Filipino eggrolls, champorado hit the spot when mood strikes for beloved pandemic-era comfort food – San Gabriel Valley Tribune

On the peak of the pandemic, Abby Gosalves turned consolation meals right into a style of grandma love.

Gosalves began Wowa’s Kitchenmade Love in October 2020, whipping up eggrolls in ingenious varieties based mostly on her mom’s household recipe and providing it at meals caravans across the Southland.

Her small enterprise’ inspiration is her mom, Avelina Penaflor, who raised her kids on luxurious home-cooked meals and spoiled her 4 grandchildren with the identical tried and true favorites.

“Wowa’s was impressed by how my nephews and nieces name my mother,” Gosalves, a resident of Duarte, mentioned. “Wowa is a reputation derived from the Tagalog of grandma which is lola. We characteristic my mother’s Filipino cooking and her grandchildren’s favorites, in order that’s why we named our enterprise Wowa’s.”

Pandemic advertising and marketing meant touring to smaller venues or social media pop-ups and providing curbside contact-less pickup in Duarte. However word-of-mouth raves have grown Gosalves’ homegrown enterprise.

She and her husband Eric supply 5 varieties to their well-liked eggrolls: apart from the same old social gathering favorites of pork and vegetable or hen, Gosalves tweaked her mom’s recipe to incorporate the why-hasn’t-anyone-thought-of-this-before lumpianisa. The lumpianisa is the mixture of a longganisa (a Filipino candy sausage) and an eggroll. It has since change into Wowa’s greatest hit. One other variation is the sotanghon eggrolls, glass noodles with hen meat and veggies contained in the eggroll.

“We make our longganisa in-house, from my mother’s longganisa recipe,” Gosalves mentioned. “Our lumpianisa is constituted of candy garlic longganisa taste rolled contained in the lumpia wrapper, and it’s change into one in all our hottest merchandise.”

I found Wowa’s at a mini-festival at Plaza West Covina, once I spied containers of Gosalves’ connoisseur tackle champorado, the candy chocolate rice porridge I adored as a toddler. I’d resigned myself to creating champorado from the processed mixes supplied at Asian groceries, however the thought of as-close-to-homemade yumminess was intriguing.

I don’t have to know what’s in Wowa’s twist to the straightforward perfection of rice cooked in chocolate. But it surely’s scrumptious. Gosalves provides her personal cream, dolce crema, to prime it with. And sure, I ate the entire container and didn’t share.

“Champorado is one in all my favourite Filipino consolation meals,” Gosalves mentioned. “My finest recollections of meals and champorado had been throughout our summer season holidays in our farm in Bataan, my mother and father’ province within the Philippines. From Manila, me and my siblings would spend our whole summer season trip on our farm the place my Mother cooked completely different scrumptious meals made out of the freshest meats, seafood and components our province needed to supply.”

Household time across the desk included meals of “sugpo,” or tiger prawns, crabs, grilled pork and hen, and naturally, her mom’s eggrolls. The champorado made its look at breakfast and was consumed all through the day. It was completed off at merienda, or afternoon snack.

“It at all times felt like a fiesta throughout weekends which we additionally spent with household and mates, whom my mother and father at all times invited over,” Gosalves mentioned. “That’s why Wowa’s champorado and eggroll assortment jogs my memory of my fondest childhood recollections.”

Wowa’s is quick turning into a crowd favourite at native meals occasions and festivals. The couple be a part of different meals distributors, together with Gosalves’ sisters, who supply their tackle their mother’s embutido, or Filipino meatloaf.

The unique chef is simply too glad that her daughters are rediscovering household recipes.