Hot soups and spicy food to keep you warm on rainy days.

Rainy Day Eats

In the 1970s, restauranteur Cely Kalaw came up with a 

 Some say that for inspiration, she looked to a spicy Bicolano stew of chilies and coconut milk: sinilihan, also known as ginataang sili or gulay na lada. Kalaw added pork to the originally meatless dish, then introduced it at her restaurant under a catchier name: 

When Bicol Express exploded in popularity, the new name eventually found its way back to Bicol. Soon, Bicolanos started calling their native sinilihan Bicol Express, too. But some differences exist between Kalaw's and Bicol's versions.

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What's the Difference Between Sinilihan and Bicol Express?

You can think of Bicol Express as the cover of a song that blew up and became more popular than the original. Some will claim that sinilihan is the "original" song—the version Bicolanos people grew up and are more familiar with.

Which version is better? That's a matter of personal preference. Despite different arrangements, both sing the same delicious, spicy, coconut-flavored song.

Let's look at what sets Bicolano sinilihan apart from Manila-born Bicol Express:

 compared to Bicol Express, which has a pale and creamy sauce.

Sinilihan is cooked until the oil splits from the coconut cream, extending its shelf life. Some cooks pack and sell it in jars as a ready-to-eat condiment or ulam.

Why Do You Need to Split the Oil From the Cream?

Coconut milk spoils very quickly because of its high moisture content. When a moist environment is present, it can breed bacteria and cause spoilage.

It's why coconut milk labels tell you to use all of it ASAP once opened. If you leave it out at room temperature, it will start going bad in about two hours.

Before groceries and canned coconut products, traditional sinilihan used freshly extracted coconut cream. Without any stabilizers, it spoiled even faster than canned cream.

Cooks found that cooking off the coconut cream's excess moisture made sinilihan last much longer. To do that, you need to simmer the stew until the cream split into oil and water. The water—the moist environment bacteria love—would then cook off and evaporate, leaving a coconut-flavored oil.

If you've made Bicol Express before, sinilihan is just as easy to make. Cook up a big batch and serve with heaps of hot steamed rice. If you start to sweat and can't feel your tongue, it means you made it right!

Sinilihan (Traditional Bicol Express)

If you think Bicol Express isn't spicy enough, make it the Bicol way: less pork, reduced coconut cream, and more tongue-numbing chilies.

The bed of melted cheddar, the crunch of sweet corn, the pull of gooey mozzarella with every slurp of noodle. Once you try it, you'll tell all your friends to combine instant noodles with Korean 

This recipe uses Samyang Buldak ramen, the South Korean instant noodles of 

 challenge fame, to bring an appetizing heat to the dish. Grab the Quattro Cheese variant, if you can.

Korean Corn Cheese Instant Noodles

Presenting our best instant ramen hack yet: a bed of hot, crunchy, gooey Korean corn cheese over instant noodles.

Arroz caldo, the hearty rice porridge cooked with chicken and ginger, is chicken soup for the Pinoy soul. The grains, boiled and broken down in broth until creamy, take on a risotto-like texture. Each bite warms the body, making it the perfect merienda on a rainy day, or a nourishing meal when you're sick.

Arroz caldo goes by many names, depending on where you're from. While arroz caldo is a type of lugaw, lugaw is not always arroz caldo!

 we have lugaw. The word means "porridge" or "gruel" in Filipino, and covers any dish made with boiled and thickened rice or grains. Examples of lugaw include arroz caldo, 

 (lelot being the Kapampangan term for lugaw).

Arroz caldo is Spanish in name, but Chinese in origin. It is said to be our adaptation of congee, which was introduced to the Philippines by Chinese immigrants. Our Spanish conquerors didn't care to learn the Chinese language, and called the dish arroz caldo—"rice broth". Eventually, the term referred to the ginger-flavored Pinoy rice porridge with chicken.

Take your basic lugaw and add chicken, ginger and kasubha: that's basically arroz caldo. To get the best texture and flavor out of your bowl, this recipe adds a few more steps—from toasting the rice to cooking down your chicken skin.

For the best texture, use equal parts glutinous rice and jasmine rice. Glutinous rice gives arroz caldo its thick, starchy texture while jasmine rice balances it out with fluffy, fragrant grains.

Toasting the uncooked rice in oil enhances its color and nutty flavor. To make it even more flavorful, mash itlog na maalat (salted egg) with the grains to give it a savory, salty umami.

