A stew of influences

After a few weeks in our new home—Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies—I finally made some friends and was invited to spend a weekend at their place. It was the early 90s, was 17, eager to win their approval, and thought maybe I could cook something for them.

One dish that came to mind was my mother’s dal, a spicy lentil stew I first tasted years earlier during a visit to Kathmandu. It seemed simple enough, so I asked her to teach me how to make it.

“You start by sautéing your aromatics,” she said, onions and garlic in this case. “You flavor the oil you’re going to cook the dish in.” When the onions were nearly done, I added cumin (the only spice I had on hand at the time), then mixed in the lentils. A couple of minutes of sautéing, then water, and a simmer until the lentils turned soft. Season with salt and pepper to taste, then stir in a bit of sour cream at the end to thicken the soup.

That was, I believe, the first real dish I ever cooked.

Soon after that brief Caribbean chapter, I moved back to the Philippines and found myself living alone for the first time. And pretty quickly, I got tired of surviving on canned goods, instant noodles, and fried food. I missed real meals, the kind that warm you from the inside out.

So I started learning to cook more dishes.

I wasn’t exactly starting from scratch. Growing up, I’d spent a lot of time watching the grown-ups in our kitchen. And where I grew up, meals almost always began the same way: with garlic, onions, and tomatoes gently sautéed in oil. That simple ritual stuck with me. I still believe a good aromatics sauté is the foundation of almost every great dish.

My cooking became a blend of the flavors I grew up with: Filipino comfort food, the bold heat of Indian spices, and later, from the Italian side of my family, the memory of my aunt’s tomato sauce—rich, deep, unforgettable. I’ve tried to recreate it for years. Never quite nailed it. But somewhere along the way, I came up with a version of my own which eventually became our signature product.

When I met RL, she didn’t cook... at least not yet. But she carried her own kitchen memories from childhood. Her mother, herself a skilled cook, once ran her own restaurant. When RL and I moved in together and made Baguio our home in the mid-90's, she was curious and eager to learn. I started sharing a few of my go-to recipes, and before long, she was not just learning them but making them her own. These days, some of the dishes I first taught her, well, she cooks them better than I ever did.

Cooking became something we shared. And when the kids came along, all five of them, we learned to be even more resourceful in the kitchen. Add to that our extended family in Open Space, the community-based theater group we founded here in Baguio, and suddenly we were cooking not just for our children, but for full rehearsal casts and production crews. Since we often hold rehearsals at home, feeding a crowd became part of our daily rhythm. It meant working with what we had, improvising often, and pouring a lot of heart into every meal.

Then came the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020. With everything on pause, we found ourselves experimenting more in the kitchen. That’s when we discovered smoking and smoke-roasting. It started with bacon and but before long, we were smoking anything we thought might benefit from a highland smoked flavor.

These days, our kitchen is full of noise, organized chaos, and the aroma of a stew of influences: Filipino, Italian, Indian, Ilocano, Cordilleran, and more. Our food isn’t fancy, but it’s real. It’s rooted in memory, built on love, and always evolving. 

Just like us. And there's that Mountain High because we just want to share all that warmth, and love, and good feeling, with you.