By Pennie Azarcon Dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

THE THING is, I was raised to scrub the toilet. With five girls in the family and Nanay being the scourge of hired help, the household chores were evenly divided among us siblings. Ate got to cook and was soon attending night courses at a nearby public high school learning to bake cakes, make embutido from scratch and concoct commercial-type goodies. A younger sister was in charge of setting and clearing the tables; the fourth sister was the designated dishwasher, and the youngest girl was the all-around go-fer.

I don’t remember if we drew lots, or if this was payback for my incredible good looks and brilliant mind that surely must have stirred terminal envy among my other siblings, but I wound up being assigned to clean the bathroom, the toilet and kitchen floors. This was fine for my Cinderella complex for some time, but soon enough, my Bella Flores nature began to surface and I was Herr Bella to anyone who dared cross the kitchen threshold or had to use the bathroom while I was scrubbing them. I swear you could eat off my toilet floor. Why, even Adrian Monk would approve of the antiseptic gleam that my labors induced from these ghetto areas.

Things were fine — until I got married. With us living with my in-laws, I had to somehow prove myself domesticated enough to stir the pot. In my previous forays in the kitchen, I had been known to burn a hole in the ozone layer when I attempted to cook gumamela jelly in a classmate’s house in Pampanga. But being a type A personality, I immediately sought to rise above the scorch marks and tackled other fancy dishes meant to impress my in-laws. To dismal results. Fortunately, the hubby was complicit enough to help me get rid of the evidence — until his rapidly expanding belly literally became Exhibit A. Realizing that her son could only do so much for love, my mother-in-law soon planted a simplified cookbook among the dishtowels. Thus began my delicious adventures into gastronomy and my enduring affair with the Lifestyle Network’s Wolfgang Puck, Giada de Laurentiis, Nigella Lawson and oh joy, the “Iron Chef”!

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

I LEARNED how to cook out of survival. I have always tended to eat at the most godforsaken hours, which goes well with the fact that I tend to work at the most unusual hours as well. When you’re awake at 2 a.m., you don’t want to have to wake up other people just to grab something to eat. This also has something to do with the fact that I’m not crazy about leftovers, and have a particular lack of interest in cold leftovers.

So I learned how to cook, mostly through experimentation, but also with the invaluable help of my friends who did cook. My dad always cooked and cooked well, but in small portions and purely by feel, and he cooked a lot less in recent years. My mom didn’t cook at all, but is a virtual wizard when it comes to recycling food. I learned slowly, beginning with easy stuff like eggs and hotdogs, moving on to rice. Incidentally, these are the three things which I’ve discovered other people expect anyone to be able to do at the very least: boil an egg, cook hotdogs and make rice. Oh many a confused egg, burnt hotdog and watery rice batch was sacrificed on the altar of my DIY cooking start.

But then I realized I actually enjoyed it. I particularly liked cooking pasta and meat, even learning to make my own variations. There was even a time when I seemed to have been possessed by the cooking spirits themselves, as I would cook, on my own volition, for visitors and even prepared complete meals for my birthday.

I learned to read about cooking and converse about it. I discovered that there were still people who were shocked to find out that guys cook. Or, for that matter, that girls don’t — or can’t. This was before the current fervor for becoming chefs and the like. Over five years ago, people cooked either because they had to, or because they really wanted to.

I think the key has always been to have fun when you cook and to sincerely want to cook something that other people will find good. I hold no illusions regarding my occasional forays into the kitchen. If anything, it has made me far more impressed and appreciative of people who cook well. It is both gift and calling. It has enabled me to discover new unexpected authors such as Anthony Bourdain, Ruth Reichl, Peter Mayle and so on.

In the end, when the kettle is singing and the tools are willing, what I always ask myself isn’t how it is that this guy has learned to love cooking, but why doesn’t everybody?

