Good morning. Angela Dimayuga, the creative director for food and culture at the Standard hotels and a former chef at Mission Chinese Food in New York, grew up in Northern California, a daughter of Filipino immigrants, her grandmother a scratch cook. When we asked her recently for 10 recipes that speak to the heart of Filipino cuisine, she didn’t just cook from her own memory. She went through her mother’s collection of her family’s recipes and combed through cookbooks drawing on cooking from across the archipelago. She studied. And then she cooked and cooked.
So now we have her coconut milk chicken adobo (above), with braised whole peppercorns, and her lumpia Shanghai, cousins to spring rolls. She’s brought us an elegant porridge of arroz caldo with collards and soy-cured egg yolks as well as bistek, the beef raised high with soy sauce, citrus and browned butter, and sinigang, a sour-fantastic soup of tamarind broth with pork and vegetables. Here’s her pinakbet, vegetables stewed in fermented shrimp paste; her embutido, an egg-filled meatloaf; her pancit palabok, rice noodles tossed with a thick chicken gravy and topped with hardboiled eggs and poached shrimp; and good Lord, her empanadas, the ground-beef filling amped up with oyster sauce and sweetened with raisins.
Then, for dessert: Her bibingka, a rice-flour coconut cake cooked in banana leaves that Dimayuga tops with salted duck egg for what she calls “a sly note of brine.”
These are amazing recipes. They may not quite match the ones your mom made in Luzon, or the ones your friend Jose makes when he’s not out on the road, or the ones Romy Dorotan and Amy Besa taught you to make. But that is kind of the point. They are your starting point, your frame of reference. This weekend, you can make them your own.
There are thousands and thousands of other recipes to cook this weekend on NYT Cooking, if you couldn’t find the coconut vinegar you wanted for the adobo, or the shrimp paste for the pinakbet. (Or if you’re planning for Canadian Thanksgiving on Monday.) I am, for instance, in love with this recipe for seekh kebabs with mint chutney that Chintan Pandya was serving at The New York Times Food Festival last weekend. And it’s never a bad time to make this recipe for family-meal fish tacos.
Yes, you do need a subscription to access them, just as I need to exchange United States currency with the guy at the car wash for the deluxe package where they clean the floor mats and spray Rain-X on the windscreen. (And how about your hungry child in college, your just-divorced cousin in Spokane with the pizza coupons, your new-parent siblings in Oakland, with their empty new kitchen? We offer gift subscriptions!)
If you need further inspiration, come see us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. And reach out to us by email if you find yourselves at odds with a recipe or with our technology. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com, and we will get back to you.
Now, it has nothing to do with calamansi or barbecued shrimp, but Jad Abumrad has a new podcast, “Dolly Parton’s America,” and I really cannot wait to play it on through.
Do you think Heidi the octopus was dreaming? I do.
If you’re going to read all the novels on the shortlist for the National Book Award, this is the weekend to start.
Finally, here’s Toots and the Maytals, “Funky Kingston,” Nov. 15, 1975 at Winterland in San Francisco. I’ve got the same jacket! See you on Sunday.
