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Despite being hopelessly inept at the kitchen, I found myself at the Center for the Culinary Arts’ Kitchen Discovery Class (KDC) last Friday. The KDC is a six-hour introductory class where you get to cook and bake in a commercial kitchen and figure out which one you’re better at. Not that I need a class to discover that I suck at cooking but I’m all for throwing myself into all sorts of odd situations and learning from them, even when I already have a general idea of how they’ll turn out.

What I ended up discovering at the KDC is not so much any hidden cooking skillz0rz (I seriously don’t have any) as little revelations about myself. I had several of them during the course of six hours:

I’m not a food person.

I don’t have much of an appetite to begin with, and I’m not at all prissy about where my food comes from or how it’s prepared. I rarely ever eat at expensive, trendy restaurants because I’m a total cheapskate - it feels like a waste to spend over 300 bucks on something I’m just going to crap out the next day. Perhaps my lack of culinary appreciation is why I’ve shown little or no interest in cooking the proper way. As far as making my own meals is concerned, cooking should only involve three ingredients: canned food, a can opener, and a microwave oven.

Of course, I kept all those things to myself during the class. Why? Because the chef instructor was absolutely dreamy and I didn’t want to be the only unsophisticated, uncivilized, unappreciative-of-food lout in the room. I hope it wasn’t obvious that I was inwardly freaking out when I glanced at the handout and saw that we were to make caramelized salmon with orange-shoyu glaze, served sauteed mixed vegetables, soba noodles, lemongrass beurre blanc, and balsamic soy reduction. I’m told that I have a very expressive face.

Seriously though, since when did cooking get so complicated? I missed my can opener already.

I like being alone in the kitchen.

In a commercial kitchen, you have to learn to work with other people and make do whatever utensils are available. Making do with resources is easy enough for me, but please don’t make me work with other people - at least, not in a kitchen anyway. I don’t have anything against my classmates, but have you ever tried chopping vegetables with someone hovering over your back? It feels a lot like someone peering at your screen when you’re writing - unnerving, distracting, and downright irritating. Not to mention that a kitchen is already suffocating enough without fourteen people sharing the same small space with you and taking the ingredients right when you need them. I don’t care if I don’t know my ass from my elbow in the kitchen. I like figuring out the recipe and preparing all the ingredients all by myself.

Clearly I’m not going to be a commercial chef anytime in the near future.

If I can’t pronounce it, I sure as hell can’t cook it.

My groupmates asked me to do one simple thing: make the lemongrass beurre blanc sauce for the salmon. It involves throwing a bunch of ingredients together and putting them over a fire - nothing too difficult, even if my cooking experience doesn’t amount to much.

Naturally, I ended up burning the sauce. Don’t ask me how that happened. One minute, it was cooking quite nicely; when it checked up on it again, it turned into this black crusty thing at the bottom of the pan. I blame it on the fact that the sauce contained fancy French words I couldn’t pronounce.

I was hoping that Chef McDreamy wouldn’t chew me out when I sheepishly owned up to burning the sauce. To my surprise, he commended me for my honesty. Most students, he said, would have lied and said that they put the beurre blanc sauce somewhere in there. I wanted to impress him with my wit and intellect by saying something about how lying takes too much effort and that the world would be a far better place if everyone just said what was on their minds, but he moved on to the next group before I could even open my mouth. Damnit.

I’m pretty damn good at making desserts.

There is one thing I’m fairly good at in the kitchen though: baking. Besides the warm childhood memories I associate with raw cookie batter and the scent of bread in the oven, I love the exact, almost-ritualistic rhythm of the baking process. During the afternoon baking session, I insisted that I make the saffron panna cotta - which I did with absolutely no difficulty. I even shaped the almond tuiles that we used to garnish the panna cotta. Of course it took my groupmates and I four times to make the caramel sauce because the damn thing kept burning in the pan. The end result, however, was kick-ass, restaurant-quality panna cotta that tasted just as good as it looked.

I still suck at making sauces, but it’s good to know that there’s one kitchen-y thing I can do right and that I actually enjoy.

The Kitchen Discovery Class is a 6-hour class that takes place every Friday. If you’d like to try it out, call way ahead of time because there’s only a limited number of slots per class. For more information on the Kitchen Discovery Class and other courses, visit the CCA website.

If the verb “to emasculate” defines the act of chopping off a guy’s nuts, what verb do you use to describe getting your ovaries snipped? By surgeons who learned surgery through the Wii? In front of the kitchen sink?

Last Monday, Anne and I randomly decided to cook something for the The Man Blog guys, girls, and friends using my mom’s shiny kitchen. Not that the TMB dudes need to get fatter than they already are, but I figured that it’s high time I learned how to cook. You see, I’ve always thought of myself as a closet housewife. I may be all, “You can’t make me give up my life and career for you! *snap snap snap*” but I have this feeling that once I settle down, I’ll most likely become a devoted wife and a suburban, pot-dealing soccer mom. Well, maybe minus the pot-dealing.

I’m weirdly traditional like that. Shut up.

