MAIDEN LAUNCH OF FOOD HUNTRESS’S OFFICIAL TV SHOW: CHEF’S DAY OUT

The ‘thousand needles’ that pricked through my body evolved into a hardcore flu that plastered me to bed for what seemed like an eternity. For all that cooking and carrying a heavy laptop around, my left shoulder became a dilapidated limb that screamed its own agony every time I wake up in the morning. I literally had to get someone to help me braid my hair and slip my jacket into lest the pain breaks me into uncontrollable tears. But alas! So true was the old saying that behind every flu is a rainbow of better opportunities.

The great thing that happened is, I have been so lucky to have signed a contract with E.T. TV – (The Extraterrestrial TV). The genius behind this ET TV believed that there was another line that ET said in the movie besides “E.T. phone home…”. It is “E.T. tee… vee…” – Why, ET wants to watch TV! So to immortalize ET, this TV genius decided to add another program with me in it. (Huh!) I just mentioned in a recent conversation that I liked Ming Tsai over other TV chefs, but now this TV genius wanted to create a TV blog program for me! Anyway, ET TV is the official channel of Food Huntress’s show which will showcase her adventures around town.

To start with, I was given a great day off by the Tribe Chief with all expenses shouldered by his checkbook, to go around town – “just to see” – and a few assignments on the side. Now, I officially hand over this post to ET TV to show us around…

EPISODE I: THE FRENCH CONNECTION

Script: Hi! Welcome to the premiere of Food Huntress’s TV- blog show Chef’s Day Out. You know what’s great about today? It’s our day- off and here we go- on a mini field trip around town! Yipee- kewpie! We are headed for the Saturday Market at Salcedo Village in Makati… haven of fine food people and talented cooks.

Indeed, it is a feast in there!

Let's take a look at this French man who is so engrossed in his craft (which I like) - making crepes. I asked him where he bought his buckwheat flour and he had said "Santi's"... - it's a store here frequented by cooking people.

Busy, busy, busy!

Freshly- made honey butter crepe, yum!

Wait, is it French- friendship day? Why are we swarmed by French cooks around here?

- no shmancy- fancy, just real great food! La Cuisine Fracaise’s quiche Lorraine is swear- worthy: “!@#$% , it’s good!”

Freshly- baked breads.

Delightful lasagna.

...and some flyers you can take home with you. When they saw us taking photos of the poster, these gracious French men handed me some brochures instead.

So that's the short episode of the show for now. I would like to thank The Body Shop and Maybelline for my hair and make up (hahaha!) and MGM taxi service. Meanwhile, we are on our way to the next segment of Chef’s Day Out – so stay tuned!

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Le Cuisine Francaise is located at #8 Farol St., Urdaneta Village, Makati City 1225 Metro Manila Philippines. Tel #”s: 893 2072 email: lacuisine@dorias.net

They sell salads and soups – Ceviche, Taboule, Soupe a l’ongon et croutons (P200- 270)
Quiches – Lorraine, Tomato Basilic, Forestiere, Pissaladier (P160/ slice or P850 whole)
Breads- Sourdogh bread, ficelle, brioche, rye bread, pain au chocolat (P50- 250)
Pates- Chicken liver mousse to country pate to chicken terrine (P200- 220/ slice)
Sausages – Boudin Noir, saucisse de paris, etc ( P170- 220 each)
Pastas- Lasagna, aux legumes, chicken tapenade, mossaka (P300/ SVG)

…… and many other for the main main courses. I will leave it right here only so you will be curious enough to give them a call and have excellent cuisine delivered at your doorstep. Their minimum orders is P1000 only ($20.00). Bon appetit!

The un-EC Life

I could only hope for the best in everybody and I do hope that you are all having a great time. Everyday I wake up this week it seemed like my body is pierced with a thousand needles. And the funny thing is that at night I tend to wake up when an idea pops up and write it down lest I forget the following morning…the look of a perfect wagashi… What again is the proportion of butter to flour to milk for that great white sauce? How much again is that wine for the French onion soup? Every time I close my eyes the dreams are no longer of erotic things but drifting Japanese kanji. Before I knew it, it’s 4 am and I have to cook again.

