Malacañang's 'hot' Babes

This “Babe” obviously can stand the heat in the kitchen. And because of her wizardry in cooking and costings, she’s definitely a “hot” Palace property.

Aurora “Babes” Austria, a Certified Public Accountant, turned down President Arroyo’s offer to be assistant secretary at the Department of Budget and Management in 2001. Four years later, she would reconsider the President’s offer to work at Malacañang — but only if she would work in the kitchen, not in some carpeted bureaucrat’s office.

And so it came to pass that Malacañang had its first woman executive chef in 2005, just about the time that the White House had a woman (a Filipina, too) in the same post.

Babes, who also has a Bachelor’s degree in Law, was in her mid-life when she made a 180-degree turn in her career path — proving that it is never too late to follow one’s heart.

In her case, she was giving up her career for her first love — cooking.

“I had had enough of budgets and taxes,” says Babes when recalling the day she made the life-altering choice to quit her job as finance director of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (her immediate boss was then Vice President and concurrent Social Welfare Secretary Gloria Arroyo) to study cooking with Chef Gene Gonzalez. She would later enroll at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in California.

Babes returned to Manila just when Mrs. Arroyo was in the beginning of her second term. Armed with a degree from CIA, she was planning on setting up her own restaurant in Tagaytay. But during a reunion with former officemates, she was encouraged to pay a courtesy call on her former boss, now the President.

“Start ka na,” were the President’s first words to her former chief finance officer.

“We are always having our dinners catered. Magastos,” Chef Babes quotes the President as having said to her. This time, Babes couldn’t say no to the boss she had worked with for over a decade (since GMA was senator in the ’90s).

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A group of women journalists including this writer met Chef Babes last Friday during a lunch hosted by President Arroyo at Malacañang. It was Mrs. Arroyo who revealed Chef Babes’ mid-life turnaround, making us more curious about the woman who spent virtually her entire professional life dealing with numbers and balance sheets, not pots and pans.

Chef Babes was wearing her white toque, white jacket and black Dutch clogs when she walked into the dining room to receive our compliments. The clogs, she said, were made especially for chefs who are on their feet virtually the whole day — and night.

Chef Babes was still glowing from the raves she got from the previous night’s dinner for US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the Bahay Pangarap at the PSG Headquarters grounds across the Pasig River from Malacañang. (The guesthouse was a project by then First Lady Eva Macapagal in the mid-’60s. It was refurbished recently under the supervision of Undersecretary Medy Poblador and Social Secretary Bettina Osmeña.) The very exclusive dinner for Clinton, according to a Facebook post by US Ambassador Kristie Kenney and an ABS-CBN report, included Tawilis or freshwater sardine with white cheese and Milkfish plantain Napoleon or “bangus” salad with banana fritters, Davao pomelos, Tagaytay micro-greens (plant shoots like celery or arugula) and Dalandan orange vinaigrette, tinola chicken chowder, Palawan Lapu-Lapu (grouper fish) in crépinette (a small flattened sausage coated with melted butter and bread crumbs) with parsley tamarind ginger sauce and foie gras (fattened-up duck liver), served with tropical salad and pandan rice.

Clinton was also served a duo rack of lamb with Meltique beef cube roll with guava jelly and Barako coffee sauce. For dessert, the guests had Guimaras mango mousse and open-faced apple pie with vanilla ice cream.

After reading the mouthwatering menu and the ingenious way it fused the best of Philippine and American cuisine, I wondered immediately which hotel catered for the event. I was frankly surprised to discover that the dinner was whipped up by the Palace kitchen itself — not that I doubted Chef Babes’ capability, only that I didn’t know Malacañang had its own executive chef! (I knew for a fact that official Palace functions from 1986 to 2005 were catered by premier hotels and restaurants.)

I asked Chef Babes what was her most memorable event as the Palace’s head chef.

“The state dinner hosted by President Arroyo for the prime minister of New Zealand, which was held in a seaside resort in Bohol,” she says. “We had tarsier figures carved out of pumpkins floating in the soup and mini Chocolate hills for dessert!”

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Chef Babes, who is single, embarked on a lifetime love affair with cooking after she burned the fence in the family home in Bataan when she attempted to cook a duck’s egg from a fire kindled with bamboo twigs. She didn’t know one had to put the egg in water in a pot first, and cooking the egg directly over the fire was a bomb of an endeavor — literally! To atone for her “mistake” Babes tried to do better in the kitchen. She would even accompany her nanay Estelita to the market and learned from her the secrets of bargaining and ascertaining the freshness and quality of meat, fish and vegetables.

Thus Chef Babes brings into her job as executive chef more than just her knowledge of cooking — she brings in as well her skills in budgeting and marketing. After all, she isn’t just a cook or menu planner — she’s a manager.

Having worked with the President (when they were at the DSWD they had no less than six meetings daily), she can anticipate what the President wants and needs. She obviously knows the President’s quirks, too.

How is it like cooking for one of the most powerful women in the world?

“Oh, the President is just like a kid. She likes to bring a lunchbox with her — with a sandwich, siopao or hopia inside,” smiles Chef Babes.

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