Kitchen notes

Nothing published here contains pork in any form. That means no pork cuts, no ground pork, no bacon, ham, tocino, longganisa de Bilbao, or chicharron, no lard or manteca, and no pork broth, pork cubes, or pork-based seasoning sachets. The name is Tagalog for "I don't want pork," and it is meant literally.

The rule exists because a lot of people cannot eat pork and are still tired of being handed a watered-down version of their own food. Halal households, some kosher households, people avoiding pork for health or for their own reasons, and Filipinos abroad cooking in a shared kitchen all hit the same wall: the classic recipe assumes pork, and the pork-free version online is usually a pale copy with the flavor stripped out. So instead of removing the pork and hoping, every recipe here is built to work as a pork-free dish from the first step.

Where pork is genuinely traditional in a dish, we say so out loud rather than pretending the pig was never there. Sisig came off a pork face. Sinigang is often pork belly. We name what changed, and the swaps guide explains what the pork was actually doing in the pot so you can judge the substitution yourself.

These are Filipino home dishes, not inventions. Each recipe starts from the standard method a dish is cooked by in Filipino kitchens: what goes in the pot, in what order, and roughly for how long. Where a dish has well known regional versions, such as adobo with coconut milk in Bicol or a Batangas take on a stew, that is written into the notes rather than flattened into one "correct" version.

We then write the recipe out at a level of detail you can actually argue with. Quantities are given in real amounts, not "some" or "to taste" where a number is possible. Times are given as ranges with a visual cue attached, because your pan, your heat, and your chicken are not ours. Doneness is described by what the food looks like, not by the clock alone.

Here is what you will not find on a page here, and why:

• Nutrition numbers. Not a single calorie, gram of fat, or milligram of sodium in any dish here has been measured, so printing a nutrition panel would be a guess dressed up as data.
• Star ratings, review counts, and reader numbers. There is no rating widget on this site, so any rating you saw would be a number we made up.
• Photographs as proof. The images illustrate the dish. They are not evidence that a specific batch was cooked to the exact quantities on the page, and we will not imply otherwise.
• Recipes we cannot describe honestly. If we cannot explain why a swap works, it does not go up.

Pages get revisited when there is a reason to: a reader writes in, a source we lean on changes its guidance, or something reads wrong on a second pass. When the substance of a page changes, the modified date on that page changes with it, so an edit that matters is visible as one. We are not going to promise you a review schedule we would only be inventing.

Pages are signed Tala Reyes, which is the working name this desk publishes under and not a person with a biography attached. Who writes thissays so plainly and lists what that name is and is not answerable for.

A substitution list is not filler here, it is the point of the site. Pork usually does three jobs in a Filipino dish: it is the protein, it renders the fat that carries flavor, and it brings the slow savory depth Filipinos call linamnam. Take it out and you have to cover all three, or the dish comes out thin and everyone at the table notices.

So every recipe names the swap, not just the ingredient. Bone-in, skin-on chicken thigh instead of pork belly, because it stays tender through a braise and renders its own fat. Mushrooms for glutamate depth. A longer simmer where the pork used to shortcut it. If a swap changes the texture or the cooking time, the note says so instead of quietly leaving you to find out.

We also list swaps for the things that are not about pork at all: what to use when you cannot find calamansi, tamarind, or gata where you live. A recipe you cannot shop for is not much use.

On anything to do with safe temperatures, storage, thawing, and handling raw meat, poultry, seafood, and eggs, we do not have an opinion of our own. We follow public food safety agencies, and where our instructions touch on safety they are written to match their guidance, not to contradict it. If a recipe here ever conflicts with one of these, the agency is right and we have a page to fix.

• USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, for safe minimum internal cooking temperatures and handling of poultry, beef, and eggs.
• FoodSafety.gov, for storage times, refrigeration, thawing, and leftovers.
• World Health Organization, food safety, for the general keys to safer food, useful wherever you are reading from.
• Philippine Food and Drug Administration, for guidance and product advisories relevant to Philippine ingredients.

Individual recipe pages carry their own short list of the same kind, naming which of these the safety lines on that particular page came from.

Recipes go wrong. A quantity gets typed with the wrong number, a step lands in the wrong order, a simmer time is too short for the cut you bought. When that happens the fix belongs on the page, not in a comment thread nobody reads.

Write to [email protected] and point at the recipe and the line. Telling us what happened in your pot helps more than anything: what you used, what heat, and what it looked like when it went wrong. Corrections that turn out to be right are made directly on the page, and the modified date moves so you can see something changed.

If a claim on this site is wrong and we cannot support it, we take it down rather than soften it. If you tell us a swap does not work, we would rather remove the swap than leave you cooking something that fails. The contact page has the same address and what else is worth sending.

Out of pocket. The domain and the hosting are paid for personally by the person who runs the site, and that is the whole funding model. There are no ads, no ad network, no sponsored posts, no paid ingredient mentions, no affiliate links, no shop, no newsletter upsell, and no paid placement of any brand, product, or supermarket.

Nothing on this site is here because somebody paid for it to be here. If that ever changes, this paragraph changes first and any paid relationship gets labeled on the page it affects, not buried in a policy nobody opens.

Things we turn down, so there is no doubt:

• Sponsored recipes and "we will supply the ingredients" arrangements.
• Paid guest posts, link insertions, and link exchanges of any kind.
• Affiliate programs, including grocery and cookware affiliate links.
• Selling, renting, or sharing reader email addresses. We do not run a list.

The site is free to read, sets no cookies of its own, and asks nothing of you. Theprivacy policy covers the analytics side in plain terms.