is the main reason I’m so much into different cuisines and I can at least partly blame my Food Network obsession to her even to this day. She would cook beautiful, restaurant-quality dishes for us nearly every night.

No Fast Food

We would always eat at home and would never want to eat fast food despite its rising popularity among American families especially during the 1990s when I was growing up. We even got to occasionally invite our neighborhood friends over and they got to eat my mom’s cooking.

Made Food for the Whole Neighborhood

She prided herself on her work in the kitchen and would always make sure to make more than enough for everyone who would potentially be coming to the table. I know a lot of kids can say that their mom was the best cook in town but I actually could claim it.

Even Fellow Filipinos Wanted My Mom’s Food

My partner and I loved her food when we got to eat it when we were invited over to her house. She would even be asked to help cook by her own fellow Filipino-American friends every year at the church festival where they would sell the food and different gatherings around food because her food was so good. That’s how you know you can cook, if even your fellow country folk want to eat what you’re cooking and have more than enough confidence to have that food sold to other people.

Church Festival

Our church, St. Philomene’s Catholic Church in Sacramento, would feature a lot of the food she cooked every year. This is when people from all walks of life got to try her food. I would help her in the booth sometimes, when growing up, because a lot of the people coming through the line were kids I knew from the neighborhood. I felt so proud getting to help and stand at the highest-selling food booth at the annual church carnival.

Favorite Dishes

My favorite dish from her was pancit. It’s a thin rice noodle with various vegetables on it and usually chicken or shrimp. Noodles are definitely something I seek out when I eat at an Asian restaurant. My mom’s noodles were always cooked so perfectly. She also made a fried egg roll style dish called lumpia that featured either pork or chicken and had vegetables in it as well. It went great with a sauce, typically banana ketchup. Banana ketchup tastes better than it sounds. I still like putting banana ketchup on lumpia to this day. It’s sweet and spicy and is a staple in some Filipino dishes.

Rice, Rice, More Rice

No matter what we were eating that day, my mom would always have at least one rice cooker pot full of rice to eat along with it. We had one of those rice dispensers that you would push a button and rice would come right out. I remember going to the store with my mom and we would buy 25 or 50 pounds bags of jasmine rice at a time. That would be about a month’s supply or less, of rice.

Rice With Dinner

My mom literally eats rice with every meal. As kids, we were obligated to at least eat rice with dinner. Since we had food from the school, I didn’t really eat rice outside of my home. I was always anxious to get home and eat dinner because if I got home late, I would get leftovers. The funny thing is that the food was so good that even the leftovers were delicious.

Multicultural Cook

My mom didn’t just cook Asian food either. She also made us pizzas, lasagna, spaghetti, steak, and chicken. My mom leaned heavily into Italian cuisine when she didn’t make us Asian food. She knew that her kids and husband loved Italian food a lot. It was certainly one of my favorite types of food growing up. She did really well at cooking Italian food too. I was almost convinced that she was Italian in a past life.

European Ancestry

Her sister’s name is Bella, I’m almost convinced that if we go back far enough in the lineage, we’ll find some Italian. There is some Spanish in there from her mom’s mom, and my mom’s name is Spanish, it’s Caridad, which means Charity in English. Funny that my mom named her only daughter Charity. I jokingly call my sister junior and she hates it. Anyway, back to the food.

Can’t Replicate Greatness

My mom taught us her techniques and showed us how to cook these good foods. I sure wish I had written these down as I’ve forgotten a lot of these recipes over the years and it’s been a while since I’ve cooked for myself, given my medical conditions. I know that if I attempted to replicate them, I could be semi-successful with it but still not approach the quality my mom had with these dishes.

Caridad’s Kitchen

My mom never opened Caridad’s Kitchen in California as she had always dreamed to. She would’ve been a great businesswoman and her food would’ve been the best of her kind in town. I kind of wish she had gotten the opportunity to. I would’ve loved growing up in a restaurant and helping to run a family business.

Love and Food

For now, I just have to fantasize about what this would’ve been like. I can still taste her food even being over 3000 miles away from my mom. I’m lucky I got to have such food growing up. Not every kid can say and mean that their mom could’ve owned a restaurant because of her cooking skills. I know that my mom loves cooking. It’s certainly in her blood. I feel like it’s in my blood. I’m a proud son who just wants to let people know that I could feel my mom’s love through her culinary talent.