I TOOK a break in the Philippines over the long Chinese New Year weekend, abandoning my family to their festivities with a hearty wave.

There, newfound friends fed me chicken inasal, or barbecue, and pork adobo, a kind of stew, urging me to try every dish that appeared on the table.

It’s widely known that, for Asians, food is a way of sharing love and is an expression of welcome.

There, I found myself missing not the Chinese New Year goodies that you’ve no doubt been feasting on, but Italian food, the cuisine I find myself cooking for the ones I love the most.

The first meal I learnt to cook was a bastardised Italian dish.

Back in my dorm room during my first year of university in Hawaii, I microwaved instant noodles and bottled pasta sauce, a strange mix of Asian and Italian that my grandmother would occasionally feed me as a child.

That meal was to become a marker. Though I would learn to cook other things in time to come, I’ve found that Italian food (grossly romanticised and commercialised by the Americans, in particular) is the thing that speaks to me the most.

I’m not remotely Italian by descent. The mix of Chinese, aboriginal Taiwanese, Scottish, Sri Lankan and Japanese in my blood should perhaps point me to other cuisines. Italian is not, by a long shot, my birthright.

But its earthiness has an everlasting appeal for me. As I’ve grown – in terms of my culinary skills and otherwise – Italian cooking has served as a sort of notch on my metaphorical wall of growth.

In my second year of university, I hastily moved in with my Second Serious Boyfriend, a golden retriever sort of guy whose main aim in life seemed to be to please.

I learnt how to cook in pans over a gas stove in our first apartment, a cramped space we shared with a beautiful black woman named Azure.

Bless her, she never seemed to mind that I would sometimes miss cleaning up minced onions from the sink.

We shared an apartment that overlooked a golf course with two other friends who were involved in a tumultuous affair.

They broke up and yet were locked into a lease with us. I slaved over large pots of pasta, trying to smooth over the hurt and awkward feelings.

Italian cooking took a break when my Second Serious Boyfriend and I moved to Seattle and then broke up.

I was too busy to cook and was involved in becoming a party girl extraordinare with my Korean- American roommate, who introduced me to food from her birthplace. I may have eaten Italian, but I didn’t cook it. It was all pure survival.

It wasn’t till last year that my Italian romance began again. Then, four years into a wonderful relationship that, even now, gets better each day, I rediscovered Italian food. What a joy it was after three years of low-carb meals I’d chosen to inflict upon myself.

The density of pasta, the richness of the sauces, the tang of the olive oil, I missed them all.

I’d forgotten that if the oil is good, I can close my eyes and imagine the plant it came from, the earth it sprouted in, the sunlight that might have touched its leaves. And I would give thanks for the things in my life, for the food I was about to eat.

I don’t imagine myself to be any kind of chef. I rely on a few good dishes, playing with and tweaking carbonara recipes, tomato sauces and bean soups.

The joy comes in working with ingredients that I love. I adore the smell of rosemary, fried till almost crisp. I love the smell of sofritto – the onion, garlic, celery and carrot mix that is a fantastic base for almost any sauce and soup in Italian cooking.

To tease the flavours out as these fry in oil together is not an art – it is an act of love.

And the thing that links it all together, that makes this a truly satisfying meal, is the knowledge that I will feed the one I love with this meal. I will nourish him, give him strength, elicit that sigh of pleasure once the food hits his tongue.

I wait anxiously every time I make something for him. Is it good, I ask.

But it’s the unspoken question embedded in the layers of the sauce, in the meal I have presented, that is really on my mind: Do you know how much I love you and how grateful I am that you are in my life?

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