Faced with fixing a cup of instant coffee, my husband PV will ask someone else to do it for him for fear of using the wrong proportions of hot water, coffee, cream and sugar. Small wonder he loves brewed coffee. He takes it black.
When asked to help assemble Sunday dinner’s salad, my sister asked how large did I want the lettuce pieces. To which I replied “Bite-sized.” A silent minute later, she followed up with a genuinely puzzled “How big is bite-sized?”
Then there’s a good friend of mine who’s idea of preparing a meal was to heat up canned sausage, corned beef or sardines. Fortunately, she’s learned how to whip up a few dishes that don’t require a can opener. But she struggles to repeat her successes and will balk at any recipe that requires more than five ingredients or two cooking steps: cutting up everything and throwing them into the pan.
As for my eldest son Bryan—he often comes home with stories of cooking disasters. An aspiring chef, he’s taking the culinary track of his hotel and restaurant management course and spends many hours in his school’s training kitchen. He is regularly dismayed by classmates who can’t tell a wok from a skillet, think folding is applicable only to fabric and paper and, if a recipe does not clearly describe the procedure, would separate eggs according to color and size.
Bryan still cringes at the memory of the classmate who dumped all the ingredients of the cake they were making into the mixing bowl in spite of step-by-step instructions to add them one at a time. The result was so heavy, he claims he could have used it in his weight-training program.
Welcome to the world of the culinarily challenged where the kitchen is a landmine-strewn battlefield, scorched pans and burnt toast are the rule and setting a kettle of water to boil can reduce a grown man to tears.
It seems cooking is an instinct that not all humans are born with. How else to explain the smiles on certain faces and the scowls on others when confronted with one of the most basic activities of daily life? I’ve known people to whom making a simple sandwich is a conundrum at best and torture at worst. And whipping up iced tea or lemonade from a mix should be a cinch yet I’ve watched a number of poor souls botch it even when they follow directions to the letter.
Maybe that’s the problem. Successful cooking does not always entail exact measurements. Hence the phrase “season to taste”. PV complains that when he follows the directions for mixing instant beverages, they seldom ever come out right. Yet when I do the exact same things, they almost never go wrong.
It’s all about balance, I guess; something that’s done on a case-to-case basis. And not everyone has the knack for it or even the capacity to learn how to achieve it. But if people did or could, there wouldn’t be a need for specialists in any profession, now would there?
Incredibly, we’ve employed supposed specialists who should never have been allowed into the kitchen, let alone near a frying pan. I recall one culinary wannabe who tried to whiten her broths not by using the water in which the rice had been washed but by adding evaporated milk. That was the first time I’d ever seen curdled sinigang.
This same “cook” served crispy pata with bottled sandwich spread, consistently ignored the directions on the back of the pancake mix box in favor of haphazardly throwing ingredients together and grilled an entire slab of tuna until it was as moist and tender as a plank of charred wood.
Another so-called cook cost us quite a bundle in erroneously prepared foodstuffs and mishandled appliances. For instance, she routinely overcrowded the frying pan in a bid to speed up the process and wound up boiling food in oil instead. Her pork chops were barely edible as a result. Her fried chicken was virtually unrecognizable. And my mother almost had a fit when the woman used the three kilos of rack of lamb she had bought for my dad’s birthday dinner for a regular lunchtime nilaga.
Our microwave oven did not survive her brief stint with us nor did our coffee maker or our turbo broiler. The last straw was when she set the kitchen on fire because she negligently left the gas on while chatting on the phone with a complete stranger who randomly dialled our number in his search for a phone pal.
Because we’ve always had cooks, my mother seldom prepared family meals. But she knew enough to come up with delicious dishes. My father was the expert in the kitchen, however, even if he didn’t spend that much time there. His skill had a little to do with hanging around his mother who’d been a wonderful cook but the greater reason was a discerning palate that was part inborn and part developed through exposure to good cooking. He could tell when there was too much or too little of anything or when everything was just right. And he was a stickler for true flavor whether a dish was in its pure form or fusion fare.
Not so a certain relative who goes by the popularity of a foreign cuisine restaurant among Filipinos to award it a badge of excellence while completely ignoring establishments that are heavily patronized by their respective nationals just because they aren’t as well known. Not surprisingly, her culinary know-how is rudimentary at most and a commendable meal at her home is usually a catered one.
Except when she’s been lucky enough to find a cook worth her salt. Then and only then can she make the claim of serving good homemade dishes. Whether she can recognize their authenticity however is a story for another time.
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