In watching foodie shows and perusing cooking videos, I kept coming across mentions of chicken (or pork) adobo, a signature Filipino dish that I, as half Filipino, was ashamed to be unfamiliar with. I finally dug up some how-to videos and, at the mention of bay leaves, it clicked - oh, my mom made this
all the time when I was a kid, and I loved it. I had always thought that it was just something that she'd cobbled together.
After a couple weeks of tracking down the ingredients in my spare time, I finally made it last night. It's funny how strongly smells trigger nostalgia - it took me back more than 30 years in an instant. Besides lumpia, this was the first time that my wife or kids had eaten Filipino food. The wife loved it. The kids have more conservative, middle-America taste buds and were lukewarm. Oh well, tough ****, 'cause it's going in to the rotation.
