Cooking Tips and Life Lesson

This isn't quite a recipe, but the previous article below inspired me to post this article of mine, which was published in 2011. Hope you enjoy it.

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My children love Filipino bistek (beefsteak). The combination of soy sauce
and fresh lemon makes it a very tasty meal and every time I make it for my children I think of my mother,who taught me how to cook it the Toledo way.

Like any typical older-generation Filipina, my mother didn’t use measuring cups or spoons when she cooked. She added ingredients as she marinated and cooked the meat. “You’ll want the sour taste to complement the salty flavor of the soy sauce,” she would say, “but neither should overwhelm the other.” And she would
simmer, taste, add a little bit more of this, simmer, taste, add a little
bit more of that, until the meat was perfectly flavored.

Easy, I thought. If I put too much of one thing, I just needed to add a little bit more of the other. But it turned out to be a bit more complicated than that because it took me many failed attempts and countless batches of bistek look-alikes before I got the nod of approval from Mom.

I learned to make Mom’s adobo in the same cook-taste-and-adjust method. I taste the broth several times as the meat is cooking to see how each flavor complements the other ingredients. A pinch of oregano, a bay leaf or two, onions, garlic, pepper and salt, soy sauce and vinegar.

She always said there are three secrets to a good adobo: plenty of garlic, lots of patience, and properly cooked vinegar. “You should never ever stir the pot when you’ve just added vinegar in,” she warned. “You have to wait for that strong sour taste to slowly blend in with everything that’s already there. You can’t rush it because the vinegar will be uncooked and the flavor of the adobo will be off.”

When I first came to the States I worried that I would never again get the taste of bistek right because none of the groceries carried calamansi. Mom advised me to learn to use what was available,because in her words, “That won’t be the last thing you’ll find different here.” So I experimented first with lime, then with lemons,until my bistek came close to the taste I knew from back home. “All
things come together in the end,” she said, “with a little bit of compromise, resourcefulness and creativity.”

There she goes again, I thought—another life lesson dispensed with her cooking tips.

But I learned to cook tinola with sayote and spinach instead of green papaya and sili leaves. I use mustard green instead of kangkong, and fine powdered table salt instead of the rock salt I was so familiar with.

One change my family welcomed with gusto is our breakfast menu. Here in America, we usually have cereal, toast or a bagel for breakfast, but on weekends and holidays, we like to cook a fairly heavy meal. Thick-sliced SPAM grilled on the pan until the edges are toasty and crunchy; corned beef sautéed in garlic, onions and tomatoes; and Vienna sausages with fried eggs and rice. Once a month we step up our family breakfast extravaganza into a brunch,adding into the mix tocino and longaniza and tinapang bangus. We all, particularly our American-born, Caucasian spouses and in-laws,love the variety and mix of our Filipino-American breakfast.

In Mom’s Life Lesson 101, this is proof positive that we have accepted and incorporated American ways into our lives and allowed some of ours to blend into the Western culture. Not that Mom ever said so. That wasn’t her way.

Mother had a subtle, indirect way of communicating. She hardly ever gave direct orders, for instance. If she needed something done she would frame it as a question, or a comment, a theory, a thinking-aloud kind of wish. That meant we had to read between the lines and we had to pay close attention to her words.

She was a gentle, soft-spoken woman who avoided harsh words and confrontations at all cost. Ironically, she was blessed with assertive, strong minded, and self-reliant off springs. I think she figured out early on how to get the best out of us without too much trouble. So she suggested rather than commanded, she hinted and temporized, and she sneakily laced her cooking lessons with bits of
wisdom that were hard to spurn.

She taught me to be flexible, to be patient and subtle, not to rush to conclusions, and to build each relationship with a light touch—whether personal, social or professional—and always open to change and accommodation. Above all, I learned from Mom the wisdom of that old adage: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” And that’s me in essence—I never ever give up.

I wonder if that was the lesson Mom wanted me to learn all along, and does she know, now that she’s sleeping with angels, that she succeeded?

By Belma Villa, Manila Standard Today