Cook with love
It’s a writing comeback for me! Upon my editor’s invitation, I decided to regain my foothold in the food scene. This time around, I’m doing the column together with my daughter Karla who has not only followed in my footsteps, but even more so! She’s a food enthusiast and a budding food photographer rolled into one. She gets credit for the pictures we will be using in our column. It’s wonderful to have her document everything.
Karla is an event planner, specializing in conceptualizing unique debutante parties. Even as we do serious work, we have lots of fun doing things together; it’s a great mother-daughter bonding experience.
KARLA: “When I grow up, I want to be a restaurateur.” So I proclaimed at the age of seven to my whole world at the time — during my kindergarten graduation at Poveda Learning Center. While most of my classmates said they wanted to be doctors and businesswomen, I declared a very specific profession, even if I didn’t know then how to spell the word “restaurateur.”
Unlike most kids, my playground wasn’t a basketball court, sandbox or a ballet studio. My playground was bigger, more dangerous and definitely yummier. In the afternoons after school, I would happily play in The Plaza’s vast central kitchen along Shaw Blvd. At the early age of three and a half, I would make raisin and happy face cookies, or cut and fold the scrumptious batter mixture of my favorite Brun butter cake. As I grew older, I would peek into the garde manger to see what our chefs were up to. And when mom wasn’t looking, I’d sneak into the hot kitchen and make pasta from scratch, try to cook my own Mongolian BBQ or just go around and “taste test” whatever the chefs were making. I had no intentions of being a chef.
Twenty years later, I decided to finally venture into the culinary world professionally. I spent two exciting months in a tummy-filling and delicious adventure in New York which was one, big culinary experience in itself. Under the tutelage of great culinary masters, I learned basic and advanced culinary techniques hands-on and the bonus was a crash course learning French culinary terms.
During those two months, I was lucky to have had the pleasure of meeting one of the world’s culinary legends, chef Jacques Pépin, a French chef who originally hails from Bourg-en-Bresse, France and came to America in 1959. It took me a lot of courage to approach him, knowing that he is a great celebrity chef and a former season five Top Chef judge, a reality TV series by Bravo TV. The late Julia Child fondly called him “ the best chef in America.” They were very good friends, shared happy moments indulging in glorious food and even had their own 2001 Daytime Emmy Award-winning TV series together entitled Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home.
I was greatly inspired by his life story as I read his book, The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen, a precious copy of which I will keep as a life-time treasure, moved by his simple dedication: “To Karla. Cook with love.”
MILLIE: Listening to Karla narrate chef Pépin’s culinary adventures takes my 87-year-old daddy Joe back to his youth. Stories of chef Pépin in wartime France brought back memories of when the Japanese troops landed in Manila where they found themselves at The Aristocrat Restaurant on Dewey Blvd, ordering “melon à la mode” and even paying for it. There is some parallelism between the story of chef Pépin’s life in the kitchen and my dad’s life in the restaurant: both of them were from humble beginnings, went through a lot of hardship and finally had success stories we can learn from. Both chef Jacques and lolo Joe were aides to their respective moms who founded and built their dream restaurants through sheer hard work and dedication.
Karla’s culinary escapades reminded me of my own where, as a student at the Ecole Hoteliere de la SSH in Lausanne, Switzerland, I would seize every opportunity not only to learn but, more so, to master the secrets of the trade.
KARLA: To be able to move up to the next level, a kitchen apprentice should first master basic techniques. How to handle the knife properly is essential. One evening, I was practicing my knife skills and produced a heaping amount of émincé (thinly sliced) onions. So, not to put them to waste, I decided I could try to make some French onion soup gratinee for my Lolo Joe and my mom.
While waiting for my soup, Lolo Joe came to check what was cooking for dinner. When I mentioned I was making French onion soup, he recounted his first visit to Paris and explained that French onion soup is the arroz caldo of the French. All the bistros and cafes in the Parisian area of Pigalle serve this delectable and hearty soup around midnight. Knowing that I’d be making one of his favorites left me so engrossed in his story, and very pressured at the same time. So I became so distracted I didn’t realize that the liquid of my soup was evaporating; plus, if I had to put the croutons on top, it would also absorb the soup. To top it all off, my Mom invited two of her friends over for dinner and failed to inform me. I was in shock and everybody else was panicking. I had no more chicken stock left to add to the soup, we had an increase in guests, and my Lolo was already salivating — like, literally.
In the end, poor Mom had to skip my “soup” — well, there really wasn’t much left of the soup. It amounted to just onions with bread and cheese. Epic failure! What should I have done to avoid this kitchen disaster? Apparently, I could have just added some water and re-seasoned the soup to taste. Or I could have added some beef stock as this was readily available. But I guess I was just too rattled to think about it at the time… Whoops!
Chef Pépin shares a recipe from his book The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen:
Onion Soup Gratinee
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 onions (about 12 ounces), cut into thin slices
About 7 cups good-quality chicken stock, or a mixture of chicken and beef stock
About a teaspoon salt, more or less, depending on the saltiness of the stock
A teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
16 slices of baguette, each cut about 3/8 inch thick
About 3 cups grated Swiss cheese, preferably Gruyere, Comte or Emmenthaler (about 10 ounces)
(In this case, I used Gruyere cave aged, available at Santi’s)
Procedure:
Melt the butter in a saucepan, and sauté the sliced onions in the butter over medium to high heat for about 8 minutes, or until lightly browned. Add the stock, salt and pepper, and boil gently for 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Arrange the bread slices in a single layer on a tray, and bake them for 8 to 10 minutes, or until they are nicely browned. Divide the toast among the bowls, and sprinkle 1/2 cup of cheese into each bowl.
When the stock and onions have cooked for 15 minutes, pour the soup into the bowls, filling each to the top. Sprinkle on the remainder of the cheese, dividing it among the bowls and taking care not to push it down into the liquid. Press the cheese around the rim or lip of the bowls, so it adheres there as it cooks and the crust does not fall into the liquid.
Arrange the soup bowls on a baking sheet, and bake for 35 to 45 minutes, or until a glorious brown, rich rust has developed on top. Serve hot right out of the oven.
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E-mail: milliereyes.foodforthought@gmail.com or karla@swizzlemobilebar.com.