To achieve that signature arroz caldo-yellow, add a few strands of kasubha while cooking the rice.

Grating your garlic and ginger does two things: it strengthens their flavor, and makes them easier to incorporate into the arroz caldo—no stray chunks to bite into. But if you like the bite of thinly sliced ginger, you can add some into your arroz caldo right before serving.

Don't discard your chicken skin! Cook it with your rice to break down the collagen and fatten the soup. This gives your arroz caldo a glossy, silky texture and more chicken flavor.

Cooking the chicken last ensures that your meat stays soft and juicy, not dry and stringy. Add it to your arroz caldo at the last 10 minutes of cooking.

Chicken

Rice

Arroz Caldo

For Serving

Chicken Arroz Caldo (Filipino Chicken Rice Porridge)

Arroz caldo, the Pinoy lugaw flavored with chicken and ginger, becomes more flavorful when you toast the rice first.

 to instant noodles? We know how it sounds. But give it a shot and you’ll understand why 

Skip the regular mayo for this recipe—you need to use 

 Kewpie mayo has a richer, silkier texture and a signature tang from rice vinegar. When you whisk it with ramen seasoning, minced garlic, and a whole egg, the mayo upgrades your watery noodle soup into a thick, luxurious broth. If you close your eyes and take a slurp, you’d think you were at a ramen restaurant.

Noodles

For Garnish

Kewpie Mayo Instant Noodles

Some people don't like chicken tinola, calling it a flavorless, watery chicken soup. We don't like to judge, but that doesn't sound like a proper tinola at all! This Filipino household staple should be comforting and restorative: tender chicken cuts and in a clean, gingery soup.

Best Tinolang Manok (Chicken Tinola)

Send this recipe to your friend who hates tinola.

Traffic's bad, the rain is heavy, and you're hungry. You stop by a roadside carinderia and order a serving of 

 The lady gives you a plate of hot rice with a side of tender beef coated in a dark sauce. Then you get a bowl of plain soup, which she says you can refill if you want. With every bite of the beef, your patience thickens; with every sip of the soup, your body heats up. And you go back to the road a different person.

There's no better beef pares than the one 

. But this homemade version delivers the same nourishing comfort, promising flavorful, fall-off-the-bone meat and a not-too-sweet asado sauce.

Beef Broth

Beef Pares

Make the Broth

Make the Beef Pares

Best Beef Pares with Asado Sauce

This beef pares recipe teaches you how to make a sweet-savory asado sauce for a flavorful soup.

 a porridge of rice balls simmered in sweet coconut milk. Different provinces have their own unique variations. For example, Pangasinan’s 

 includes tapioca pearls and local produce like sweet potato, cassava, or saba bananas.

We adapted this recipe from Marvin Gapultos, author of 

 The rice balls and sago pearls makes this porridge fun to eat. Powdered milk gives it creaminess; vanilla makes it taste like ice cream. But feel free to skip them if you prefer a more coconut-y flavor.

Sago

Sticky Rice Balls

Sweet Coconut Milk

Filipino Coconut Milk Porridge with Mango and Sago

This version of Filipino tambo-tambo or ginataang bilo-bilo combines sweet mango with sticky rice balls, sago, and creamy coconut milk.

A simple bowl of lugaw works wonders, but this rich, bulalo-inspired version will make your eyes roll back in pleasure. Suck the marrow off each bone before chasing it down with a spoonful of warm rice, which we boil with ground beef and kneecap bones for extra beefy flavor.

Lugaw

Topping

Bone Marrow Rice Porridge (Lugaw)

This bone marrow rice porridge looks to bulalo for a rich, beefy rendition.

Korean steamed eggs (gyeran-jjim) lie halfway between an eggy soup and a silky custard. Like Japanese chawan mushi and Chinese zheng shui dan, it’s extremely cheap and dead simple to make. Once you master the recipe, customize it however you want: replace the water with stock, add chili flakes, or adjust the egg-water ratio. Enjoy as an appetizer or as a simple meal, served with hot rice.

A traditional ttukbaegi makes this dish a one-pot affair you can cook in and eat straight out of. Rinse and repeat for round two, if you’re hungry.

Ingredients

Korean Steamed Eggs (Gyeran-jjim)

This traditional Korean steamed egg dish is a worthy addition to your arsenal of simple egg recipes.

