cooking sinigang

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.