Maybe it was the subconscious awareness of my incessantly
gurgling stomach, or the growing sense of longing for something reminding of
home, or the realization that the past couple of days had marked a milestone in
this tortuous road that is my life, that impelled me to achieve the
unachievable: to cook myself a proper Filipino meal.
Regardless, I’m proud to say that this short misadventure
didn’t prove to be as disastrous as I expected. The end product? A pot of
sour-spicy pork sinigang with eggplant, spinach, and kale, and a steaming bowl
of jasmine rice on the side.
I knew I didn’t have a gift for cooking since fifth grade.
Our stick-thin professor, Ma’am Lucila, (God bless her soul) took the pains to
explain to us in hard-to-understand Tagalog how important it was to have the
right balance of seasonings and ingredients in preparing stews.
However, the math-and-science geek in me took all her lessons
for granted, believing that numbers and test tubes were what ran the world.
Cooking, I thought, was something I would never have to do for myself in my sheltered
life, and thus I only retained whatever information I needed to pass the class
– her words went in through one ear and out the other. And now, sadly, here I
am more than a decade later, no less a culinary idiot than my fifth grade self.
So I reluctantly listened to my brother, who was quickly
becoming the foodie amateur himself. Cooking was a lot like running: a task
excruciatingly hard once you barely start doing it, but becomes immensely
enjoyable once you are used to it. I took a five-minute jaunt to Fiesta, a
local discount supermarket known for its surprisingly diverse international
food selection, to grab a hefty bag of rice and the vegetables I needed to make
the dish that I was craving for.
I scooped a couple of cups of uncooked rice onto the rice
cooker before I started. As I went on, I found that, true to my co-worker’s
word, cooking sinigang was far easier than it sounded. I chopped some garlic,
onions, a plump tomato and three Serrano peppers and plopped them all onto the
steaming pot where I had been boiling some pork. I stirred in some Mama Sita’s "tamarind seasoning" mix (this doesn’t count as cheating, does it?) and let it stand for
several minutes. Finally, I tossed in a handful of okra, eggplant, spinach and
kale for good measure. And voila, un chef d’ouvre! I thought.
The broth was fine, sour and meaty with a slight hint of
spiciness, and the vegetables nicely cooked. But, oh, the meat! It was tougher
to chew than inch-thick cardboard. I was crestfallen, yet I knew I had to
remedy it, else I’d have to throw it all out. I didn’t want to re-boil the
whole pot and turn all the vegetables into mush, so I gingerly scooped out
every piece of pork that I could find, poured everything out, and let the meat
boil in a cup of broth for an hour.
By the time I the pork was done, I had already stuffed
myself full with eggplant and okra, and there was nothing left to do but store
everything away. Now, I have a week-long supply of sinigang in the fridge with
nobody but me to finish it. Any takers?
Regardless, I found the whole process revelatory,
therapeutic, if not amusing. It was gratifying to find out that I could prepare
a dish from scratch without following a recipe to the dot. Who knows? Maybe
this is Providence telling me that wearing a sous-chef’s cap in an upscale Manhattan
restaurant is something that I should aspire for.