Eggs on rice is a dead-simple equation for an effortless but rewarding meal. Here we toss hard-boiled eggs in a hot, fiery-red sauce. Thanks to gochujang, or Korean fermented chili paste, the eggs acquire a deep, fermented flavor with a sweet-spicy sting. Minced green onions and sesame seeds give it color. These eggs are substantial enough to serve over rice or noodles, but will play well with meat and vegetables, too.

Eggs

Sweet-Spicy Sauce

Sweet-Spicy Korean Braised Eggs

Turn hard-boiled eggs into a comforting meal by braising them in a sweet-spicy Korean sauce. The secret ingredient: gochujang.

Champorado is a Filipino start-of-the-day staple that almost doubles as a dessert: chocolate rice porridge made with sticky rice (malagkit) and chocolate (usually tablea). It's creamy, sweet, and filling, best eaten on a cold day.

This recipe guides you through how to cook a perfect version of traditional tablea champorado. No fancy ingredients, no out-of-this-world techniques. A tried-and-tested method to make champorado that gives you the pure flavor of cocoa and the pure texture of malagkit in a thick, creamy soup.

Tablea Champorado (Filipino Chocolate Rice Porridge)

Here's how to cook champorado, the rich Pinoy chocolate rice porridge, using tablea.

What once was a lazy way to get the flavors of tantanmen into some instant ramen became one of our best recipes yet. This is our unofficial hack for Mendokoro Ramenba‘s tantanmen. For this recipe, we suggest using pork-based ramen like 

This instant ramen tantanmen is thick, slightly creamy, and flavorful. The ground pork gives it a nice meaty flavor—especially if you have those browned parts. The broth is nutty; and while it’s still pretty spicy, it doesn’t violate the senses thanks to the addition of milk. You can add a bunch of other stuff to this recipe to finish: sesame seeds, spring onions, or even some nori!

Instant Ramen Tantanmen

There are so many things going on in pho. You've got sharp but subtle savoriness from the broth and spices, freshness from the herbs—and that's not even all of it. This complexity is achieved through hours of building the broth. But you don't always need to leave the pot on for seven hours just to get the 

 soup. This instant pho gets you a light, flavorful pho, except it only takes 45 minutes to put together.

Granted, any instant pho, including ours, won't replicate the exact same experience as 

. But what this recipe promises is a similar experience; one that mimics traditional pho, without the same time-consuming process. And we do this through a bouillon cube and a ton of aromatics and spices to make up for what's lost in the time.

Broth

Assembly

Instant Pho

This instant pho recipe builds a flavorful broth in more than half the time of a traditional pho, but it delivers a similar experience.

Lelot balatong means “bean porridge” in Kapampangan. When toasted, green munggo darkens into a coffee-like shade of brown with a deep, nutty flavor. The toasted beans are then split, dehulled, and cooked with sticky rice in sweet coconut milk.

Don’t limit yourself to merienda! Enjoy this hug in a bowl for breakfast or even as a dessert, like you would with 

Ginataang Munggo (Lelot Balatong)

Think coconut-flavored champorado with a nutty bite. Toasted munggo, glutinous rice, and coconut milk come together in this Filipino merienda.

Adding fruits into savory dishes is far from novel and 

. Enter Manam’s Watermelon Sinigang, with a soup that's soured by sampalok and rounded out with sweet, fresh watermelon.

Manam-Inspired Watermelon Sinigang

Manam's Watermelon Sinigang is the sign you're looking for if you wanna create something different this rainy season.

Rainy afternoons call for ginataang mais, a Filipino porridge of young corn kernels and malagkit rice cooked in coconut milk.

Long-grain glutinous rice keeps its shape better than short-grain, which tends to break down and turn mushy by the time the ginataan thickens. We suggest using fresh corn for its natural sweetness, but canned sweet corn will work fine in a pinch. Adding coconut cream at the end provides extra creaminess and flavor.

Best Ginataang Mais

This ginataang mais recipe uses sticky rice, fresh corn, and a combination of coconut milk and cream.

Bicol Express is a spicy Filipino stew made with two signature ingredients of Bicol cuisine: fiery-hot chilies and creamy coconut milk. Cely Kalaw, the restauranteur 

 for inventing and popularizing the dish, named it after the old railway connecting Manila and Albay.

