The writing on the wall

You might call this one of my life goals - that of being able to write on pastries presentably enough for said pastry to make it to the display case. So. For the last three days of my practicum I asked to be assigned to the chef in charge of decorating the Golden Fan's cakes, and I told him that if he could teach me only one thing, it would have to be this. I spent one whole day trying to write - it's all in the piping cone and the flick of the wrist, he told me - and here are some of the still-awful results, although the sous chef of the hotel came by and said one of them, the "Happy Birthday" in the foreground next to "Happy Anniversary", looked decent enough. Well, the Great Wall wasn't built in one day, was it?

Getting it right the second time

I love making these meringue cups (would they still be called vacherons?) because making them involves pulling out all of the piping skills I can muster from my flour-dusted self. This was my second time to make them and they're a vast improvement over the first batch I did, which had lots of hollow spaces in the sides. The pastry cooks start turning out quantities of them when a glut of unused egg whites accumulates, and the Golden Fan uses the meringue cups as the base for the fruit tarts it serves in its buffet resto.

Cutesy cutesy coo!

Aren't these strawberry cupcakes the cutest? They're for a children's party. I was asked to decorate all of them with a dusting of Bianca powder (essentially a fancy form of confectioner's sugar with an additive that prevents it from absorbing moisture), piped whipped cream (it was like dancing: 1, 2, 3, step!), a fresh strawberry quarter and a triangle of colored white chocolate.

Salty art

This is by far the coolest thing I have ever made in a kitchen, and it's not even edible. It's a salt sculpture! To make them, we mixed salt, cornstarch and water, poured this into a mold and microwaved it for a couple of seconds. My partner and I made about 35 of these dragons in orange and yellow.

The chef saw how much fun we were having so he brought out his other kids for us to play with.

Screwed, almost

I can't believe how close I came to getting screwed. I went yesterday to the posh hotel, which I shall call The Golden Fan, where I was going to do my apprenticeship. Lo and behold, I was told that my file had been placed in the "did not pursue" category. I broke out in a cold sweat despite the glacial air conditioning. I was about to be thrown out on a limb - after having quit my job I had visions of myself moving into a tent made of discarded election posters (national elections had just ended) and selling gruel (with puréed newspapers as extender) to survive while waiting for another internship opening.

The hiring manager must've seen the desperation in my face threatening to erupt any moment and ending with me jumping up and down like a deranged monkey on her paper-cluttered desk. So rather than risk having her filing system upset by some bushy-haired baboon, she decided to hand me my endorsement papers. Off I went to be "interviewed" by the sous chef, with said "interview" consisting of a five-second head-to-toe size-up and a grudging "I'll borrow her for the Thai banquet" mumbled to the HR assistant escorting me. I knew the sous chef doubted my grit. I would've been skeptical too - someone aspiring to work in the kitchen does not usually set foot in it in a prissy lace-trimmed camisole, a knitted robe-like wrap and pointy patent leather ballerina flats. All the toques looked at me too, and I could barely suppress the impulse to slink under the grease trap.

After that minor humiliation, we strolled over to Laundry to make provisions for me to borrow one of their chef's jackets. Wearing your school jacket is fine if you work away in one of the Golden Fan's cavernous hidden kitchens, but not if you hold fort at a station that puts you in contact with guests.

And then, that was that. I ascended the stairwell back to the front of the staff entrance, wiped the cold fear-sweat from my brows, hobbled away from the premises, and searched for a dark corner where I could put my knees together in an upright fetal position, and rocked and rocked until I lost consciousness and awoke to find that I had killed and eaten my pet Madagascar hissing cockroach.

I hope you have the tongue of an angel

"Maybe that's really your calling because your progress is so quick," said my friend Preppy Boy when he found out I was going to do my internship at a luxury hotel.

Sana magdilang anghel ka. In my culture, to say magdilang anghel is to say that a person has just uttered something akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Values education for budding chefs

After two months in the real world, I've come to realize that cookery schools should include a values education class in their curricula. Alongside the usual classes on knife skills, sauces and plating, future chefs should be receive a grounding on critical life and career issues, including:

* Moderating one's alcohol and cigarette consumption. Since I began my practicum I've received almost daily invitations to go out drinking. I've always turned them down because I feel uncomfortable being the only woman in a group of strange men, and because I'd rather catch up on sleep than get soused up.

"So you don't drink or smoke?' one asked incredulously, implying that I've been living a dull, monotonous existence. Sorry dude. I have a rich, meaningful life full of enriching experiences. I don't feel the need to get piss-drunk or fill my lungs with carcinogens to feel alive. And I'm not square; I do drink and go out with friends once in a while. It's just that doing it everyday, and to the point of senseless inebriation, is not a very adult thing to do.

* A how-to on dealing with sexual harassment for the ladies, and a guide to gallantry for the men. I lasted only 140+ hours at Artsy Asian Outpost because of this. Okay, that's a little misleading - I left because I got accepted to a five-star hotel. Come on men - do you really need to fire off crude jokes and molest female coworkers to cook?

