MussoLOLen is Always Right! |

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.

Microtel Boracay
O hai sponsors sup?

If it were not for our lovely sponsors, I would not have spent last weekend with bloggers in Boracay. It’s funny, because I’ve been to Boracay twice, and I don’t believe I’ve spent more than a thousand pesos for both trips. The first time I was at Boracay, friends from Canada took care of plane fare, my hotel accommodations, and everything else I ate or drank. The plane fare and accommodations of last weekend’s Blogger Boracay Trip was paid for by Seair and Microtel Boracay respectively, with dinner sponsored by Zuzuni on Saturday night. The only time I shelled out any money was when we went clubbing on Saturday night. Even then I didn’t need to order too many drinks because we had some Absolut vodka beforehand, courtesy of the Microtel bar.

My life is made of awesome like that.

My life. It is awesome.

Most people I know who have been to Boracay rave about how Boraaaah is THE place to be at. Take it from me though – it’s not as great as people make it out to be. Or maybe this is because I’m the type of person who’d rather go camping at isolated beaches or shack up at low-key resorts, the kind that don’t have the comforts of home, instead of partying in tourist-trap tropical islands.

I arrived in Boracay late Friday afternoon and was very disappointed to wake up to dark, overcast skies on Saturday morning. Not that it stopped me from attempting to swim in Puka Beach (which isn’t meant for swimming to begin with) and snorkeling out in the sea.

Me and Gail at Puka Beach, pwnt by the waves

A fishies. I can see them!

After a lovely dinner at Zuzuni, we went clubbing. Yay, how totally unpredictable! I was itching to do something completely out of the box though, so I decided to go on a mission that evening. My objective was to make a new friend, and that friend has to be a foreigner. Boracay in January is crawling with tourists from the west and I had difficulty suppressing how envious I was of them. How lucky they are to be in a country so strange and foreign to them! I wanted to get to know someone and live vicariously through his experiences, adventures, and views about the world. And yes, it has to be a guy because girls scare me.

A night life. We has it!

As the night progressed, however, I realized that a discussion like that might have been too much to hope for. I did meet a lot of guys that evening, some too briefly to even consider them an acquaintance. Most of them were only interested in dancing with me or making small talk in heavily accented English. At two separate occasions however, I did get around to have a proper conversation with two guys who told me all about Madagascar, Africa, the villages of northern Thailand. But even these conversations had a small talk-like feel to them. Also, it was difficult to really listen or make yourself heard when there’s a large speaker blaring hip-hop or dance music two feet away from you. I was tempted to ask, “Would you like to go someplace more quiet?” but thought the better of it. I’m Filipino, they’re white – what else do Filipino girls and white guys do in Boracay? They didn’t seem like the sleazebag type but still; the last thing I wanted was to look like I was trying to pick them up. In any case, the conversations never got very interesting and as if on cue, my party companions would drag me out to another bar right when I was running out of questions to ask.

All I wanted to meet that evening was some kind of a kindred spirit, but I suppose Boracay is the wrong place to look for those. You see, people go to Boracay to visit the clubs, drink the booze, get tanned, try out the water sports, and most importantly – have random, anonymous sex. I bet they don’t even notice that the locals live along narrow, dirt-road streets in crowded, hollow-block houses half the size of their hotel room. They bury their cigarette butts in the sand and toss their cellphones overboard. Marc actually spotted an old Nokia phone among the corals while he was snorkeling and fished it out of the water. Yay for decent human beings who remove tourist trash from the sea!

It makes me a little sad about how the hordes of visitors to Boracay don’t really give a damn, but on the other hand, I can understand why they feel that way. The allure of Boracay, according to a Manilenean I talked to there, is that its’ a beautiful escape from the stress and reality she has to deal with back home. That’s not a very telling statement since all vacations are a grounded escape from reality. I think the real allure of Boracay is that it’s a safe, familiar escape. This island, really, is pretty much what fancy mall Greenbelt would be like if you added a tropical beach to it. Boracay’s white sand and white tourists is enough to make you feel like you’re far away from home, but it’s familiar enough so you don’t get culture-shocked by strange customs and unfamiliar languages. It’s a great place to meet strangers, fuck strangers, and act out in any way you want because chances are, everyone will be too drunk to remember all the stupid things you did there. Who you are in Boracay is not who you are in Manila. For people who don’t have the balls to act the way they want to in the city, anyway.

I’m still me wherever I go, though. Idealistic notions about the world and all.