The origin of the dish itself is not as clear-cut. Some say that Bicol Express started as a less-spicy 

 of Kalaw's signature spicy laing. Others claim that Kalaw adapted Bicol's 

 or ginataang sili by adding pork. It could also be 

 an existing Bicolano dish, repackaged with a catchier name.

Whatever the real story is, we can all agree that Bicol Express should, at the bare minimum, be 

Depending on the household, the specifics of these ingredients can change: coconut cream versus milk, green versus red chilies, bagoong guisado or alamang, ground pork versus pork belly, and so on.

This recipe gives you a solid Bicol Express to enjoy as is or to fine-tune to your liking. Some versions are garnished with cooked ground pork or chicken. Sinilihan, AKA traditional Bicol Express, prefers the spicy oil separated from the cream—we have a whole recipe for that 

This recipe both coconut cream (for the sauce) and coconut milk (for cooking the pork). Go grab your brand of choice, either canned or boxed, from the grocery.

If you can get fresh coconut cream, even better! Any coconut-forward dish like this one can benefit from naturally sweet and fresh-tasting coconut.

—to set your butt on fire. This recipe uses both siling labuyo (red chilies) and siling haba (green chilies) to fulfill that requirement.

Pork belly is the standard cut used for Bicol Express, and for good reason: It has a good balance of fat and meat, of flavor and tenderness. No need to stray from tradition here.

Most Bicol Express recipes call for bagoong guisado, but depending on the brand, it can taste too aggressive. And as much as we like the convenience of jarred alamang, it made our Bicol Express too salty. It tasted like it died in the stew, leaving a slightly unpleasant smell and aftertaste.

To stick to the authenticity of this dish, we recommend using fresh alamang or balaw from the wet market. It starts out as salty as jarred bagoong, but with the proper prep, you can temper it into a mildly shrimpy, just-right fishy flavor.

Bicol Express

Bicol Express is a spicy Filipino stew of sliced pork belly cooked in coconut cream, shrimp paste, and tons of chilies. 

As much as we love the convenience of instant sinigang mix, nothing beats old-school sinigang made with sampalok, or tamarind. Like drinking fresh orange juice after a lifetime of powdered stuff, sampalok-soured broth has a brighter, fresher tartness with citrus-like notes. For the pork, we use two cuts: ribs for porky flavor, and belly for richness. 

Meat

Vegetables

Best Pork Sinigang with Sampalok

Our best pork sinigang recipe gives you an old-school sour soup made with sampalok.

‘s idea of Filipino cuisine was limited to adobo, sinigang, kaldereta, etc. But after traveling to 22 provinces, he challenged this definition. In his new cookbook “Also Filipino,” Angelo chronicles “75 regional recipes [he] never had growing up;” proving that Filipino food went beyond what our moms made us at home. 

This recipe from his book is for kinalas, a noodle soup from the Bicol region. It’s like a cross between mami and bulalo (it also reminded us of nilaga), plus gravy. The dish started in Dayangdang in Naga City. Local tricycle drivers would prepare it before their shift starts. Then, at the end of the day, they’d fix up a bowl as a reward.

Soup

Gravy

Kinalas (Bicol Noodle Soup with Gravy)

Kinalas is a Bicolano noodle soup traditonally made with miki noodles and meat scraped off a cow's face, hence the name.

This simple soup recipe is made from a combination of dry and fresh mushrooms, enhanced by the savory flavors from bouillon cubes and truffle oil. 

Truffle Mushroom Soup

A quick, easy bowl of soup flavored with earthy mushrooms and fragrant truffle.

Before the boom of artisanal bean-to-bar Filipino chocolates, the only name in the game was Ricoa. And as kids, we were all too familiar with their two ready-to-eat chocolates: Flat Tops and Curly Tops. There was always a debate as to which one was better, but the answer really depends on personal preference. This hot chocolate recipe uses Curly Tops because it has a deep chocolate flavor and smooth mouthfeel, working well as melted chocolate.

Curly Tops Hot Chocolate

Make hot chocolate out of Curly Tops for a warm, nostalgic beverage that's comforting in more ways than one.

Kulma is a rich Tausug beef curry dish. It's commonly prepared during special occasions in Mindanaoan households, but we've been happy to see it become a more known dish all around. Kulma is stewed in coconut milk, peanut butter, and tomato paste, giving it a complex mix of flavors. Think of it as a crossover between traditional curry and 

 to make. Our "cheat" version cuts that time in half and takes a few shortcuts in flavoring the broth, but the end result is just as flavorful.