Small Plates is where Epicurious dishes on cooking for families and kids.

My parents met in San Diego. In San Diego there's a really big population of people of my generation who are half-Filipino, half-white, which is primarily because San Diego is a huge military town with military bases. A lot of the people who went off to the Philippines for the military brought back Filipino wives.

That's not how my parents met, but that's how my mom met her first husband, who was also an American Navy guy. They separated, and a few years later she met my dad in a bar. She tells this funny story of spotting him and telling her friend, "I'm going to marry that man."

They were definitely not drawn together because of similar tastes in food. They have very, very different palates. My mom hates bread. She hates cheese. She thinks that my dad's food is way too filling and fatty.

I have been torn between the Filipino side and the white side of my family for as long as I remember.

Meanwhile, my dad grew up in New Jersey, in a very white family. They didn't have a lot of diverse inputs, at least at the food level. He doesn't like shrimp. My dad doesn't like any seafood, really. He's not a big fan of Asian food in general.

And so he's not a fan of Filipino food, not any of it. He detested the smell because a lot of Filipino food is very seafood heavy.

My mom would buy these dried fish that were heavily salted, and she'd fry them up in oil. That smell just permeated the entire house for days. As a gift for her—but mostly a gift for himself—he bought her an outdoor grill with a side burner so she could fry her fish outside. She used to also make this shrimp dish where she would dice up onion and tomato, maybe some garlic, and sauté all that in some oil, or maybe it was butter. Then she would throw in a bunch of shrimp with the heads and the skin on. It would make the oily liquid this bright orange. It was basically just shrimp flavored fat that I would spoon a ton of over rice, and then would rip off the shrimp heads and suck on them. She had me peeling my own shrimp at a very young age.

The author as a (really, really adorable) child. Photo by Lew Wolfgang

My dad never ate the food that my mom made for herself. So she would often make two meals, one a Filipino meal and the other a dinner that she would deem American—something more palatable for my dad. This would be anything from spaghetti to meatloaf to steak. She did this most nights of the week.

My sisters and I were always given a choice of what to eat. I would just waffle back and forth. Sometimes I would have a plate with two dinners on them: one American, one Filipino. Sometimes I would eat a pre-dinner with my mom and then a second dinner with my dad.

Sometimes, when I was eating one of the Filipino dishes, I'd be like, "Oh, this is so good, Dad. Why don't you have some of it? I'm sure you would like it." He just had this aversion that he couldn't get over. He was like, "I know what rice tastes like, and I know that I don't love it." It was just a given in the household that I didn't question too much.

It's really hard for me to empathize with my parents' pickiness because I was exposed to both of their weird preferences and developed an appreciation for all of them really early on. And now, as an adult, I'm an open-minded eater. There are very few things that I won't try. It's hard for me to imagine not liking something as simple as bread.

Sometimes I would have a plate with two dinners on them: one America, one Filipino.

I think it's interesting because it's one example of leading a multiracial existence. I have been torn between the Filipino side and the white side of my family for as long as I remember. I never really identified with either side. I don't really look like either of my parents. I don't look like any of their family. I feel like I've lived a life without a real identity that I can trace back through my lineage. And there's something about being this combination that's outside of what we know that I think makes for an experience that is more open to variation.

I think that this is reflected in the food that I ate growing up. I was always presented with two worlds, neither of which I truly belonged to. But in the end, I came away being really open to both, even though I didn't fit into either one. I never really felt like I owned either cuisine, or that I owned any cuisine for that matter. I felt that they were all equally accessible and inaccessible to me. I could have leaned in on the inaccessibility. Instead, I leaned the other way.

As told to David Tamarkin. Interview has been edited and condensed.