My grandmother may have passed away in my childhood but the kitchen lessons I learnt from her are carried on way onto my adult years. One of these is that in cooking, if you want something to taste the way it ought to, there are no shortcuts. To this day though, I still haven’t defined what ‘ought to’ means yet I rarely ever use instant sauces and mixes. I always cook from scratch, never mind if it entails doing tedious prep work. Even when I’m in the city, where time is always of the essence, I find myself cooking the way I was trained, with minimal omission of steps. I might as well just eat a sandwich on the run than some haphazardly prepared stew. Now, make no mistake, I’m no snob and very tolerant of other people’s cooking. It’s just my own that always has to follow Lola’s rules. I’m making that qualification lest I be banned from friends’ dining tables.

Anyway, one practice that is already being abandoned is extracting the essence from shrimp heads and shells to flavour whatever is being cooked with shrimps. I find this a necessity if one wishes to have a tastier dish. No amount of salt or patis (fish sauce) can equal a cup of shrimp extract. Compared to patis, one can control the amount of sodium. When I serve dishes cooked with shrimp extract, everybody notices how malinamnam or tasty these are. The only drawback is that they are a bit darker than the usual, meaning less photogenic. But then, life is about trade-offs!
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In one of my previous incarnations as a junior government bureaucrat, I was travelling all the time yet hardly saw the places that I went to. However, not having enough time to go around did not stop me from visiting the marketplace or the grocery just to have a feel of the daily life of the populace. I would also eat where locals go and sample their fare. If I only knew then that I would be maintaining a food blog! Sigh!

Among the places that has my heart (and stomach) captured is Rome. Whether in the office canteen, the trattorias or ristorantes, I was fascinated with the simplicity and freshness of the cuisine. Even as I was preoccupied with work, at the back of my mind I was trying to dissect what I was eating such that I could cook them myself. I’ve always been partial to red sauces for my pasta and in Rome I learnt of combinations that I wouldn’t have come up on my own. Returning home, I recreated some of the recipes which I now regularly cook. Following the same principles, I have also come up with my own recipes.
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This was supposed to be posted on the eve of New Year’s Day but I was still out of sorts after the Indian Ocean calamity, not knowing how things were out there, praying and feeling helpless. I had to spend more time with my own thoughts, trying to make sense of the situation. While efforts are being done to help the victims of the earthquake and tsunami, perhaps it is best to use this web space to remind us, myself most especially, that such destruction shall also pass.

I can say this confidently because 13 years ago, we were in the midst of a catastrophe, of a lesser magnitude no doubt, but we also felt helpless and hopeless. Today, we have not yet fully recovered from the devastation of Mt. Pinatubo yet a lot has already improved. Most people have gone on with their lives, some farms are already rehabilitated that we have to think of ways to maximise the harvests that would just go to waste. Life has become quite normal, in fact that for three years now our town has been celebrating the Duman Festival, partly to revive a vanishing tradition and partly to celebrate life after devastation. What better way to be grateful of how we overcame destruction than through a rice festival, the symbol of prosperity in many Asian societies?

Three years ago, some brilliant townmates came up with the idea of reviving a tradition which almost vanished in the wake of Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption. Most of the rice fields having become productive once again, all was set.
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