AsianPinay is an independent blog written for Filipinas at home and abroad — recipes, province guides, remittance maths, traditions and everyday living. A small editorial desk publishes everything under one byline, AsianPinay Editorial. We do not invent authors, statistics or testimonials.
What is AsianPinay?
AsianPinay is a small, independent blog for Pinays — in the Philippines, in Dubai, in Milan, in a share house in Toronto, in a kitchen in Sydney trying to work out why the adobo tastes wrong. We write the practical things. How much a tricycle from the port actually costs. What to do when the only vinegar on the shelf is white distilled and it turns your sauce sour instead of round. Which remittance route leaves the most pesos in your mother’s hands after everyone has taken their cut.
None of that is hard information. It is just scattered. Half of it lives in a Facebook group you have to be invited to, half of it lives in your auntie’s head, and the version that shows up first on Google was often written by somebody who has never queued at a remittance counter on a Sunday. We wanted one place where the answer is written down, in plain English, by people who cook this food and take these buses.
Why we started it
The immediate reason was a very ordinary one. Somebody asked how to make sinigang without fresh tamarind, and the three top results were a recipe with no substitution notes, a listicle padded with adjectives, and a page that spent four paragraphs explaining what the Philippines is. That is the gap. Filipino readers do not need the Philippines explained to them. They need the swap, the ratio, and the reason it works.
The second reason is that a lot of English-language writing about Filipino life is written looking in from outside. We write from the inside, for readers who already belong. Pinay is a word we use with pride, the way the community uses it. If you grew up abroad and your Tagalog is shaky, you will still follow every sentence here — anything in Filipino gets translated the first time it appears.
Who writes AsianPinay?
A small editorial desk. Everything publishes under one byline: AsianPinay Editorial.
We want to be blunt about why. Plenty of sites this size invent a masthead — a “senior food editor” with a stock-photo headshot and a biography nobody can check. We do not do that. There are no invented names on this site, no personas, no fabricated contributor bios, no made-up experts quoted to make a claim sound heavier than it is. If we ever quote a real person or a real organisation, they are real and we link to the source. One honest byline is better than five fictional ones.
How we choose what to write
Two filters. First, what readers actually ask — the questions that come through email, the ones that repeat. Second, what we have personally cooked, travelled, or worked out the hard way. A recipe goes up after it has been cooked in a home kitchen, not after it has been assembled from other recipes. A route goes up when someone has taken it.
Where we have not been somewhere first-hand, we say so in the piece rather than pretending. And every price we publish is an indicative range with the month it was compiled, never a promise. Fares and fees move. You should always confirm before you book or send money. The longer version of all this is in our editorial policy.
What we will not publish
This matters more than the list of things we do cover, so here it is plainly. AsianPinay does not publish:
- Adult content of any kind. The site is safe for work, always.
- Celebrity gossip, “scandal” material, or leaked-media stories.
- Anything that sexualises Filipinas or frames them as a curiosity for an outside audience. No dating-site angles, no “foreign bride” framing, none of it.
- Skin-whitening promotion. We write about caring for morena skin — warm brown skin — not about changing its colour.
- Fabricated statistics, invented experts, or fake testimonials.
- Paid placements dressed up as editorial recommendations.
We are new, and we will say when we are wrong
This site launched recently. That means a small archive, a small desk, and a real chance we get something wrong — a ratio, a fare, a spelling in a language we are still learning to write well. When that happens we fix it and we note the correction on the page instead of quietly editing it away. Posts carry an Updated date so you can see when something last changed.
Where to start
The site runs in five sections:
- Kusina — kitchen. Recipes, regional dishes, and cooking Filipino food with what your supermarket abroad actually stocks.
- Lakbay — travel. Province guides, budget itineraries, and planning a balikbayan trip home.
- OFW Life & Money — remittances, savings, documents, homesickness, and the plan for coming home.
- Kultura — culture. Fiestas, weddings, superstitions, and enough language to keep up at the family table.
- Ganda & Buhay — beauty and life. Skincare for morena skin, budget finds, and the small business of running a home.
Contact us
Write to us at hello@asianpinay.in.net. We read everything, even when it takes us a while to reply.
Three kinds of email are especially welcome. Corrections — if a fare is stale, a step does not work, or we have written a Filipino word badly, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did. Recipe notes — if your lola’s version uses a different ratio, or you found a substitution that works better in your country, we want to hear it. Topic requests — if you searched for something and could not find a straight answer anywhere, that is exactly the kind of post we want to write next.
You can also read our editorial policy, privacy policy and terms of use.