For a city/metro area with 9,000,000+ people, Chicago has a dearth of good egg rolls. You can find great Szechuan braised tendon, head-on salt and pepper shrimp, and a celebration of the diverse fungal bounty of Yunnan province down in Chinatown, but a personal dynasty's length search for sublime crisp deep-fried won ton skin pockets in this same 'hood have turned up nothing. Instead, I have to turn to the Filipino Uni-Mart grocery on the northside for my fix. Ford the stainless steel shelves filled with salty and sweet shrimp and squid chips and you'll be rewarded with a take-out counter filled with pork glazed in thick syrupy adobo; orange laquered barbecue chicken; beefy, brothy oxtail-studded kare-kare, and a host... More

October is Filipino American History Month, and on that note, Filipino food blogger Marvin over at Burnt Lumpia (tagline: "Finding identity through food") posits a theory that his peeps may have had a hand in helping create gumbo: So what’s all this have to do with Gumbo you ask? Well, given these facts, one can conclude that like the French Acadians (roux), Africans (okra), and Choctaw Indians (File powder), perhaps Filipinos (shrimp) can be included in the melting pot that is Gumbo. I won’t go so far as to say that Filipinos are responsible for shrimp being an ingredient in some Gumbos, but I will venture to say that Filipinos at least contributed to this fact. We were, after all,... More

I don't know much about Filipino food, but after seeing Grace's radiant photo of roast pork from NYC's Krystal's Cafe, I suddenly crave crispy skin-encased chunks of lechon along with any other Filipino specialty with a 1:1 ratio of meat to fat .... More