Some unsolicited advice for those of you who are planning to go to Boracay. Wear your tsinelas (or Havaianas, or whatever you call them) as your feet will get wet when you get on and off the boat. Make back-up plans in case of rain. Respect the locals. The beach is not an ashtray, so your goddamn cigarette butts in the trash. And don’t be an idiot and take your cellphone with you when you go out swimming.

Oh, and because somebody on my Livejournal commented that I look like an endorser of Microtel in my photo, Bim took the liberty to make the following awesome adverfisments:

Other entries about the Boracay Blogger Trip:
Boracay Escape with Pinoy Travel Bloggers
Microtel Boracay in Diniwid Beach
Boracay and the Dream
A Long Boracay Weekend with Bloggers
Pinoy Travel and Photo Bloggers Go to Boracay
Microtel Boracay
Bloggers Boracay Bound

WE’RE HEEERE!

Well what do you know, I ended up NOT making an ass out of myself on the intarwebs after all. The wonderful Lorna (aka TheBachelorGirl) took the time to personally speak to Fritz and me so we could sort out the mess that was my unexpected marketing scheme. What a very nice lady she is! Thanks to her, we got to occupy the best seats in the house. Even the obscenely tall couple sitting in front of us could not ruin the view from where we were seated.

Unlike Fritz, who pretty much knew the soundtrack by heart even before we got our tickets, I only knew of two songs from Avenue Q: Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist and The Internet Is For Porn. (Aside: I find it odd that my friends keep cracking jokes about how I would know a lot of things about the internet being for porn. Me?! Lauren Dado? Role model for the Filipino youth? What do I know about vulgar things like Internet pornography? Srsly gais.) I felt like a douche for showing up unprepared, so I went on a mad Avenue Q OST download spree before heading out. It’s a good thing I wasn’t able to find the complete soundtrack though. You see, when it comes to watching movies or plays, I believe that Ignorance Is Bliss. I like knowing next to nothing about what I’m about to see. This makes me a more open-minded viewer and keeps me from falling into the trap of holding unrealistic expectations or from “challenging” what I’m about to watch (”Come on puppets, bring on the LOLZ!”). Also, I become more receptive to happy surprises and unexpected plot twists.

The Ignorance Is Bliss tactic brought rise to a rather unusual experience I had while watching Avenue Q: for a very brief moment during the second act of the play, I actually felt like crying.

This happened when Kate Monster sang the lines, “I wish I could go back to college. Life was so simple back then.” Fuck me if I haven’t made that same wish (almost) every day since I graduated! Actually, the opening lines of the play – “What do you do with a BA in English? What is my life going to be?” – was enough to hit me right where it hurts. I did not expect Avenue Q to address the question of Purpose or to portray the confusion and self-doubt that plagues us sheltered college kids when we step out into the Real World. The lighthearted moments were appropriate placed though, so that the heavy stuff didn’t get too heavy. Thank god for that, or I really would have burst into tears and made an idiot out of myself.

Besides the existential angst, Avenue Q also brings up other Real World issues people don’t like saying out loud simply because they aren’t very pleasant things. Things like: you aren’t as special as you thought you were, money is a real bitch to come by even with a degree, and happiness is an evasive and fleeting thing. If I had kids, I’d take my kids to see it because nobody ever tells children about the awful things that await them in the Real World. Then I’ll make sure they don’t have access to sharp objects or ropes afterwards. Also, nobody ever tells children about sex and how it happens. So parents – if you feel awkward about explaining how the boy’s peepee goes into the girl’s vajayjay to make babies, the very graphic sex scene in the play is quite instrumental explaining the reproductive process. My mom did her best with me, but for the longest time I seriously thought I could get pregnant by kissing someone.

We have pictures of the cast, just not with them. Suxxorz.

Performance-wise, the cast was excellent, particularly Aiza Seguerra, who pulled off a very believable performance as the grown-up child actor Gary Coleman, right down to the accent. Joel Trinidad was also amazing as Trekkie Monster and Nikky. Then again, I’m a little biased because I’ve had the hots for him ever since I saw him perform at Mag:Net Bonifacio High Street. Once I have more time, I intend to make Jayvee bring me to his SPIT shows so I can stalk him properly and propose marriage, or perhaps concubinage, when the opportunity arises.

I think the reviews done by bloggers more eloquent than myself already said what I want to say. Which is: go watch Avenue Q! I hear the shows are all sold out, but try to mug someone you know with tickets anyway. The jail time will be worth it, I promise.