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.