Saturday, February 10, 2007
Woman cooking dreams
SHE whom the gods love, they first destroy.
At seven, Senen Ouano lost her father Aurelio before he could walk her through the lore of his tiny Sikatuna eatery.
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But when Senen was just in her '20s, the education undergraduate was already whipping up kaldereta (goat meat in tomato and liver sauce), pochero (spicy beef stew with Spanish blood sausage) and other lutong bahay dishes (home cooking) in a carenderia (cafeteria) located on the same street of her father’s dreams.
In November 1990, when Cebu reeled from typhoon Ruping, Senen became one of its victims.
Now an agribusiness entrepreneur, Senen lost hundreds of thousands of pesos when the most destructive of the tropical typhoons that year damaged a hectare of her budding apple-guava trees.
With four children to put through school—and the eldest in medical studies—Senen fell back on her father’s dreams: cooking.
A canteen she operated from her home in Banilad drew a following among subdivision residents and students and teachers of a nearby medical school.
After eight years of meeting her loyal customers’ requests for home-cooked dishes for intimate dinners and school functions, Senen’s Fastfood and Catering Services came to be.
According to daughter Marie, their record is meeting 28 functions in one day. For the peak seasons—the fiestas of Opon and Mandaue, as well as Christmas—their patrons book two months in advance.
During the recent 12th Association of Southeast Asian Nations Summit, Senen was invited to cater again to the employees of a five-class hotel, one of the Summit venues.
Ensuring that taste and hygiene never fall beneath standards, Senen is in the kitchen at the crack of dawn to orchestrate the flavors that have customers repeating orders for her sotanghon (bean thread noodles), chicken cordon bleu (chicken breasts rolled in ham, cheese and mushroom sauce), spicy spare ribs and seafood platter, among others.
Eschewing formal training, Senen still reads multitudinous cookbooks before she veers away from the tried-and-tested to create her own memorials to taste.
At 58, Senen lives the dreams a girl of seven once waited her father to walk her through. “Falling down is not failure; staying down is.”
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (February 10, 2007 issue)
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