Vegetables in the Filipino Diet

During my childhood, my mother avoided serving salads and raw vegetables for fear of contamination, so we ate a variety of cooked vegetables using a method of preparation called the guisado (see Mongo Guisado), which uses a base of fried garlic, onions, and tomatoes, to which shrimp, then a vegetable, was added. The dish was seasoned with shrimp juice, fish sauce, and sometimes with bagoong. We ate a lot of chayote, upo [gourd], kalabasa [squash], sigadillas [winged-beans], and sitao [longbeans]. The few times we ate a salad, usually made with cucumbers or blanched greens like water spinach, the salad dressing would not be like the traditional oil and vinegar combination found in the West, but rather a vinegar-water-sugar combination. When I came to the United States, I had to get used to eating salads coated in oil.