Welcome to Today's Delight.
Hi, I am Chris. This blog was inspired by my mom’s cooking and my love for photography. My mom suffers from dementia and doesn’t remember how to cook anymore. She is a great cook and for many years had a catering business. Also, I love landscape and night photography and was always intrigued by the beautiful food images I see on Pinterest. Whenever I cook something special, I find myself taking pictures of my creation. Then, one day I realized why don’t I create my own blog. Little did I know, food photography was harder. I struggled at first, now I am getting better.
Nowadays, me and my sibling are the cook and my Mom is our Today's Delight food blog model. In our images, she is the one holding the fork or pouring the sauce. The last time I remember my Mom cook was in 2015. Due to her age, she has memory lapses. Sometimes she’ll say, I remember using “Sarsa Perrin” but I don’t know where I used it for. I showed her this website and she thought people are ordering food from us. We can explain it to her many times but she will forget in a few minutes. Oh well.
When my sibling and I moved to the US some 38 years ago, my Mom used to send us recipes. I never had any reason to learn to cook when I was in the Philippines. My brother is more interested in cooking than me. On a whim, he might be barbecuing chicken at midnight. I learned cooking because of necessity when I moved to the States. I missed my Mom’s cooking plus there were only 2 Filipino restaurants in our area at that time.
Years ago, my mom was invited by a friend to show her how to make ensaymada. I was there to hang out. Besides, it looked too complicated that I had no interest in learning it. The same way with my mom’s hopia. She made perfect, delicious hopia that we all loved but I had no inkling in learning it. Instead, my mentality was I would rather buy since I only need 1 package to satisfy my craving. To this day, I have not found hopia similar to my mom’s. Now, I wish I did learn it.
I lived with my brother and his family for a while and once in a blue moon, I have the urge to make empanada or siopao. My brother would comment, she is a good cook but she only makes it once a year. When I was younger, I wasn’t one to do much cooking.
Before I quit working, I cooked a few dishes over the weekend that lasted me for a few days. I usually made pancit, guisadong monggo, sinigang, nilaga, spaghetti and if in the mood, I prepared embutido, pancit malabon, lumpiang sariwa and more. On top of that, I always ordered non Filipino food. I love to try different cuisine.
Now, with all the time I have on my hands, I am inspired to cook different Filipino food and other cuisine. And yes, I have gained so much weight already. I hardly ate rice when I was working, but now, I have it throughout the day. Delicious dishes like dinuguan, bangus sa tausi, chicken afritada, adobo, callos are all good with cups and cups of rice.
Luckily, my Mom was never greedy when it comes to sharing her recipes to relatives and friends. I don’t have all her recipes or if I did, it might be missing instructions. From time to time, I’m asking people closed to her if they have such and such recipe. My mom kept her tested recipes in a bunch of beautiful calendar books. I joke that her recipes are encrypted. She might have 4 cramped recipes in a tiny page with her teeny-weeny handwriting with only ingredients, no measurements or instructions.
When I got into cooking, I watched her often and I adapted her way of cooking. I don’t use any measurements myself and I can tell from the aroma and taste of my food what I need to add to improve the flavor. My brother cooks the same way. That was the challenge I faced when I started blogging. I need to get used to measuring my ingredients to show in my recipe blog.
What to Expect in Today's Delight
We don’t claim to be food experts or chefs but there are different ways of doing things even with cooking. We are all unique, we love to experiment and tweak the recipe to our liking.
Sometimes, a recipe is born because it was done differently. A good example is Andrew Zimmern’s version of Sisig. Typical Filipino sisig doesn’t have the ingredients he used, but a friend made his recipe and it was scrumptious.
So there you go, all I care is that the food we cook and the recipe we publish is easy to follow with accurate instructions and taste delicious. It might not be to others but we encourage you to suggest how we can improve our recipes. Suggestions are welcomed and we are grateful that you did.
We hope you find our recipes helpful and delicious. Our content is straight forward with a few short stories and tips. Magluto na tayo! (Let’s cook.)
Thank you for visiting Today’s Delight.