Peninsula chef for a day

Now this is what you call karma.

Four years ago, I started giving undercover assignments to the STAR Lifestyle Section writers, and it was for fun, according to me, yes, but not necessarily according to all the writers. I asked a young writer to wear her skimpiest gimmick outfit and pose as a prostitute – or is it GRO – one night, and write about the experience. Two new staffers got their baptism of fire when I told them what their first assignment was – to join the then hot Pera o Bayong game show on ABS-CBN, live on television! One staffer was such a coffee addict so I asked her to work as a barista for a day at Starbucks. A shopaholic staffer got the surprise of her life when I told her she could just stay in the mall one working day – but as a salesgirl at the Anonymous store in Glorietta. A staffer who was an incurable night owl got two undercover assignments – one night as an Easy Call operator and another night as a police apprentice of sorts at the police station, hanging out with detectives, looking for ferocious characters of the night and riding the mobile patrol car – during the graveyard shift, of course!

And still another staffer who might have been a frustrated doctor, I assigned to the emergency room of the Philippine General Hospital. For one day. Fun, yes?

Then late last week, Cathay Pacific Airways invited me and two other lifestyle editors to join a three-day familiarization trip to Hong Kong to experience Cathay’s new Business Class.

Fine. What a cool respite from the daily routine of closing 24, 36 and sometimes 48 pages of the newspaper.

All three – Chelo Banal-Formoso of Inquirer, Ethel Soliven-Timbol of Bulletin and myself – were surprised one morning when we were told by Cathay’s assistant marketing manager Bettina Palpal-latoc that we would be cooks for a day at the Peninsula’s Cantonese restaurant called Spring Moon.

"Yes, you will help our dim sum pastry chef make the ordered dishes, maybe a hundred dim sums, at our Chinese restaurant," said Teddy Leung, Spring Moon restaurant manager. "You can cook, yes? But we will teach you how to cook."

Cook?

The three of us laughed, with obvious fear in our hearts. Ask us to close 24 or 48 pages of the lifestyle section, yes. But cook?

"I only cook, rather, heat TV dinners," announced Chelo, who was based in Los Angeles with her family for the past two decades.

"Just because I feature recipes for our Food page, readers think I can actually cook," laughed Ethel who says she hardly eats – or cooks – at home.

Likewise, I could only laugh at myself.

And how was I able to make my kids believe when they were younger that I could actually cook just because I could prepare a salad bar (you just lay out all the ingredients, right?), cook raclette (you just need a raclette maker, right?), and whip up my specialty of pan-fried tuna fettuccini with mushrooms (you can just mix and match, right?).

I realized I was the world’s lousiest cook when my Pampango husband, upon discovering that I actually couldn’t even boil eggs correctly, took over the cooking and marketing at home.

And so, there we were, three non-cooks, tasked to cook for the best hotel in Hong Kong where the food ingredients are flown in daily from Europe and Asia, and where the best chefs work to produce 1,200 scones, 130 soufflés, 1,200 chocolates and some 3,000 meals every day, served with the best wines, including Erap’s favorite, those prized bottles of Chateau Petrus.

What if we chop our fingers instead of the ingredients? What if we burn the food? Worse, what if a customer gets poisoned!

Such Kafka-esque thoughts made us quiver as we washed our hands, donned our aprons and embarked on our "undercover" assignment.

The Pen’s kitchen, looking so high-tech, with its stainless-steel cleanliness, seemed formidable at first. But once Chef Yip Wing Wah started laying out the ingredients on the table, things started to look easy.

We were to cook shrimp dumplings, and Chef Yip had thoughtfully prepared the shrimp filling for us. "That’s easy," he said. "Just mix the shrimp with the salt, chicken powder and sugar together with diced mushrooms, vegetable oil and chives. The chive water (you get this by putting diced chives with water in a blender) is optional. Use only when you want a green colored dumpling."

Fine. Then he deftly put his slightly oiled thick knife to press a small portion of the dough (made with half protein flour, half cornstarch and chive water) to form a small round dumpling wrapper. That looked very easy – until we tried it ourselves.

Oops, we came out with oblong and nondescript shapes at first. But in cooking, as in all other brave ventures in life, patience is a virtue.

So we tried again and again until we got the right roundness and thickness for the dumpling wrapper. Next problem: forming the dumpling itself.

In the hands of Chef Yip, it looked so easy indeed. First, he made a fish-shaped dumpling. Then a mini-purse shaped dumpling. Then a ball-shaped dumpling. Want a heart-shaped dumpling?

Nah, we’ll stick to your shapes, we assured him. And when we tried, boy oh boy, we looked like fumbling simpletons who couldn’t even form the right shapes. Give us a break! After all, Chef Yip has been doing this for 10 years and we’ve been here in the kitchen only 10 minutes, right?

Next step was placing our alleged masterpieces into the steam baskets for five or ten minutes. "This will be your lunch," Teddy Leung reminded us.

"No way," Ethel exclaimed. "I’m not eating what I made." Okay, we’ll starve ourselves this morning.

To take our minds off our culinary misadventure, Teddy led us to the other parts of the kitchen where roast duck was prepared, chicken broth perfected and vegetables sliced. We saw how tasty the duck looked even while being roasted yet, how the chicken broth was achieved after boiling all day and night, and how only the best portions of vegetables were chosen for Spring Moon’s meals.

After five minutes, the aroma of delicious shrimp dumplings wafted in the kitchen, reminding us that we were hungry.

Chef Yip presented the steamed baskets of dumplings to us, gave us chopsticks, napkins and plates, and voila! Our creations looked so appetizing, and they were delicious too!

Bettina, who was perhaps the most skilled cook among us, enjoyed eating her dumplings. And so did the three of us. Okay, so we’re eating our words. Non-cooking lifestyle editors can cook.

Okay, we edited that sentence a bit: Non-cooking lifestyle editors can learn to cook.