Cooking 101 (Part Deux)
I was talking to Philip one time and was telling him about the time I helped out my brother with making the fruit salad for his class’ Linggo ng Wika.
“Hey, that’s my favorite! I love fruit salad,” he told me.
I smiled. “That’s good. Don’t worry, I’ll make you one someday.” Sooo not gonna happen. Unless we started moving in together and there is no way THAT’s gonna happen… I just like to make him think that I might actually cook for him. He can always fantasize about watching me toil infront of a hot stove wearing a cute teddy, stilettos and an apron, during those long cold nights.
“Do you cook by the way?”
I shrugged, “Uhhh… no.”
“Why? Haven’t you ever watched your mother cook and then ask her to teach you?”
“My mother rarely cooks, we have a maid for that. And when my mother actually does cook, it’s usually the kind of food that I would never eat, like Pinakbet or Kare-kare,” I said, scrunching my face in disgust.
He looked at me. “You don’t eat vegetables?”
“I do. But I’m picky. I will never eat okra or ampalaya (bitter cucumber) though. I have reservations about stringbeans and eggplant but I will eat them if I really had no choice.”
He smiled. “Too bad. I love a girl who can cook.”
Silence. He’s probably thinking of Midge, who can cook. And I’m thinking of him thinking of Midge, who watches him everyday as he consumes the meals she cooked for him.
Refusing to feel depressed, I erased the sordid image in my mind and beamed at him, “My mother always asks me how will I ever survive when I finally get married and I still don’t know how to cook for my husband and my children.”
“So what do you tell her?”
“I tell her I’ll just find myself a husband who will cook for me instead.”
Philip laughs and finding me adorable, proceeds to hug me.
Cooking 101 (Part One)
I can’t cook.
For the past 27 years of my life, I have never learned to cook.
Oh, I can fry an occasional fish, boil an egg, warm up a can of corned beef, cook rice in a rice cooker (which is basically following the 1:1 rule, no science in that), but I cannot make a complete fantastic meal to save my life. I can make a really fatty atherosceloris-beckoning breakfast though, composed of coking an egg sunny side up, warming up a can of corned beef, frying a couple of nitrite-laden hotdogs and toasting last’s night’s left over rice, if I really had no choice, but a year of that kind of cooking and I’d be the youngest contender for bypass surgery at the age of 28.
I’ve had several cooking mishaps, one which consisted of me attempting to make pancakes which resembled doughy scrambled eggs (which a few of my classmates have witnessed and never made me forget, referring to it as “The Unforgettable Day [Mistress] Tried To Make Hotcakes In the Community”) and another incident where I tried frying hotdogs, only to realize that I had actually forgotten to remove the hotdogs from their individual plastic wrappers and I had managed to make those plastic wrappers curl up as they burned in all that hot oil.
I blame it on the fact that I lived most of my life with a maid, who cooks all our meals for us. My mother, being a working mother for as long as I can remember (and will probably continue to do so, as long as the Philippine government will allow her) rarely cooks except occasionally, on the weekends that our maid has her days off. Actually, even on those days, my aunt, who has never married and lives with us, does most of the cooking so, I never really found the opportunity to ask my mother to teach me how to cook as she toils over a hot stove nor the drive to actually immerse myself in the kitchen.
But I’m really just making excuses. I’m lazy. That’s probably it.
But for the past few months, learning how to cook has provided me with a certain fascination equivalent to Fuck-Me-Boots* (black classy knee-length boots that I dream about but cannot find, afford, nor wear since I have calves disproportionate to my body from all that bicycling during my highschool days) and mountain-climbing (an activity I’d really want to take up but have found no friends willing to do that with me). I found myself checking out websites of other bloggers who cook, salivating over the pictures while wiping my own drool from my laptop and poring through cooking recipes in the Internet of foods that I will probably not be able to make from scratch.
Hence, I have resolved to mentally add this to my list of 101 reasons why I should move out of my parent’s house after I find myself a job: It will give me the opportunity to finally force myself to learn how to cook.
SoSexy, who has officially won the class’ vote for the Best Dinuguan (blood pudding) award, used to tell me that learning how to cook will make my then boyfriend fall for me more. As much as I loved my boyfriend then, I’m lazy guys, hasn’t anybody noticed that yet? So, it is only until recently that I actually started fantasizing about cooking up a romantic meal for some guy – after which, he would be so enthralled with my cooking that with a mouth full of Tequila Lime Chicken topped with Cranberry-Walnut Chicken Salad, he will go down on his knees and look up to me and say:
Whhhhmp mmm mmmpppprrrrhhhy mpphooo?
(Translation: Will you marry me?)
And I’d tell him yes.
Unless of course, I didn’t want him to. Then I’d just shove another spoonful of the Apricot and Walnut Vareniki dessert into his mouth instead and pretend that the wedding proposal never happened.
Catholic School Girl Guilt
I occasionally think that maybe I have a destructive personality.
