Welcome
This is my ovo-vegan adventure in the kitchen. This site contains collection of recipes that I create myself. I don’t use measurement most of the time but for each recipe I post I try to mentally gauge how much of each ingredient is used and how to prepare them to the best of my knowledge. This site also contains my favorite recipes from home, The Philippines, and from other places I have lived and visited, i.e, Thailand, Italy, including my current residence, England.
They, who influenced me
My dearly beloved mother – I had a pretty basic knowledge in cooking but I only knew how to make the food that I was eating back home in the Philippines. And when I was in elementary school, I used to help my mother make Filipino native rice cakes but my role was more of a sous chef. I was never involved in recipes and such. As I moved from one country to another, I, inevitably got exposed to other exciting foods, like Thai foods.
My husband — When I came to England in 2008, I didn’t know how to make European foods, let alone Italian food, so my husband was cooking for both of us. From him I learned the rudiments of cooking pasta and bread making. Coming from Sicily, my husband showed me that pasta can be cooked with vegetables. Basically, he’d just toss the vegetables in the pan with a little oil and salt then mix them them with pasta. Interestingly, they appealed to my palate. Before this, the only Italian food I knew was spaghetti and pizza. I even used to think that spaghetti was a sauce! 
So when I was eating carbonara I would call it white spaghetti. 
Gabriella – my sister-in-law, is another big influence in developing my culinary passion. When she came for my wedding, she made some really fantastic Italian foods that tickled my gusto. She made the best lasagna I’ve ever had and it was buonissimo! Muah! and she didn’t even taste it because she’s a vegan. It just blew me away! From her I learned some recipes that was passed on from her mother. She also taught me how to make fresh pasta. Gabriella is a cheerful cook. She hums while she cooks which amuses me and I absolutely adore it.
Pearly — During an ordinary phone conversation with Pearly, a friend from church, she suggested I watch Professor Walter Veith’s videos on Amazing Discoveries in chronological order. So I started off with his testimonial video, From Evolutionist to Creationist, unfortunately, it’s not available at this time. When I got to his health lectures, Life At Its Best, it opened my eyes, in a more scientific way, to the amazing facts about plant-based diet and how to do it properly. It made me understand myself better especially my hyper-acidity problem and some other food-related problems I have.
In March this year, I got involved in the Women’s Ministry in the church where we learn vegetarian and vegan cooking. Pearly, the head of the group, taught me a lot of cooking tips and she most certainly tapped my waning culinary interest. Then it struck me, vegetarianism is so much fun after all.
Disclaimer
I wouldn’t call myself a vegetarian but my diet is comprised mainly of vegetables and other plant-based foods such as soy butter, soy yoghurt, etc. I am discarding milk and cheese almost totally because my stomach cannot handle them very well. While here in the UK, I also try to avoid meats because of the way they raise their cattle. I eat chicken from time to time and egg is still part of my cooking, although not that much.
When I go out and get invited by a friend and they serve meat, I would eat it and not going to fuss about it as long as it’s Biblically clean meat. Sometimes being a total Vegetarian/Vegan is a burden especially when you’re out and about. That is why I would rather call myself the flexible kind of vegetarian.
It’s sad to note that in our current situation, the market caters mainly to meat eaters making it difficult for people to make a choice. I can’t blame them. Vegetarian section is almost always difficult to find. But if “there’s a will, there’s a way”, isn’t it? Well, I choose to be flexible for my own convenience and that of the host. I wouldn’t shut myself out of social functions just because of my diet preference. ”When in Rome, be a Roman”, so they say and I am bound to oblige– by my own freewill.
