For years, I have been cooking Filipino and Asian dishes almost every day. This blog is all about sharing with you what I’ve been cooking throughout my life. When I moved to America some 25 years ago, my Dad worried a lot about my well-being. My name is Elizabeth Ann Besa-Quirino and I live on the east coast with my husband, Elpidio P. Quirino and our sons Timothy and Constante. Before we moved, I assured my father I was going to be fine because Mom taught me how to cook. Cooking and writing were what I knew best. These skills were my best coping mechanisms. And this is what this blog is all about… to share with you my Filipino & Asian recipes and how I find a way to cook these dishes in my American kitchen everyday. Come on and grab a seat, and enjoy my culinary adventures!
Elizabeth Ann Besa-Quirino is a cookbook author, an award-winning journalist, food writer, correspondent, a previous college professor and former ad agency copywriter/creative director. She blogs and develops recipes about Filipino home cooking on her popular website Asian in America (www.AsianInAmericaMag.com).
She is a six-time winner of the Plaridel Writing Award for excellence in journalism, given by the Philippine-American Press Club in San Francisco, California, and is the recipient of a Doreen Gamboa Fernandez Food Writing Award for her essay, “A Hundred Mangoes in A Bottle.” She was named as one of the FWN Filipina Women’s Network 100 Most Influential Women of the World.
Her writing has been published on Positively Filipino, a premier online magazine, where she is a correspondent; FOOD Magazine by ABS-CBN Inc.; Rustan’s Sans Rival magalogue; and Philadelphia’s Quirk Books DIY blog. She has appeared on the TV network KACL-LA 18’s “Halo-Halo with Kat Iniba,” which aired in California and Hawaii. Find some of Betty Ann’s essays on Medium.com, too.
Betty Ann, as she is fondly called, was born in the Philippines and raised in Tarlac province, where her way of life was molded early on by her parents’ farming and agricultural business. Her childhood home was well known to friends and family as the ‘home along the highway’, a welcome stopover conveniently halfway between Manila and Baguio. She learned to cook from her mother, Lourdes “Lulu” Reyes Besa, who made dishes from the fresh produce grown by her father, Gualberto Besa in their backyard and farm in Tarlac. Memories of these special meals were the inspiration for her three cookbooks: Instant Filipino Recipes and My Mother’s Philippine Recipes, and How to Cook Philippine Desserts: Cakes and Snacks (Amazon.com).
She has also co-authored the history book Statesman and Survivor: Elpidio Quirino, 6th President of the Philippines, and created, illustrated and published Color and Cook Food Coloring Book on original Filipino food art. All her books are available on Amazon.com.
Now based in New Jersey, USA, Betty Ann is a member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP); and the Association of Culinary Historians of the Philippines (CHOP). She serves as a member of the Board of Advisers of the President Elpidio Quirino Foundation. Betty Ann travels often back to her home in Tarlac city, in the Philippines and throughout Asia in search of traditional recipes and stories about culture, history and personalities.