It occurred to me, however, that there’s one tiny problem to this vision I have of my future self: I don’t know the first thing about being a closet housewife. My idea of cleaning is hiding all my crap under the bed so that my mom, the ultimate neat freak, doesn’t get stroke every time she pokes her head in my room. I can’t cook. I hate kids and toddlers. I hold babies like I hold cats - very awkwardly. I can sort of sew. Oh and once, I picked up crochet as a hobby and attempted to make my then-boyfriend a blanket using extra-soft, 100% cotton yarn I bought from the States. I wasn’t even 1/4ths done with it when I get bored with crochet and moved onto something else.

I can, however, analyze a poem, write songs with no lyrics, and defend my wanton shopping habits using John Maynard Keynes’ paradox of thrift. Other than that, I got nothing.

So in preparation for My Future Self as a Closet Housewife five, ten, twenty years from now, I met up with Anne, Coco, and Fritz at Hypermarket to buy ingredients for chicken casserole and steak. Actually, THEY bought the ingredients; I was coming from The Land of Long Taxi Lines (Megamall) and reached them as they were paying for stuff at the cash register. Yeah, I’m very useful to have around like that.

An hour later we were at my house - the women in the kitchen and the men off gallavanting somewhere. I was to cook the steak, Anne was to make the chicken casserole. I realized too late that I didn’t know the first thing about preparing the marinade, but a quick text message to my mom saved my ass and made me look like I knew what I was doing. Unfortunately, I gave away my kitchen n00bness when I told Anne cheerfully, “The marinade’s done!” Her expert eyes looked over at what I did and asked if I rubbed the marinade into the meat. To which I replied, “You mean, I have to touch it? With my bare hands?” I stifled an “Eww gross!” and proceeded to do as she said.

Once the marinade was all massaged into the meat, I offered to help Anne with the casserole, who then gave me the potatoes and told me to peel them. I’ve never peeled a potato in my life BUT I’ve read enough books and watched enough movies on World War II to know that peeling potatoes involved some knife action of sorts. It’s all about imitating the hand gestures, see.

I had barely begun peeling my first potato ever when I noticed that Fritz was leaning on the kitchen counter, snickering at us wimmin. Anne told me that he always does that when she cooks and that I should just ignore him like you would ignore a fly buzzing about your ear. But I didn’t want to ignore him - I wanted to swat him away from the kitchen with a flyswatter. It’s not nice to make fun of my potato-peeling skillz while I’m holding a sharp object.

Finally, Fritz came up to me and said that I was indeed peeling the potato all wrong. “This is how you do it,” he said, with a hint of condescension. I handed him the knife and stood there watching Fritz seriously pwn my ass at potato peeling. Never have I felt so emasculated before. Except instead of balls I had ovaries that were slowly getting whittled down to their atomic numbers by the potato-peeling knife. I know that this is the age of gender equality and all, but come on. Men shouldn’t be better at peeling potatoes than me! That’s just not how the world is supposed to work. T_T

A couple of hours later, dinner was ready and the guests have arrived. I noticed that the comments people made on my steak had something to do with how near or far they were seated from me. Fritz said it was okay, but it would have been better if the steak were grilled instead of baked. He was far from stabbing reach. Luis, who was at the far end of the table, mumbled something about how he likes his steak really bloody. Penny and Coco were smart enough to just eat and stay quiet. Jayvee, on the other hand, immediately began praising my steak after he took his first bite. Guess he must have noticed that my knife was poised for action.

I gotta admit, that wasn’t so bad for a first attempt. But I think I’ll do the cooking alone next time, just so I don’t embarrass myself in front of the experts. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to make chili con carne for a high school reunion tonight.

After more than two weeks, the novelty of partying and being a hardcore bum is beginning to wear off. To alleviate the summer boredom, I decided to take it upon myself to learn how to cook my favorite dishes. I begun my domestication project yesterday when, out of nowhere, I suddenly had this strong craving for some carbonara. With no cookbook and only my instincts to guide me, I was able to whip up the perfect carbonara sauce. Not too creamy, not too salty, not too bland, and just the right amount of herbs. I was very pleased.

Tonight I attempted to make one of my favorite Filipino dishes–beef sinigang, with a little pork. Sinigang is a sour, tamarind-based soup with meat and a variety of vegetables such as kangkong (the green leafy things in the picture), chopped tomatoes, siling labuyo (a native kind of pepper), and maybe some okra. I like mine very sour and slightly spicy and for some reason, the household help couldn’t quite make the kind of sinigang that I like. My goal tonight was to figure out how to make the perfect beef sinigang from scratch, with absolutely no MSG.

Unfortunately I made my decision to cook sinigang at the last minute, thinking I could just go to the grocery and pick up fresh sampalok (tamarind buds). What I didn’t know was that supermarkets don’t carry sampalok; I’d have to go to the wet market for that. The household help was able to acquire a few buds from a nearby store, but it was far from enough. I resigned myself to an unhealthy meal and tossed in three Knorr tamarind broth cubes.

Again, I didn’t use a recipe and was only guided by my sense of taste and the instructions of the household help. The concoction I ultimately came up with was indeed quite sour; I had more than one serving and my parents seem to have enjoyed it. Still, it wasn’t the kind of sinigang that makes my tastebuds orgasm. I’m a little bit disappointed, but I suppose it takes a couple of tries in order to develop the perfect recipe. Perhaps I’ll try it again in a few weeks.

More on sinigang
Wikipedia entry on sinigang