NOW SERVING: FOOD FOR THE SOUL

Can something good come out of a pandemic?

Despite the untold pain and sufferings of people, I have something to be grateful for in this time of crisis. It has something to do with the family reuniting, rediscovering, and relearning stuff that family members had forgotten or cast aside over the passage of time.

When the restrictions eased up, Husband and I asked our second-born, who works as Executive Chef at a hotel in Puerto Princesa, to come home. The hotel ceased to operate temporarily and he was cooped up in his room with not much to do. My main agenda was to have him vaccinated against flu and pneumonia as added protection against COVID 19 complications. He arrived a day after our shared birth date. Since then, we’ve been spending a lot of time in conversations during and after meals, when it is easy to let your guard down and just talk about nothing and everything under the sun.

“Nobody believed that I could hold my own in the kitchen,” he told me one day while I was preparing lunch. He recalled how he used to hang around my mother’s kitchen, munching on fresh tomatoes as he watched the househelp prepare our meals. Ima’s kitchen was a busy one. Our househelp came from a clan of cooks, not to mention that Apung Dadong, my grandfather, was a food-lover  from a family of excellent cooks and native delicacy makers of Bana in Sta. Rita. We grew up eating savory food even on ordinary days. Each meal was like a feast by itself.

Son imbibed this love for good food, but we were all surprised when he took it a step further and took up Culinary Arts despite his inclination for Engineering. When he graduated from college, we pooled our resources to send him to the US for a one-year on-the-job training at Ritz Carlton in Colorado. This somehow made it less difficult for him to find a job upon his return. He had brief stints with various food joints before he found a job in a restaurant owned by renowned Kapampangan chef, Sau del Rosario who mentored him and later recommended him to a hotel in Palawan. I honestly thought that it was too much too soon for this young man.

When he was new to this challenging job, Husband and I flew to Palawan to see for ourselves how he was carrying on. We quietly observed how he went about his work and how he interacted with his co-workers. Having been exposed to the high standards of Ritz Carlton, he was initially slow in adjusting to a provincial setting and was easily disappointed when the people he worked with failed to meet his expectations. At the end of our four-day visit, I wrote him an email and shared some insights about his work: “Love your co-workers. Learn to value what they can offer. When you step out of that hotel, you cease to be their boss; they become your equal. Nothing beats compassion.”

Over time, he learned to relax. He also began to mentor those he found to be promising among his staff. Alas, this pandemic broke out and turned his world upside down. The young man who came home in the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic looked like a typical Gen Z’er in walking shorts, plain shirt and sneakers, but when we began our catching up sessions it became obvious that he was as bewildered as we were at the sudden turn of events in a global scale. I could sense a hunger to make sense of it all – his life, his dreams, his craft, and his future. Aside from his jogging-cum-bonding sessions with his father, our table fellowship satiated this hunger.

“I felt the pressure to accomplish much,” he said in one of our sessions. “I had to catch up with your accomplishments. My sister has her advocacy for little people, you have your books, Papi (referring to his father) has his real estate firm.”

“Who pressured you? Certainly, the pressure didn’t come from us,” I said in reply. He shrugged his shoulders. “I guess it was a personal choice,” he said. “And those accomplishments that you mentioned? I don’ take them as my accomplishments. Those are fruits of grace and prayer. You see, when I finish writing a book, I bask in the joy and exhilaration of finishing another project, but that’s only for a day or two. Then I reset my system to zero. I am only as good as my last output. It is as important to build a strong character as it is to establish an excellent track record in your chosen field.,” I told him. He listened carefully as I talked.

Learning in a table fellowship setting is not a one-way street – from parent to a child. As the children grow older, they become their own persons and grow in wisdom from both their unpleasant and pleasant experiences. From Chef-Son, I’ve been learning a lot of cooking techniques. A few weeks ago, I woke up early and decided to venture out to the park to buy crabs. The only available ones were small but fat crabs. I bought a dozen, boiled half of them and asked Son to cook chili crabs using the ingredients I bought from Singapore during a pre-pandemic trip. He took it a step further and asked if I had stock of salted egg yolk powder. I took it out and told him to make good use of it. While having my siesta, I heard banging in the kitchen. It was Son transforming the small crabs into yummy culinary delights. Over dinner, I learned more tips on how to make the flesh firmer and avoid shell shock among the crustaceans.

I overheard him one time admonishing his elder sister not toss the knife carelessly into the sink. “When people do the dishes, they just carelessly dig in. The newly-sharpened knives will cut the fingers of the one tasked to wash the dishes,” he said.

One night, I cooked Korean Beef stew using beef camto and shin. Camto is yummy but fatty. He admonished me to take out the fat by putting a block of ice in the boiling stew so that the fat will cling to the ice for easier elimination. I refused to do it. “Fat makes it tastier,” I said teasingly. I refrigerated a sizeable portion of leftover. The following day, before I could get my hands on the stew, he spooned out the coagulated fat. “See? That will go into your arteries,” he said.

Having had a lot of time to ponder on his craft and synthesize his experiences in the kitchen, he has come to realize that cooking is not only about having the skill and the taste buds to go with it; it is also about attitude, respect for other cultures, a genuine love of people, and starting with what is there rather than what isn’t there.

I am hopeful that Son and Daughter are learning some lessons of life from our table fellowship at home where food for the soul is as filling as the food for the body. We always tell them that we cannot be here forever and that they have to be prepared to carry on when we’re gone.

Son has to go back to Palawan soon to see what the future holds for his craft as a chef. Like any other player in the hospitality industry, nothing is certain at this point. As he prepares to leave and be on his own away from home once again, Kahlil Gibran’s words come to mind:

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams…”