Seadfood City Supermarket

“I think I’ve rolled a million lumpia in my life,” Philip says, recalling childhood memories of cooking with his mom. He learned the basics from her – making rice, handling a knife, and of course rolling lumpia. “We made lumpia a lot.”

Despite these memories, Philip only truly learned how to cook on his own when he moved away from his family’s home in California to Hawaii. He taught himself recipes he’d see on the Food Network. “It was the only channel I would watch,” he says, describing how he’d go online to find the recipe from a show, learn it, and then change it based on his own preferences. He would do the same whenever he’d discover a great dish from Oahu’s multicultural food scene – learn to make it at home and then develop his own version.

This echoes his mom Arlene’s own experience learning how to cook for the first time. She too only learned after she moved away from home, in her case from the Philippines to the US. She would ask her mother how to prepare the dishes she missed the most. Then she did what her son did decades later – she tailored them to her own preferences and to available ingredients.

On this page we share Philip’s video recipe of his mom’s pancit. He remembers her preparing the dish for parties and also remembers judging every other pancit by this standard. Whenever he came across one that didn’t quite cut it for him, he’d think “Oh, that’s not my mom’s.” This video is one of the many on his YouTube channel designed to help viewers get better at the things he’s passionate about: making great videos and cooking great food. With about 13,000 subscribers and counting, it’s increasingly likely that Philip will one day attend a random gathering where the home cooked pancit might just make him go “Hey, that’s just like my mom’s pancit!”