So this is the EC life. I don’t know the PhD nor the MD life, but the EC life is far from being academic nor smart- it is swinging in different directions between science and romance and poetry and fine arts and humanities and anthropology, and the marketman’s and fisherman’s and the farmer’s- and the insane (or at least sometimes, I do have that little sentiment that some aspects of my job is driving me crazy.) I could not patch all the pieces altogether, but the EC life is like a mosaic of many professions. For now, we set aside the culinary trainings. You’re doing French? Ok, so by all means learn the language- therefore you need a stardust of the linguist; befriend a flirtatious French man – therefore you need the skills of public relations; watch Amelie- ah- humanities professor? You’re doing Chinese? Go back to the incense- smelling streets of Chinatown, travel to the land of Chairman Mao, sleep with a Chinese cookbook- learn feng shui! You’re doing Spanish? Ah, those Spanish lessons– and reward yourself with canonigo afterwards. You’re doing Japanese? Learn the hiragana, go to Little Tokyo, and don’t ignore those creepy horror flicks! (And most importantly, don’t forget the portrait of Takeshi Kaneshiro). It doesn’t matter if you become a little of a multi- lingual freak- it’s part of the job.

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I could not imagine how I would go through this had my initiation been incubated in the four corners of the culinary school. The more I open another book and discover another dish, the more my paranoia kicks in and the more I start to doubt if I can really cook or not.

My cluttered desk is the portrait of this predicament. Since I have been working on things Japanese, my screensaver were all Zen Buddhists and geishas and mornings at the Tsukiji market downloaded from the National Geographic archives. And yes, live Japanese , speak Japanese. Start with the Japanese ABC’s if you want to read the labels next time you go to the Jap grocery.

My past time on an ordinary afternoon is leafing through some cookbooks for ideas and inspiration to create a hybrid of Japanese and European cuisine. I am a cookbook freak myself, but still, the rules that rule are the following: Rule number 1: Do not copy recipes. Rule number 2: Do not copy recipes. (By the way, is there such thing as ‘food plagiarism’ in the culinary world? You know, your restaurant makes money from a particular recipe you lifted from the book.)

Specially if you are working on a whole restaurant menu, unless you wanted to acknowledge the genius of the author who made the recipe, I wouldn’t think it’s fair to copy down to the last teaspoon of salt.

Why I call this un- EC (read: uneasy) life because of the many food tugs-of-war between me and my boss. He wants me to create dishes taken from snapshots that he got from his travels abroad. “Chef, I want you to do this.” My source is the picture and not the recipe. It is like creating a brassierie from a post World- War photo- no blue prints- just the picture. This is where that saying “Imagination is better than knowledge“ comes in. Ergo, it is helpful that you have, albeit it drives you to the brink of insanity, a little piece of each and every helpful profession. How can you translate on the plate the penchant for things European of the Japanese? And vice versa? Since there was no recipe on hand for the said dish, I had to resurrect the essence of a beautiful French woman wearing a kimono walking down the streets of New York with a white parasol… The creaminess of a French sauce smothering steamed Hokkaido scallops on pasta topped with a chiffonade of nori ? Any individual who can imagine would probably get the picture. But not anyone who can cook can paint the picture on the plate.

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If I could remember well, there is Math 101 at every academic curriculum, but what I didn’t learn from the schools I’ve been to is one that one skill that constantly inspires and changes the world: Imagination.

EGGS- PERIMENT 101

Whenever me and the chefs are talking about the foods and cuisines we cook (god, I hate it when people ask questions like “what cuisine do you specialize in?”), I want the questions to go elsewhere so I always drop in my culinary waterloo: Egg Cookery. Yes, the precious and humble eggs give me that uncomfortable feel in my gut- I don’t know where all of it came from. And this egg cooking is not about soufflés nor pavlovas, but… boiling. Yes- boiling eggs!

Sunday morning in a halter dress and I have to review some egg cooking techniques. I am creating this Japanese dish that includes a hanjuku tamago (soft- boiled egg), and it all has to be very, very perfect. (Aaarrgghh… do I really have a tough destiny with the perfectionist Japanese?!)

Egg boiling 101. Water must be a full rolling boil. As aggressive as it could get. The temperature is steady anyway. Drop the egg slowly. In this case I marked the shells 5 minutes, 6 minutes and 10 minutes. The counting of the minutes start as soon as the eggs are dropped into the water. What is so fascinating about cooking eggs (and sugar) is that they change very rapidly at every minute that passes. This calls a lot of attentiveness on the cook’s part. Even the temperature of the egg when you cook it is crucial too. So I have to compare- chilled vs. room temp. - just to be very, very sure. (See, I get all too OC at this). Be sure to have very cold water in which to plunge the eggs after cooking.

I skipped the three- minute and four- minute eggs. The egg white and the yolk aren’t all set during those hours anyway so I don’t have much need of them. I settled with the 5 minutes :

Careful with the yolk. Although the white is set, it is still very fragile.

The 10- minute egg. I prefer hard- boiled eggs that are chalky on the outside but have a moist center. I like its good mouth feel.

The 6- minute egg. My favorite. The yolk is just beginning to set around the sides but the inside is still runny. Oeufs mollet, anyone?

Good morning!

