Cooking is fun with Christine

I don’t cook, but I know I can cook. I cook when there is no one else to man the kitchen and I have to feed the brood. If it’s just me, I can subsist on Spanish sardines breakfast (if I’m already up by then), lunch and dinner.

I cooked (okay, I was forced to cook) while I was studying in the US and I made the best beef steak that side of Boston.

I learned to cook as a child because even then I already had this habit of getting out of bed in the middle of the night to have a midnight snack.

Since I didn’t want to yank the cook out of bed (and most certainly I didn’t want to wake up my mother because she would have growled at me), I did the cooking myself – really very simple meals: omelets, spaghetti and fried anything.

On days I didn’t like the viand, I would cook my own food. Of course, I’m not encouraging the kids to do the same, except that in our house, they’d cook one big batch of menudo on Sunday and that’s going to be the viand for the whole week at every meal and I swear by Thursday night, menudo would already be coming out of our ears.

Left to fend for myself in the kitchen, I learned to experiment and try out recipes I read in magazines. One time I made eggs Benedict and everyone made a beeline for it. Maybe I would have learned to cook some more had it not been for the advent of instant noodles, which made life so easy for me and everyone else.

These days, I’m just an occasional cook. I cook only when the need arises. I also cook in front of the camera from time to time – in the cooking show of Cecile Garrucho one time and four years ago in Dina Bonnevie’s D-Day.

Recently, I was again asked to cook for TV – in Mobile Kusina no less (Friday, 10 a.m. on GMA 7). When I agreed to accept their invitation to cook in that show, the first thing I asked of course was what I was going to cook. Looking back, I don’t think they trusted my culinary skills (and I don’t blame them). They told me to wait. I was going to be assigned a dish and the recipe was going to come from them.

I immediately realized the practicality of this kind of arrangement. Mobile Kusina is a show that is strictly supervised by team of chefs and cooking experts. Since the recipes come from professional chefs, expect the dishes to come out nutritious and yes, palatable.

On some cooking shows in the past, I’ve heard of horror stories wherein celebrities would be asked to share personal recipes – but with disastrous results. Usually, it would be a secret family recipe that should have remained a secret in the first place. No wonder, families break up.

Mobile Kusina sometimes also prefers recipes to come from them because the ingredients and cooking utensils and equipment are provided at all times by their very efficient team. And I swear they have extensive resources.

I also like to think that they would rather assign recipes to celebrity cooks so that not every other guest cooks pasta in the show.

In a lot of cases, however, Mobile Kusina allows (actually they encourage) celebrities to cook their own recipes - just like Jaya, who cooked her version of sinigang na pork spare ribs and, quite recently, Gladys Guevarra, who did a very tasty dish of cheese-y pork.

Since the show has a reputation of being run efficiently by its people, all I did was to wait for the taping day. Location was in Sta. Cruz, Manila on a Friday morning and they were nice enough to have picked me up in my house since I would never had made it on my own given the changes in the district’s landscape.

It was Mara Gaceta who picked me up and it was a happy reunion for us since she used to be with the staff of Startalk. On our way to Sta. Cruz, she finally revealed to me what I was going to cook: Hainanese Chicken, which is a rather complicated dish since it has to be done in three segments.

Actually, the cooking part was easy. What was difficult was memorizing every step of the cooking process. Sure, I could rely on idiot boards, but when there is still time for me to study my spiels, I put them to memory – something I can never do in Startalk because, being a live show, everything is handed to you at the last minute.

When we go to the location site in Sta. Cruz, I already knew the cooking process and had it played in my mind.

The setup of Mobile Kusina is very impressive. From a distance, I saw the mobile kitchen and there stood host Christine Jacob and celebrity cook Ian Veneracion, who was cooking steak with three kinds of side dishes (The steak was in itself easy to cook, but the side dishes made the process a bit complicated).

Since they were still waiting for Ian to finish, they ushered me into a tent, which – to my delight – was air-conditioned! I also saw Ernal Forte, my Startalk makeup artist and immediately I felt at home. And since this was a cooking show, there was food galore.

Given such royal treatment (give me good food and I feel like a king), I ached to start my cooking. But wait, my partner in crime wasn’t there yet. I turned out that Lolit Solis was also joining me in my cooking segment. And then I remembered the old adage: Too many cooks spoil the broth.

(On Saturday, my culinary ‘misadventures’ with Lolit Solis).