The Market Basket

I know, I know. I'm sooo sorry for having a follow-up blog this late. It's just that I seem to have ran out of brain cells to elaborate about ideas I believe in which I can actually summarize in three sentences. Three sentences ain't a blog, and it's too long to be a tweet or a status message. So I've finally given in to my comfort zone and one of my major fields of interest, which is incidentally yours too -- food.

http://cms.sacla.com/

I've been professionally cooking for only two years now, but I've been an amateur garage-band type of cook since I was a young lad. You see, in the culinary world, there is a term called the market basket. It began somewhere in time when people went to the market every single morning to decide on the menu of the day. What ever is offered in the market today shall be what is on the menu later. It's a pretty challenging task for a chef to come up with different dishes everyday and also takes a set of highly skilled cooks to execute to the chef's standards a different dish each day. Not many restaurants or eateries are blessed with such a crew. The market basket is so challenging that it has evolved and established itself as a format for competitions in the culinary world, even used in reality shows like Top Chef.

The previous paragraph just shows how cluttered my thoughts are as a writer; starting with being a young lad and cutting to the market basket concept. So where does my ladhood go in the picture of this thing called the market basket? Here: I have been doing it since I was 6. As a child, my parents both worked the 8-hour jobs. When I got home from school for lunch, nobody would be there. My sister comes home in the late afternoon, and my mom & dad came home late at night. So for lunch, it was just me, the fridge (my market), the stove, and the TV; and for dinner, it was just me, the fridge, the stove, the TV, and my sister. You can guess what I did with these things. And you obviously know how I was (and still am) when I was a kid -- I was fat. In the Philippines, there is a term people use to joke about fat kids, "napabayaan sa kusina" roughly translated as "left alone in the kitchen". In my case, the joke was not half meant; it was entirely true! Thank God I never burnt our house down. My mom swears by this story (although I think I do remember parts of it), that once she and my dad were away for a seminar out of town for a few days. One morning, she calls home and I answer the phone, "Hello, mama?" Like I knew it was her who was calling. "How are you, my baby?" she says. "I'm awake." "Where's your sister?" "In bed. Asleep." "What about you? What are you doing?" "Cooking breakfast..."

http://www.jinlovestoeat.com/

In the Philippines, traditional folk don't usually have toast nor pancakes nor bacon nor cereals and milk as proper breakfast. We have garlic fried rice, an assortment of scrambled eggs, omelet, and/or perfectly sunny over easy eggs, fried dried fish and/or smoked fish and/or beef/pork/chicken tapa/tocino and/or sweet sausages (called longganisa) that spit and spatter when you fry... plus an assortment of dips (called sawsawan, i.e., ketchup, fish sauce, spicy vinegar, bagoong) and tomato & leafy top salads with salted duck eggs. Sounds like a feast eh. Now, imagine a 6-year-old preparing such a table as this... for two -- me and my sleepy sister.

I don't mean to brag or toot my own horn. All I wanted to do was finally share one of the things I'm most fascinated about. Besides, any 6-year-old kid can do (probably even more than) what I did when I was a kid. Hello? Junior Master Chefs? If there's one thing I'm proud of though, it's that God gave me a set of parents who raised me well into being smart and independent as young as I was, even in the aspect of food preparation.