ATALANTA: The Food Huntress Inspiration

My blog is turning one year next month. I opened this blog in 2007 in a century- old library, and I do admit that there was a time when I have been a little worried if I had the staying power to sustain it. But as it shows, my counter continues to roll- many thanks to all of you out there in the world who took time to read my page.

I think it is quite timely to write here a few facts on how this blog alter ego came to be. It all started with this little illustration of Atalanta, a Greek myth character, whose story I have been reading since… I can’t remember when. From this picture emerged the name ‘food huntress’ – a woman holding a spear about to shoot a boar - all of which speaks a lot about my psyche more than sheer fascination for this literary character. And lately I started living in that fantasy as this year I got into a masculine gathering of men – being the only woman in a male- dominated kitchen brigade- as Atalanta has been with the hunters of Arcady. Indeed, we become the reality we create.

One true conscience of this blog page is my dramatic/ romantic side. While garnished with a little surrealism, it intends to indirectly illustrate that dimension which is innate in each one of us: our natural and unpretentious tendency to be appreciative of beautiful things, good food, and our natural inclination to love. Why Romeo and Juliet are immortal, why the Taj Mahal was built, why some foods are termed aphrodisiacs, and why the human race lives on - all of these respond to that primitive nature of the human heart.

Legend has it that whoever could beat the swift- footed Atalanta in a foot race would be the one she’s set to give her heart to. Those who don’t win were executed. Apparently it is not my intent to beat a man in a foot race nor any duel (hahaha) for him to earn my affection, though I admit, I do most of the time imagine the adrenalin rush of it. Atalanta’s legend goes perfectly with my kind of love story which is not the type where an egomaniacal necrophiliac Prince Charming (haven’t we noticed that Prince Charming is a womanizer? He’s the one and the same prince that helpless princesses are linked to) makes love to a sleeping princess, nor the Madame Butterfly martyrdom, but more of this wonderful Greek myth where the hero was measured by his courage and the pureness of his intentions.

At some point in my life I have become naturally nonchalant with men- either treating them respectfully as plain comrades or with hands down indifference that such attempts for courtship die even before they start. I am not sure if our Greek heroine had similar attitude, but for this blogging food huntress, albeit we have the tendency to be blinded by self- indulgent infatuation, it is quite easy to distinguish the borders of passion and friendship. When you work with men every day, such numbness for manly companionship grows that it makes you wonder how different you are from any other female to have attracted this fate.

Atalanta runs like a gazelle but there wasn’t a record in history that she had pursued men. And what was it that Japanese warriors have taught us to relate with honor and self respect: they’d rather die than stand the shame of defeat (or of hanging around where we’re not wanted). She is neither a Madonna nor a whore. She is a man’s dream- not as a woman per se- but her feats and athletic victories that come naturally are the same things that the male ego wants for itself. Men like her (she was known to have many suitors) because she is unconceitedly beautiful- more preoccupied with the things of the wilderness than looking at herself on the mirror “As for her face, it seemed too maidenly to be that of a boy, and too boyish to be that of a maiden…” On the other hand, men dislike her because “ (some of the heroes resented her presence and) felt it beneath them to go hunting with a woman…”

Atalanta’s story the only classic plot I knew that has a strange twist. The contenders became lovers after competing. There was only one rule- outrun her and she’s yours. Melanion, (a.k.a Hippomenes) the lover, doesn’t run as fast as the huntress, but he used his head to outdo her. Ah, give way for love, give way! As for food, there were the golden apples, a product of the Melanion’s genius and Aphrodite's help, which was the cause of Atalanta’s fall.

I think the story’s one lesson is that it takes a kind of man to beat the odds in order to win a woman’s favor – especially if she has a reputation of being his equal. Our strengths after all are counterbalanced by the many events and people who arrive in our lives, for while Atalanta delighted in her many triumphant adventures and presumed that no man alive could outrun her in a foot race, Melanion’s essence is that of quiet confidence. Quite the opposite of the typical Alpha male who’d proclaim himself as lord of the jungle. What sets him apart is that he disregarded the fact that Atalanta could hunt and shoot and wrestle , instead focused on his desire to have the girl - true to his heart - even if it meant risking the consequence of losing in a race against her, or beseeching the help of the gods. To take risks is in itself a manifestation of courage, and courage has genius in it.

Filling up this blog turned my life around in ways that so much creation – whether of thought or things material- sprouted out of it. What a genial way this idea is to write ideas, to get connected to people, and above all, to discover what you are made of.

I am too fascinated by this character that I decided to place her on my header (does it require a copyright permission?) - like what the gods did to hunters and heroes – they were placed as constellations in the night sky.

- Thank you.

