Ferdinand ‘Budgie’ Montoya’s Filipino family recipes

Chicken in coconut vinegar, vegetables with fermented shrimp, and cassava cheesecake – the Sarap chef’s homage to his mother’s cooking

I was born in Mindanao, in the south of the Philippines, but I grew up in Sydney. We used to return quite often when I was younger, but there was a lot of instability during the late 1990s and early 00s, so we stopped and I never really went back. I tried to be as Aussie as possible, assimilate as much as I could. “Budgie” is an old nickname I’ve had since high school when I fell off a balcony trying to catch a friend’s pet budgie I’d let out of its cage.