This was something I'd been totally unprepared for when I began my practicum. I actually sobbed my heart out in the bathroom on one particularly bad day when I got bullied and touched inappropriately by four different chefs. Nothing - not my friend's stories or reading up about the kitchen - had prepared me for the real thing and what made it even more of a shock was that I'd worked for such a long time in a company that was a model corporate denizen. The male chefs in school are all nice people. They were the kind you'd want to grab coffee with after class. I'll never forget chef Vic when he asked to excuse himself because he had to say the word 'condom' in class. That's who they were - decent, salt-of-the-earth people. Compare that to the animal who put his arms around me as he proceeded to "teach" me how to properly fabricate chicken, or to the asshole who'd repeatedly comment that I favored a particular sexual act whenever I bent down to lift or pick things up on the floor.

I never could fathom why they needed to do this, but somehow, I'm thankful for the experience because it opened my eyes and showed me I needed to be tougher. I learned valuable things about my self and how to navigate these situations. I left when the offer from the hotel came but if that hadn't happened, I'd probably still be at that resto, toughing it out. If we get fired by the establishment we forfeit our diploma but let me just exult a little: I fired my establishment instead.

* Being a joy to work with. Don't let your competence and rank in the kitchen get to your head; stay modest. You're not hot property - you're not CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you don't have a PhD, and you didn't earn your master's degree as a scholar of two European universities. I've met and been friends with achievers with this sort of pedigree and they're the nicest, most modest and down-to-earth people I've had the fortune of knowing. You're nothing, Power-tripping Chef de Cuisine (you're not even that high up in the kitchen hierarchy!)

And please, don't be mean to those of humbler rank than you. At that resto, they like to order the dishwashers and junior cooks around, just because they can. They're like dogs pissing on their territory.

* Respect for yourself and your customers. Develop good working habits. Work clean; you establish yourself as a conscientious, circumspect chef who respects the food he makes and the people who pay to eat it.

In spite of a somehow bruising encounter - and I've probably only barely scratched the surface - the romance of cooking and making good food is still there for me. Some of the glint of being a chef might have gotten scratched off, but I hope my passion for the profession never fades.

Because chefs can do things their way...

Somewhere inside the hot kitchen:

Pumpkin shooters and cop-outs

Two days into my internship, I get a taste of my first big function - cocktails for about 600 guests. I was supposed to assemble pork wantons - spoon kung pao sauce onto the fried triangle of pork, then sprinkle crushed peanuts on top - but got assigned to the pumpkin shooters instead.

That task involved pouring pumpkin soup into a shot glass and decorating it with a drop of yogurt and a papadum sliver. Easy, you say? Fair enough, but the challenge lay in timing assembly and send-outs so that the soup would still be warm by the time it reached the guests. I made two miscues before getting it right. There were heating lamps to keep some of the food warm, but to me this was a cop-out. Sure, they kept the shooters warm, but if you kept soup out long enough, an unattractive film forms on top. The papadums too, which remind me of Indian cornflakes, would become soggy from sitting in the soup too long and would often sink to the bottom. They would have to be fished out and replaced with a new one.

Cutting is a dance...

I spent most of today at the garde manger station slicing things. I still feel unhappy about my knife skills. My cuts look like they were made by someone who'd never gone to cooking school. For someone who cares about doing things the proper way, this is quite a self-esteem deflater.

Anyway, we were talking about dancing, right? In spite of my lack of knife skills, I found the wherewithal to enjoy the groovy house music being piped about the dining area, and remarked to myself how vibrant and energetic the place is. It's nice slicing things with peppy music in the background.

Still kicking!

No, dear audience of three, I haven't died or evaporated. I've simply been incredibly busy with school and work. So while this blog has been in its death throes for a while, don't cart it off to the morgue just yet.

I'm now done with school, or the classroom part at least. I started officially as an intern on March 17 at this resto in one of Manila's financial which I like to call the Artsy Asian Outpost (AAO), and have been enjoying every minute of it, in spite of the leg-breaking (one has to stand up for nearly nine hours everyday without a break) work and the near-zombie like state I sometimes work myself into because of perpetual sleep deprivation.

Everyone was surprisingly nice and decent-behaving. Except for their unanimous disbelief when they hear my response to the standard "how old are you" conversation-opener, and a little irritation on my part when almost everyone kept asking about my marital/relationship status (I should be used to both reactions by now as a single 30-something, but I never am), there weren't too many horror stories of the kind Shuna Fish Lydon described in her blog. One major annoyance was the line cook who pretended to sneeze and spray me with his snot, and then threw bits of chocolate wrapper at me, but I'm taking it in stride. Into each ass a little pain must fall, no? Anyway, he made nice to me afterwards.

I just wish I didn't look so young, because people here (is it only in the Philippines, or everywhere else?) equate youth with being a pushover.