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Illustrations by Steele Savage lifted from MYTHOLOGY: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton

The Promised Land for Dates, Cows, St. Peter – and Mama Rosa

These photos were borrowed from the photo album of my mother who just arrived from a business trip from Israel the other day. I am personally fascinated by her trip so I decided to write about it.

To say a little about my mother, her life is a colorful story of the rags to riches tale – and never went back. Mama Rosa (whose character reminds us Ursula) was born under the Virgo sign Year of the Sheep, to a peasant couple in a two-by-two provincial shack. Now years later with a doctorate degree and a sprawling mansion in Macondo and seven kids whom she iron- handedly raised and sent to college, she technically doesn’t know what to do with her retirement money so she travels. My father, a Melquiades clone, is a bum artist.

This is Mama Rosa’s second trip to Israel- the first in 2000. But the pictures are better this time. The first was a pilgrimage of some sort, but since then she has been so fascinated with the kibbutz and the whole country in general. So she went back.

Remember the Rose of Sharon?

Cows... and kois in a kibbutz...

Apparently, my mother is expecting that I would do an ultra erudite feature of her trip. But I already know what to expect the moment she opens my blog...

The Sea of Galilee where Jesus Christ, St. Peter and other disciples used to fish..

Fried St. Peter's fish! Yum!

2 x 2= five thousand fish and loaves - Jesus Christ times.

Israel's sons and daughters.

Fruits by the roadside. Israel kibbutz produce some of the world's best crops.

When Your Boyfriend is a Chef...

There is probably a common fantasy that when you have a chef for a lover or even a sibling, it’s pure euphoria. We think of delicious food on the table and someone to tuck us in bed every night with homemade gourmet ice cream. Maybe yes, maybe no. But alas, there are a few realities why it is not easy having a chef for a lover.

10. Don’t expect fancy dinners all the time. I honestly find lucky those women who have chefs for a mate, if such partners had enough stamina to cook for them on a regular basis. Because for the life of me (this could be an excuse because I am a woman), cooking is such an exhausting job that every time I go home late, doing another mise en place is the last thing I ever wanted to do. I just take a brief shower then doze away in sixty seconds and dream of giant blue cabbages. I only get to cook for my family once or twice a week.

9. Don’t expect breakfasts in bed either. Another ironic reality is that I’ve never cooked for the guys I dated. During the weekend and holiday mornings, instead of lazing away in bed with the morning paper and a romantic brunch, I had to go running like crazy at 7 am for the weekend and holiday crowd. This pissed off a former lover who once bellowed at me, “Get a f------- real job!”

8. Chefs being artists have their own mood swings. Don’t nag if your chef- lover is all clammed up while you blabber on. He’s not listening to you. He’s thinking how he screwed up the sauce last night and got a customer complaint. Or, he’s thinking about what dish goes best with pickled scallions. Sometimes you’d also find him sketching with his fingers on the air. He’s composing a meal.

7. You can’t go on last-minute dates. Unless you want to go out with someone whose hair smells of hickory barbecue sauce or hold hands with someone who just chopped tons of onions… it’s entirely up to you. And besides, our backpacks are not always squeaky- clean impressive. We have soiled aprons, perspired kerchiefs, kitchen- smelling clogs.

6. If you’re both chefs dating each other, it’s either you coach each other how to make the perfect hollandaise or pick upon the other’s cooking. Would you be exchanging recipes and techniques in between kisses? Would you be discussing the anatomy of a sandwich instead of rolling under the sheets in the morning?

5. Forgive them if they’d rather talk of Champagne or Sake than listen to your whines…


4. There’s no guarantee that we could spend special holidays with you. Forget Christmas or Thanksgiving or even Valentine's Day. If you happen to be dating a professional chef, he/ she is cooking for someone else during those times.

3. If you’re a male dating a female chef, extend your patience a little more if her makeup melts like butter all over her face. Be a little understanding, dork! And if you’re a female dating a male chef, get used to waking up with a caveman beside you- the haircuts, the shaving… ah, how often are they forgotten.

2. There’s this unavoidable tendency to curse every thirty minutes. Sorry. Really.

1. And by the way, if you’re a female chef dating a male chef, I could only imagine how the two of you would fight. Not only do you each have a set of knives, but both of you were trained on knife skills, weren’t you?

Proof of my affair.

Hail, the Mighty Azuki

This is taken on the same day I wrote about the Japanese book. I don’t know how this is called- this azuki candy- it was brought by my boss from Japan. Azuki (adzuki, aduki) beans enclosed in sugar crystals.

To experience superbly:
Nibble on these delicious bites while sipping black coffee. The sugar crystals will melt in your mouth while coffee washes it, stirring the bitter- sweet taste down your throat.