"Train well, work hard, work harder."
--Charles Carroll, American chef.

KITCHEN work is never an easy task more especially if you are the assigned to conjure a menu that will make everyone smile with pleasure. Pressure.

It takes years with, preferably with the proper guidance, to move around the area with ease and come up with the most tasteful preparation of the simplest dish.

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Some start with big-eyed chin on hands watching lola or mama prepare the daily fare. Then you eventually move to the next step in peeling or slicing ingredients and maybe sooner than you think, the preparation.

It is a gift. If some people are born with green thumbs, some are gifted with the silver spoon, not on the lips but on the hand. If not, then it can be learned.

There is a sudden proliferation of culinary schools around the country. It must be the next "in" thing after the Physical Therapy, Nursing and Call Center fad.

Now everybody wants to learn how to cook and eventually earn the title of Chef.

But to be a chef entails more than earning a certificate in a short course of a year or less, so never use the term loosely. You only learn the basics of cooking in this short a time, but it takes longer time to really learn the craft. You have to be armed with passion-for food, for life.

There is a certain art to cooking, more complex than we think. You may wear the prescribed uniform but it will take more training and hard work than you think it does to get that title you are aspiring for.

The culinary school is your best bet to either hone what you already know from experience or start from scratch. Locally, there is the Center for Asian Culinary Studies (Cacs) that offers programs in cooking and baking either through lifestyle recreational classes for one day or a 20-day certificate program.

Certificate courses are given a chance to showcase what they have learned from the school's Chef-instructors in a Legacy Buffet at the end of the term. And at Cacs, the 10th batch of 19 students prepared their choice menu for the public to sample.

It was a pleasant meal. Nothing fancy in presentation, both in the dishes and venue, most probably to make the food the centerpiece of the evening -- an impressively vast menu from starter to dessert.

Congratulations to the latest graduates of Cacs for taking the first step to a bigger dream -- a chef's hat and the hard-earned title to go along with it.