While I’ve been taught that half-a-drop is analytically significant, with steady hands that are capable of making 0.0001 g on the balance; in my own kitchen, I’m a wanton: Where I’m not bound by measuring cups and recipes. Where a sumptuous meal is not the product of the appropriate measuring vessel used, neither is it an outcome of if whether the method (este recipe) was followed to the letter. I would take one look at any meal recipe just to get an idea, a variation, and then I make my own version of it.
Cooking for me is something instinctual (is there even such a word?) and not a learning process that one learns through time. At least that’s what growing up in a small village in Bicolandia made me believe. Where if one hasn’t learned the old art of cooking by age ten; then you can’t cook ever. By then, one is expected to know her way ‘round the kitchen, which means being able to at least chop wood, start a fire, cook rice and concoct some palatable and good-smelling viand that would go with it. The secret is in the spices, baby. A good mix-match of what’s available in your kitchen or in your backyard…and a whole dash of salt, pepper, chili and love. Cloves and leaves in odd numbers unexplainably always do the trick. Lemon grass, yellow ginger, bay leaf, herbe buena and oregano are not only home remedies for common ailments.
My cooking prowess has taken a back-seat in the past couple of years. My Raine’s palate is limited to the bland and pure-salted fried (or boiled) ones. I’m itching to toil in my kitchen and create something that smells better than perfume, something that will make one forget his name. He he.
Meanwhile, I’ll stick to the exact science and sweat it out in my other kitchen: the lab.