Sauce and the city

NEW YORK — “Man can’t live on hipster Asian cuisine alone,” I thought, as I walked the plank over wet cement leading to Totto Ramen.

Fifteen months after New York magazine’s Grub Street blog had declared 2012 just that — “the year of Asian hipster cuisine” (fanning the flames of a post-Chang hunger for pork buns and ramen), here I was with my boyfriend outside a 20-seat noodle house, standing in the cold, on a piece of plywood, at the mercy of a clipboard on which I had scrawled “Anna … party of 2” just inches from the bottom. Boxed out by the growing 5 p.m. crowd, Diego took a step back into just-paved sidewalk, leaving a clownish Red Wing footprint that the asphalt-layer came to fix with a steel brush. I wondered if there was some other way for a couple of brown-skinned, blue-balled soup slurpers to leave a culinary footprint in America City.

I can’t cook but I certainly can eat.

My proudest food-related moment in the last year was around my birthday, when a boy I had liked took a baking class so he could present me with a blueberry cheesecake on my big two-five. That was a messy little cap to the first quarter of my life. A second moment, also involving pastry, was that time I met a friend for brinner (a favorite repast: breakfast for dinner). I forked distractedly into a pancake, glanced back down and saw that I had landscaped it into the gang sign of Wu Tang Clan. Sweet.

Even at home in Manila, in the apartment that I shared with my sisters (the older one, a talented cook; the younger, a skilled home baker), there was no place for me in the kitchen, except maybe for my spot, sometimes, on top of the marble counter. From my perch, I regaled my housemates with stories, like a tramp on top of a baby grand. Even my green shakes of apples and lettuce were pulsed through the blender by our cook, Argelyn. (I miss her so.) But with my recent move to study abroad in the Empire State, I had to start learning to help myself.

It started with visits to the grocery. Living in Queens, I have discovered a wealth of Asian food marts, most notably a seafood market-cum-convenience store across the boulevard. It has everything! Marty’s “chicharon,” salt and vinegar cracklings, sinigang mix, lechon sauce, and various bottles of specific brown seasoning, like Kikkoman and Knorr. No Maggi, but there was an old bag of Ovaltine stashed somewhere by the garlic. The produce section isn’t too bad, either. It has okra, long talong (as opposed to the bulbous kind) and other vegetables, leafy, but also used as euphemisms.

Being in the kitchen, however, is a different story.

Here, I play sous chef to my brother Noah — a master of the broiler, the oven and the barbecue. One time he roasted some kind of newfangled chicken, smothering the bird in turmeric, stuffing it with apples and onions, tucking butter beneath the skin and nuking everything in the oven with chicken stock. The end result was a juicier Pollo Loco, with a tender mash of buttery apples. My participation in the masterpiece included watching the timer and naming the recipe (Chicken with Apple Butter).

For such complex dishes, you might say I contribute. At most, I chop, season, or stir a pot for effect. One of my pastimes as well, either with my brother or Diego, is to dream up concepts for Pinoy food trucks. Like sisig. Except you call it pork hash. And you have signs up all over the truck saying “GET YOUR HASH HERE.” Boom. (Believe me, the Philippines is the next great food town, after Chinatown and Koreatown.)

I guess I’m from the school of food-channel magic. I am a Vanna White for finished products.

Positively enthusiastic about food, I always tear into care packages from visiting friends and relatives, smuggling contraband like longganisa and cheap cigarettes. Once, after stripping a mummy-wrapped bottle of masking tape and bond paper, I shrieked ’cause it was a bottle of my favorite tuyo.

That is not to say that I haven’t tried to make things on my own, from scratch.

On my laptop are a dozen open Google tabs for ridiculously common things like “halabos na hipon” or “sinigang.”

But none were as challenging as Pinoy fried chicken.

It was hard. I had a deep fryer but it kept coming up bloody, until I finally just cut around the pink parts. And ate. The best fried chicken is the one you don’t fry yourself. I learned that, after 25 minutes of cranking the temperature down, then up, then down again, perplexed by the science of whether I should keep the oil really hot and let convection do the trick, or keep it really low so that I could cook the sucker through without burning the skin. I had taken the stubborn poultry out, sliced into its thick leg several times and then double-dipped it back into the dismally bubbling fat.

It’s the down-home things that you miss the most: the crackle of a pork rind, the hiss of frying fish, the high, clear note of sourness in tamarind broth, and yes, the quick pleasures of dunking browned chicken in red ketchup. Through the kindness of hired help, all that’s left for you to do, really, is twirl the lazy Susan on which your cook sets down a dish, and figure out how the food goes into your mouth.

At this juncture, the subject of condiments comes up. That moment when you rip open a ketchup packet and squiggle it onto a salted French fry? Multiply it by 10, and you get an idea of how I take my meals.

I make a huge deal of assembling a perfectly balanced spoonful of rice, viand, side dish and condiment — a process you might call “spooning.” Take, for example, crisp lechon kawali, a Filipino classic. In my hands, it turns into an infinite number of permutations: lechon kawali with Mang Tomas, lechon kawali doused with a dipping sauce of soy, vinegar and onions, lechon kawali in Mang Tomas and the soy-vinegar dipping sauce, lechon kawali with a helping of fresh tomato salsa, and maybe some diced green mango, lechon kawali with fresh tomato salsa spiked with bagoong on top of the mango, lechon kawali with vinegared bagoong, hold the salsa, keep the mango, and so on and so forth. (I know what you’re thinking. She must have really large spoons.)

At any time I will have at least three little saucers in front of me. “Galit-galit” is the state of mind. It’s a nod to my dad’s Pampanggo roots. We are suckers for sawsawan. It’s the reason why kare-kare can’t be sent to the table merely swimming in an orange puddle of peanut butter and tripe jam. We need shrimp paste on the side! (Here in downtown Manhattan, the Filipino joint, Jeepney, serves chori-burger with bagoong aioli — that is, bagoong and Kewpie mayonnaise.) In a way, such calculated spoonfuls let me flex more muscle over my eating experience, stretching out my control to a thousand different iterations, as many as there are jellybeans in a jar. If I can’t have my fried chicken right, at least I can have my Jufran.