For more on chefs, the latest cuisine and cooking as a career, check out this weekend’s issue of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine, out July 6 with the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

By Pennie Azarcon Dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

ONCE I hit the mid-20s, the pressure began to build up. Subtle as a sledgehammer, Nanay would nag, “So get married already. What are you waiting for? Baka mahirapan ka nang mag-anak,” she warned, like I were an aging septuagenarian about to croak. College friends, saddled with one or two kids by this time, hinted broadly about my missing out on what they slyly described as “luto ng Diyos.”

But I had just come from a month’s tour of Europe, having won in a travel essay writing competition sponsored by this airline, and suddenly, I saw the world out there. The castles! The swans gracefully circling placid lakes! The majestic Alps! The Swiss chalets like I imagined from the pages of “Heidi”! Marie Antoinette’s excesses at the Versailles! I was the frog in the well who had leapt out of the fetid waters, saw that the world was more than just this piece of sky crowning the mouth of hell, and wanted more of it.

In the end, bowing to convention and my parents’ near panicked attempts to marry me off (quick, before The Boyfriend recovers from Ativan and comes to his senses!), I marched down the aisle looking strangely serene for my normally high-strung self.

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

BELIEVE it or not, I decided on my wedding photographer long before I decided to get married. I was assigned to do a cover story on an up-and-coming actress; the cover photo would be taken by Patrick Uy.

I had heard of Patrick before; my former boss Alya knew him and had written about his vibrant career as a wedding photographer as well as the unfortunate fire that razed his studio even as he was on the clock at a wedding.

But I had never met him nor seen much of his work until that assignment. His new Pacific Light studio could be found on Annapolis, Greenhills, atop an incongruous escalator. The studio was tastefully minimalist — and floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall full of gorgeous wedding photographs. Patrick himself was an extremely amiable guy.

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

IT’S a Filipino thing: playing in the streets as the sun goes down. The very names of the games played speak to their exotic and mesmerizing nature: tumbang preso, patintero, and so on. It’s a siren song; when the mothers start asking their children to come home because it’s getting dark, the need to play becomes so much stronger, like a mild muazzin. Every second of play becomes all the more precious, even as the mothers’ voices grow shriller.

But not everyone thrives in the streets. Those who are neither fast nor athletic nor well-liked literally don’t play well with others. Truth is, they don’t play with others at all. I was one of those. I never learned to ride a bike; I tried, it didn’t go straight — or well. I was not only a weakling, I was an annoying weakling prone to holding grudges and getting ticked off.

But I found a refuge in the library, be it at home or in school. I know, I know, it seems so contrived, but I enjoyed playing inside my own mind much more than I did outside with the others. I liked watching events unfold even if I knew what was going to happen. And we had amazing books at home because my parents bought all the books they could. We had encyclopedias, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books (those were awesome), hardcover classics, and the holy trinity of Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins.

They were my companions, my playmates. I worried after Ivanhoe and Rebecca, knew that nothing good would come from Lancelot making goo-goo eyes at the Queen, disliked Bess, found Chet Morton annoying though found his hobbies fascinating and while the Bobbseys were predictable, the places they traveled to were not; Greece and London were the best.

And it never, ever occurred to me that I was learning. Countless suns have set. Endless games have ended. But I have never regretted not spending my time in the sun. The ultimate games were those found in the cool places between a book’s pages, each shadow stretching into forever.

Check out the June 22 issue of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine.

By Pennie Azarcon-dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

LOOKS, some people say, is nature’s way of giving you a good hand. Excellent genes help, but are no guarantee. What if you have some recessive genes that suddenly decide to make an appearance three generations later? Which explains how two people of normal height can sometimes be blessed with a midget child.

Being born to wealth might give you an edge when you decide on cosmetic surgery later, but good looks are never a monopoly of the rich. In fact, a sociologist friend once pointed out, the reason beauty pageants are so popular among the urban poor is that they consider good looks a singular blessing, a sort of sign from above that they’ve been given a rare opportunity to better their lot so they should go hop to it. If you can’t engineer good looks and they suddenly land on your lap via a fair and tawny-headed daughter, doesn’t that say that the gods have smiled on you at last, and your luck just might change for the better? Why not expose the girl then to beauty pageants where any number of rich unattached guys might be on the panel of judges and on the prowl for their girl de jour?

