This 11-year-old loves to cook

“Pinoy Junior Masterchef” grand champ Kyle Imao grew up in a house filled not only with the mouthwatering aromas of home cooking, but with aesthetic appreciation for paintings and sculptures as well.

Kyle stays with his grandparents, National Artist for sculpture Abdulmari Asia Imao and art gallery curator Grace de Leon-Imao, in Marikina City. “He sleeps there even if his dad (Kim) and I live just across their house,” Kyle’s mom, Mylene, told Living Stars during this visit to the Imao Compound.

Mylene added: “He’s been their willing errand boy since he was 8, since his grandma had cancer. If she needed anything, even in the middle of the night, Kyle would run to assist her.”

Showroom

The two-story home was a storage space for the family’s art collection before it was renovated. This explains why it looks like a showroom of paintings and pieces of wooden and brass sculpture by the elder Imao and Kyle’s uncle Toym.

“We’re used to changing fixtures. These things are crafted here, and a lot of them are sold and then replaced with new ones. We’re using something one day, the next day it’s gone,” explained Mylene, noting that the family has changed dining tables three times just this year.

Atttachments

Kyle’s grandmother Grace admitted she sometimes gets emotionally attached to these works of art. “I cried when I sold our first table,” she said. “There are stuff here that I can’t bear to sell, like the wooden chairs in the living room. They’re gifts from Daddy Mars (the elder Imao’s nickname). But since I’m an art dealer, I try to avoid getting attached.”

Kyle has his own nook on the second floor, where he has mounted his own exhibit of sorts: The 11-year-old is into assembling model kits and toy robots.

Discovery

His mom said a lot of Kyle’s toys and artworks were damaged during Tropical Storm “Ondoy” in 2009. Actually, she said, her son’s cooking talent was discovered at the height of the storm.

Mylene recounted: “People, mostly workers employed by Kyle’s uncle, got stranded here. They didn’t have food and couldn’t go out to buy any on account of the floods. Kyle, only 9 at the time, walked up to the fridge, got stuff together and whipped up something for the people to eat. Kyle has since been helping his dad, who also likes to invent and cook.”

Victory parties

Kyle’s dad served salad, spring rolls and chicken bonchon during the grand champ’s thanksgiving dinner on Friday at the grandparents’ house. Kyle’s fellow “Masterchef” contestants, their parents, as well as the production team, all turned up to celebrate with him.

(He won P1 million in cash and a culinary scholarship worth P1.5 million.)

“Kyle was at school so his dad did all the cooking—except for the lechon,” Mylene related. But on his grandma’s 71st birthday, Kyle surprised everyone with his version of garlic prawns.

“I cooked eight kilos of prawns,” the boy recounted. It was tough peeling more than one kilo of garlic for that.” Also on the menu that night were, again, lechon, plus callos and the family’s specialty, pancit luglug.

For Living Stars, Kyle whipped up his Asian-fusion shrimps and scallops, the dish he prepared for the judges during the grand finale. His mom enumerated the ingredients: “Vermicelli noodles, scallops, shrimps with garlic plum sauce, lime jelly, cilantro/lime sauce, salad base—and the pomelo foam, which was the most difficult to make.”

Sports, too

Kyle’s parents would like him to continue cooking. “He should do a lot more baking because he’s already an expert in savory dishes. Although we don’t want him to neglect his studies,” Mylene said. Kyle is a sixth grader at the Our Lady of Perpetual Succor College in Concepcion, Marikina.

His mom said: “Also, we’d like him to get into sports. He wants to learn how to swim. Kim and I hope to introduce him to biking and mountain climbing. He needs to get more exercise, instead of just being in the kitchen all the time.”

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