The Restaurant in My Home

What my dad taught me, what the cookbooks left out, and why I finally renovated the kitchen

There is a restaurant in my house. It has one cook, no menu, and it opens only when there is a reason.

The reasons are the usual ones. Christmas. A birthday. My kids coming home for a few days. The house fills, the table gets extended with whatever we can find, and I am in the kitchen from morning, which is exactly where I want to be.

I have loved cooking since I was young. That is not a late discovery or a hobby I picked up when life slowed down. It is one of the few things about myself that has not changed.

Where it started

My dad cooked, and I watched him. Children learn more at an elbow than anyone credits — the way he moved around a stove, what he tasted for, when he decided a thing was finished.

But most of what I know, I’ve read.

I read cookbooks the way other people read novels. Cover to cover, for pleasure, with no intention of making anything that week. There is a whole shelf of them, and in some of them, the spines have given up.

A cookbook will tell you what. It will almost will never tell you how.

Nowadays, I still do, mostly from blogs of foodies.

What the recipes leave out

This is the part I wish someone had said to me plainly when I was starting.

The recipe says sauté the garlic until fragrant. It does not tell you that fragrant arrives about four seconds before burnt, and that you will smell it before you see it. It says heat the oil. It does not tell you the small sound a piece of onion makes when the pan is finally hot enough to take it. It says cook the chicken until tender. It does not tell you when the chicken is tender but no longer juicy.

The cookbook will not tell you what to do when your food is salty, or when it is too sour, or what happens when one ingredient is too much. None of those are written down. You learn them by cooking the food yourself, usually badly the first time, and paying attention while you do.

I have ruined dishes. Everyone who cooks well has ruined dishes. That is not wasted food. That is tuition.

Tasting is a skill you can practice

When we eat out, I taste.

Not politely — I taste the way you would listen to music you intend to play later. What is in this. There is calamansi here. That is star anise, and there is not much of it. Something in the sauce is sweet and it is not sugar.

Then I go home and try to build it from what I understood.

Sometimes it takes three attempts. Sometimes what I end up with is only a cousin of the original, and we eat that and nobody complains. I am not trying to take anything from anyone's kitchen. I am trying to understand it. Those are different projects.

Most of the pasta I cook at home, I invented this way. There is no recipe for any of it. Each one began as something I tasted somewhere and then quietly stopped resembling. I cooked the gintaang tinola which we tasted in one restaurant in Bohol. They called it chicken soup.

My children ask me why I do not measure.

This is why. A measurement is a guess somebody else made about the ingredients they had in front of them that day — their tomatoes, their salt, their pan, their stove. Mine are not the same and never will be. The only honest instrument in the kitchen is the tasting spoon, and it has to be used more than once.

The eating is not the best part

People assume the pleasure of cooking is at the table. For me, the table is almost the anticlimax.

What I love is before that. The mincing of garlic cloves, and then the onion. Dicing bell peppers and potatoes into pieces that match each other. Whatever vegetables the dish is asking for, washed and cut and waiting in their own small bowls, so that when the pan is hot I am not scrambling.

There is order in it, and quiet, and my hands know what to do without consulting me.

The onion that makes you cry is only a plant defending itself, releasing a compound that turns to acid when it meets the water in your eyes. Chill it first and it argues less.

The eating is over in twenty minutes. The preparation takes the whole morning, and the whole morning is the point.

Why I renovated

A few months back I had the kitchen rebuilt.

The old one was built for the old me who cooked differently than I do now — fine for a weeknight, hopeless on the days that matter. On a holiday I would have one oven and four things that needed it, doing arithmetic with time and temperature instead of cooking.

So now, two ovens. The roast and the bread no longer negotiate. And cabinets, plenty of them, because baking accumulates equipment the way nothing else in a house does — pans and tins and the mixer, and the things you use once a year that refuse to give up.

I did not renovate it for guests. Guests see the table. I renovated it for the hours nobody sees, which is where I actually live.

The restaurant still has one cook and no menu. It still opens but only when there is a reason.

There is almost always a reason.