Hello.
I’m writing this after a good weekend. I say it’s good because it was the first one in a while (as you may have noticed in the scarcity of posts these past few weeks) that I had the time to slow down and breathe. And when I say breathe, I mean really take lungsfull of air—the kind that not only sustain, but nourish and revive—where I do breathing best: in the kitchen. I finally had time to cook again, and the clanging of pots, the sizzle of butter in a hot pan, the woodsy smell of thyme as onions caramelize over the stovetop, all the sights and sounds and smells of my cooking…they reminded me of who I am.
And I had needed the reminder for a while. I kind of broke up with my blog a bit these past few months. In Tagalog, “Cool off kami,” an expression that means the amorous fires of affection have been doused with the rains that come with weathering daily life: familiarity, complacency, the humdrumness of it all. As I managed a day job, went home for a quick trip the Philippines, attended three weddings in a span of a month and a half (I was in two of them), worried about Typhoon Ondoy, celebrated anniversaries and birthdays, screamed on roller coaster rides, visited with Wild Things and honed my Cranium skills for game night, I just got SO LOST in the shuffle of my everydays.
It’s not that I had nothing to write about, I had just lost the words. They were hanging out somewhere in a cupboard in my mind, and I didn’t know how to reach them. For a while, I didn’t even really want to. I would read all your blogs, and all the wonderful things you were being and doing in your lives, and I’d grope for the words to describe mine. Who did it matter to, really, all my words? Because somewhere out there, someone else is tackling a Pavlova, or stenciling fabric to sew into a skirt. Someone somewhere always had an idea—often a better idea—and she was writing about it. With beautiful photography to boot.
Two weekends ago, right in the dregs of my Blog Loathingness, I was at my Manang Linda’s house in Las Vegas. Manang Linda is the sort of classic cook who tackles roasts and racks of lamb and steak with a single-minded fearlessness that I’ve always admired. I’m always picking through her cookbooks and, that weekend, realized that she had both volumes of Julia Child’s Mastering The Art Of French Cooking.
I wrinkled my nose, remembering the poetry with which Julie Powell described Child’s signature dish, Boeuf Bourguignon. Don’t get me wrong. I love the book and shamelessly teared up during the movie, but somehow, I didn’t like how EVERYONE was on a Julia Child kick. I didn’t want to BE like everyone else. I read through the recipe, thinking, WHAT was the big deal about this dish, really? PLEASE, it’s a simple BEEF STEW, I scoffed.
I thought about that recipe for two weeks. Encouraged by the imagined simplicity of it, I’d look at it with one eyebrow raised, imagining all the steps in my mind. I would read it before going to sleep, my culinary vocabulary hiccupping over the French terms.
I plotted my conquest of it during my lunch hour at work, carefully listing the ingredients to buy, outlining my strategies in the kitchen. I finally decided I would make it, more to prove my point that it was a simple dish of beef stewed in wine–nothing more–and please can people just please pipe down about it already!
What I didn’t know was that cooking the dish would not only humble me, but would drag me by the apron strings out of the kitchen and out of my writing slump.
I’m not going to explain the steps in how the dish is made. There are countless other blogs who have done me the favor, describing their experience in great detail. I realize this is because the recipe is actually quite involved, and has several laborious steps. An exploration of it warrants a detailed description that hopefully breaks it down into more manageable cooking procedures for the next home cook to tackle.
But I won’t bore you with the details, because in the end, just as in life, the details didn’t matter. In the end, what happened to me while cooking it is the real story.
I started out that morning at Santa Monica’s Farmer’s Market on Cloverfield.
I wanted to get as many fresh, local ingredients for the dish as I could. There were many stalls of fresh produce, their bright colors filling my eyes.
Back in the kitchen, I took stock my ingredients, stepped back to gather my wits about me and plunged in.
Staying as faithful to Julia Child’s directions as possible, I sliced, seared, sauteed and seasoned for the next four hours.
And the thing is, these methods aren’t new to me. But I started to realize I’d never really made anything French before (fries, maybe, but that doesn’t count).
And it occurred to me that I’d never really made anything by Julia Child, and had never cooked with the combination of stuff like chianti and bay leaves and garlic and thyme.
So the smells and colors and flavors that bloomed from the stove into a warm cloud of Juliachildfrenchness in the kitchen was something I had never smelled, or seen, or tasted. At least, nothing I’d ever made myself before. And tasting something for the very first time–that’s one of the purest experiences someone who loves food can ever have.
It was also the first time I’d taken a shot at making a bouquet garni–a bundle of aromatic herbs wrapped in cheesecloth–that seasoned the onions as they braised in stock. That tiny thing fascinated me, only because I’d never made it before.
Somewhere between searing batches of meat in bacon fat (doesn’t that just sound dangerously yummy?) and talking to the mushrooms as they turned golden in butter (“Please be perfect, little shrooms!”), I found my cooking groove again. You know, the kind that makes me know when to check on something just from the smells of it, or tunes my pulse to the rhythm of rattling pan lids as their contents bubble away. I was cooking again, cooking for myself, and just like that, the words came hurtling out of the cupboard of my mind. I was already beginning to write this blog post as I finished the dish, exclaiming after the first tasting, “This is perhaps the best thing I have ever made. Ever.”
The flavors were robust, complicated and comforting at the same time. I couldn’t wait to sit down and write about it.
And just as I cooked for myself, I realized that all that really matters is that I write for myself. Because when I do, I get to celebrate my favorite domestic pursuits, the way only I can.
So, this is the long story of how Julia Child and Boeuf Bourguignon were the aphrodisiac that made me fall back in love with my blog (“Kami na ulit!”). I didn’t want to channel Julie Powell, but sometimes, the dishes choose us as much as we choose them. Julia Child spent all that loving time on that phenomenal dish, and probably didn’t know how some day, the experience of making Boeuf would wake someone like me up from a slumber I didn’t quite know how to get out of.
I was wrong. It ISN’T just beef stew. It’s braised bliss and stewed serendipity, all in one glorious, happy, delicious pot.
Welcome back to me. And how have YOU been?
—
Thank you, E., for hunting down pearl onions with me, leaving me alone in the kitchen when I needed to be and reassuring me that it was only a matter of time before I found my words again. And also for introducing me to Cactus Cooler, which I will now always remember as the perfectly odd beverage pairing for Boeuf! Haha. 
J. | 
11 4th, 2009| 
