Lucy Torres’ kitchen secrets

MANILA, Philippines - It’s easy to tell that she has it all together. As an actress, TV host, model, wife, mother and representative-elect of the fourth district of Leyte, Lucy Torres sure knows how to keep everything intact and stay on top of all her responsibilities.

If made to choose among all those, however, the choice is a no-brainer as her favorite jobs are the ones closest to her heart — that of being a wife and a mother. No matter how tired she could be from doing everything else, she makes sure that her family has her at her best.

One of the ways that they bond is through food. Lucy admits though that her husband Richard is more adept at doing magic in the kitchen. “He loves to cook and he can do it effortlessly. He is one of those that grew up with pots and pans as his playmates. The kitchen is easily just one of his many playgrounds,” she says.

To this day, she is impressed with Richard’s creativity in the kitchen. Even if he’s only cooking for the two of them, he will plate the food as if there are guests over. “In that way, you are able to celebrate the mundane daily,” she dotingly shares of her husband.

His skill has motivated Lucy to be adventurous in the kitchen as well. Into their marriage, she has used this as drive to also learn her own tricks, even if she began with no kitchen know-how. “(Unlike Richard), I need more guidance and structure and time. What I know of cooking, I learned from lessons I took as a new bride,” she admits.

This has brought her to finding partners in the kitchen that will help her through the cooking challenge. She doesn’t mind occasionally seeking help from recipe books and finding equipment that will aid the process.

One of which is an oven by Miele, a German manufacturer of high-end domestic appliances. “For starters, it has an automatic program feature for different kinds of food. For every program, the cooking function and temperature, as well as the cooking time, are pre-set. All I have to do is select the right dish on the display, put the food in, and the oven will do the rest,” she says.

This has relieved Lucy of stressful kitchen work and replaced that with expanding what she can cook up in the kitchen. “I feel that there’s a lot of guesswork involved, and there is this self-imposed pressure to constantly hover over the dish, poke it, and pray that it turns out (to look and taste good). It is for this very reason that I love the Miele oven. (This) oven is very intelligent, in the sense that once I have a recipe perfected already; there are customizable user programs that can be manually pre-set, (so the machine remembers my settings at the touch of a button). There is also the Wireless Food Probe feature that ensures accurate roasting of fish, meat and poultry by not only measuring the core temperature, but also displaying the remaining time needed until it is just perfect,” Lucy enthuses.

As a mom and wife, she recognizes the nourishing and uniting power of food. For this reason, she sees the kitchen as an important part of their home.