Kusina

Kusina — kitchen — is where we keep the recipes. Adobo the way it actually goes in a home pot, with the vinegar left alone to boil off its sharpness before you stir. The difference between pancit canton and pancit bihon, so you stop buying the wrong noodle. Regional dishes that never made it onto restaurant menus abroad. And a lot of substitution: what to reach for when the shelf has no cane vinegar, no calamansi, no banana ketchup, and the nearest Asian grocery is a train ride away.

This section is for whoever is doing the cooking. The Pinay abroad recreating her mother’s sinigang from memory, the daughter raised in Sydney who wants to make it once without a phone call, the person who has cooked it forty times and just wants a ratio confirmed. Every recipe here has been cooked before it was published, and we say what it should look like at each stage, not only how many minutes to wait. Start with how to cook adobo if you want the foundation, or the substitutions guide if your problem is the shopping, not the stove.