Again, says this sociologist friend, it’s not only the colonial mindset that makes fair skin and skin whitening creams a winner. It’s aspirational. Among the poor, fair skin unblemished by insect bites, wounds and scars is kutis-mayaman, the skin of the privileged lot, and isn’t that what most people aspire to be?

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By Eric S. Caruncho, Staff Writer
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

IN THEIR song “Betamax,” Sandwich configures ancient history as the time before MTV, MP3, DVD, cellphones and the Internet, when there was only “Betamax”. But there are those among us who remember even further back.

Watching Quentin Tarantino’s and Robert Rodriguez’s “Grindhouse” films (”Death Proof” and “Planet Terror”) with my popcorn in the air-conditioned comfort of the local cineplex, I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the kids in the theater knew what a “grindhouse” was? How many of them could even imagine what it was like in these illicit dens of sin?

The quaint term for them was “second-run moviehouses,” but my parents called them “Sine Surot” (my mother even convinced me that was what the revolving neon “S”s around the theater marquees stood for). They existed in most towns, decrepit buildings with noisy old projectors that showed double features of foreign movies that had shown months, sometimes even years before, in first-run cinemas.

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

LOOKING in, the trouble with beauty is that its very idea is impossible to define; it is relative and self-evident, timeless and fleeting, why she even walks in it, according to Cummings. A bigger puzzle is how people can be in such agreement (celebrities) and conflict (beauty pageants) about it. So is it really within? Why then do we spend so much time working on and being obsessed with the without part?

Additionally, what women and men see as beautiful is apparently not in harmony, perhaps has never been. Additionally, individual “taste” has been much maligned, heck, even ridiculed, often ironically, by whomever they’re dating at the moment.

Putting aside the fact that personalities are not usually immediately quantifiable, then the eyes have it. I don’t mean we look at how the eyes fit with the rest of the face, or even the rest of the person. No, I mean the eyes by themselves.

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By Pennie Azarcon-dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

I ONCE read this item in a newspaper about the IgNobel Award, a spoof of the Nobel Prize, which was given to the silliest, most useless, and ridiculous invention or idea of the year. At that time, it was conferred to this inventor of artificial testicles for neutered dogs that he called, and I swear I’m not making this up, Neuticles!

I remember that the Nigerians were given an honorary IgNobel for coming up with a creative literary form that publicly begs decent people to help ousted dictators, military strongmen and corrupt politicians launder their ill-gotten millions via e-mail.

Well, after reading and editing the stories for this Sunday’s Inquirer Magazine — on the provocative theme “Sex, Vice and Discipline on Campus — I thought there should be a local counterpart to the IgNobel Award in our schools. After all, some of the silliest, most useless and ridiculous rules I’ve ever encountered emanate from the cerebral cortex of our august academicians.

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

I WAS never the most enthusiastic person when it came to the first day of school. I was largely a bad student who only studied when I was fascinated by what we were taking up, which wasn’t often for most subjects, and never, when it came to math. I was also a kid with a history of being virtually impossible to drag away from the TV (I was a true-blue afternoon section guy), even if the school bus (ah, the immortal service) was already idling outside.

But there were things to love about the coming of school and most of it had to do with the new stuff we brought. There were the basics, like the stroller bag that went really fast. Those dismissal-time stroller races needed the swiftest strollers, after all. Everyone had new shoes but very few had new uniforms (usually reserved for Friday) so that was a wash.

It all boiled down to the glory of school supplies. From those days, I still carry with me an exultation that comes with staring at office supplies. Back then, it was all about the conspicuous stuff. Those were the 1980s, the heyday of the Trapper Keeper, those monstrous plastic-and-Velcro contraptions that were actually not very useful (too big, too bulky, way too noisy) but man, were they ever distracting. Mead (manufacturer of those Trapper Keepers) remains the grand poobah of binder construction today but has toned down the colors and dimensions to make tasteful and utterly practical wares.

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