I frequently lament on not having a boyfriend and getting worried that maybe someday I will end up dying alone, but when I do end up in a relationship, I somehow end up mucking things up until it just doesn’t seem to work out for anyone of us that the relationship just has to end.
And the cycle repeats itself.
I say this because I have noted one particular attitude of mine that has most likely brought about the start of the impending destruction in most of the relationships I have been in.
I call it, the Catholic School Girl Guilt.
You know that Golden Rule for Cheating Boys that goes something like, “If you’re ever caught cheating, at all costs, never ever admit to the truth”?
Well, I do the exact opposite.
Even if they have no idea that I had done something wrong, I feel so incredibly guilty that I end up confessing to my boyfriend about it. It probably had something to do with the guilt that has been ingrained far up my cerebrum from my Catholic School upbringing when occasionally, even if you haven’t really done anything wrong, your teachers make you feel like you did. You become unable to look them in the eye and your conscience really eats at you that you eventually end up confessing to a deed which, most of the times, you didn’t even do in the first place.
Case point my freshman year in medical school. I had been seeing Rockstar for more than six months already. I had just started medical school and was starting to make new friends. I loved my new classmates and I was missing my old college buddies terribly. Hence, I wanted the opportunity to get to know my new classmates more. A bunch of the guys were always inviting me out for drinks and night-outs. I always kept telling Rockstar that I wanted to go with them. Rockstar, always feeling threatened by the presence of other guys spending more time with me, forbid me to.
This, of course, does not do well for me.
“No,” Rockstar remarked, for the umpteenth time.
“Come on. We’re always hanging out together. Can’t the two of us go out with them for once?”
He, of course, took this the wrong way. “Why? Are you bored with me?”
“No, I didn’t say that. It’s just that I want to get to know these people too. I would be going to spend the next five years with them after all. As for us, we’ve known each other for six months now and baby, we have a lifetime to get to know each other. Don’t I deserve the chance to be able to hang-out with these people as well?”
“Well, if you loved them so much more than me, then maybe you should break up with me to be with them.”
“You’re totally taking this the wrong way.”
“No, seriously, I mean it.”
“What? I’m being insecure? Is it so bad to be worried that my girlfriend wants to spend time with other guys than her own boyfriend? They’re guys, [mistress]. I know what guys are interested in when they ask out girls their own age. You can’t understand me because you’re a girl and you don’t know these things.”
Rockstar had no concept of a platonic relationship with the opposite sex. His closest female friends have all been either girls he used to court in the past, he used to have a thing with, used to have a thing for him or are just too unattractive to even have a thing with at all. I pouted. “You’re being irrational.”
“Now, I’m irrational? They like you! Is it actually wrong for me to feel threatened that some other guys are interested in you and you actually want to get to know them?”
“They are NOT all attracted to me.”
“Not all? So you mean to say, there are some who actually are.”
This is the point when I should have just kept my mouth shut. But the Catholic School Girl guilt slipped in before I could even stop myself. I was just so pissed off with him that I didn’t even think first before talking my mouth off. “Well, there are a few who seem a little too friendly.”
“WHAT?” If Rockstar was a cartoon character, it would be safe to say that there would be steam coming out of his ears at this point.
But, oh, I had already opened the floodgates and I must have been incredibly stupid that I proceeded to further incriminate myself. “You know, just a little too flirty that maybe misconstrued as a sign of interest. But it’s nothing. They’re probably just being friendly or something.”
“Who?” Rockstar asked me, his expression hard as stone.
“Rockstar!”
“If you’re not going to tell me, I swear I’m going to leave you and walk out of here right now!”
“Seriously, [mistress]!”
“Okay, okay… I think FunnyBoy has a thing for me.”
Before I knew it, he begins this major phone brigade wherein he calls my bestfriend from highschool, EngineerBoy, asks him about FunnyBoy which of course, EngineerBoy does not have any idea about, asks for the number of his girlfriend Darna, who is also one of my classmates in medical school, calls her up and asks her about FunnyBoy as well which she fervently denies, asks her for FunnyBoy’s number, calls him and asks him the most embarrassing question as to whether it is true that FunnyBoy is interested in me.
The whole thing happens with me fuming and pleading him not to proceed with all this embarrassment.
“Rockstar, come on! This is embarrassing to me and to FunnyBoy! For all we know, I’m just imagining things and he’s really just being friendly. What if he’ll start thinking that I’m one of those conceited girls who think every man in the room is in love with her?”
“Stop it! I’m done talking to you!” And he proceeds to talk to FunnyBoy on the phone. FunnyBoy, of course, denies being interested in me and their conversation ends with Rockstar telling him to stop flirting with me because I already have a boyfriend. Somewhat appeased, Rockstar finally relents and drops the argument with me.
Of course, at this point, I was already incredibly humiliated that for the next few weeks, I avoided FunnyBoy as much as I could and just simply couldn’t look him in the eye.
Me and my big mouth.
