About AsianPinay

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.

Who reads AsianPinay

Four readers keep appearing in our questions, and the site is built for all of them. The Pinay abroad — cooking the taste of home from a foreign supermarket, wiring money that costs too much to move, keeping the ber months alive in a country that starts Christmas in December. Most of our guides carry a section that quietly faces her. The Pinay at home — planning the Palawan trip on a real budget, comparing remittance channels for a sister overseas, deciding which wedding traditions stay. The second-generation reader — fluent in the food but not the language, reaching for the culture her parents carried; the Kultura hub’s explanations and the Tagalog phrases guide were written with her at the desk. And the partner — the fiancé decoding the ninong list, the spouse learning po and opo before meeting the family; he is welcome here, and the guides explain rather than assume.

What unites them is the way they arrive: with a real question. That is why every page on this site is structured as an answer, and why the fastest way to shape our pipeline is to send yours.

The name, and every way it gets typed

AsianPinay is exactly what it says — Asian, Pinay — and because readers hear the name before they see it written, search engines meet it in dozens of spellings: asian pinay, asianpinay.com, pinay asian, asianpinoy, and a long tail of honest typos. We keep a dedicated page that gathers every spelling and the site’s complete guide map in one place, partly for lost typists and partly to say clearly what we tell anyone who asks: this is the official AsianPinay, we publish only at asianpinay.in.net, and we are not affiliated with any other site using a similar name. The site is family-friendly everywhere, whatever a stray search suggestion may have implied on the way in.

How the site sustains itself

Plainly: today, AsianPinay costs more than it earns, and that is fine — small publications start that way. If that changes, it will change inside the rules already written into our editorial policy: any affiliate link disclosed exactly where it appears, no gifted products or comped stays shaping recommendations, no sponsored posts dressed as editorial, and no advertising category that would embarrass the readers this site serves. The order of operations does not reverse — the recommendation exists first, the monetisation (if any) attaches after, and any page where that ever stops being true is a page we have failed on and want reported.

Our promise, kept short

Every figure dated, every source named or linked, every correction made in the open. Nothing published to fill space, nothing gossip-shaped, nothing we would not want our own families to land on. Written for her — wherever she is, and however she spelled us on the way in.

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 [email protected]. 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.