Cooking, cooking!

Since I have resumed my cooking routine few weeks ago, I decided to write about my cooking experiences in the past 8 months! I cook for almost everyday, but mostly dinner only as my breakfast is just either coffee and biscuits or oat meals while my lunch is mostly settled during the lunch break during the weekdays and sometimes I simply skip it during the weekends.

I am an imaginative cook. I imagine how the flavours and textures of each and every of the ingredients that I bought that week would complement each other, and then only I set off to the cooking process. Don't get me wrong, I don't cook complicated food like Foie Gras, quiche, paella, or eclairs. Its just some simple stir-fry, salad or rice congee only, and most of the the time they are probably semi-homemade cooking. Some of them came out much better than I thought it would be, yet, not all imaginations are edible. Below is the list of some accidental Gourmets and hapless Food Fiascoes:

Gourmet:

1) Instant Soup with Grilled Bread
This is a heavenly match, and easy to prepare. First, you heat up some garlic oil in a frying pan, then fry some minced garlic until they are golden. Next, put some minced chicken into the oil and fry until they are a bit dry. Pour some hot water into the pan after that and then add in a packet of instant soup (mushroom or chicken). Pour the mixture into a bowl. Then heat up another pan for the grilled bread. Dip the bread into the soup so that it can absorb some of the soup which totally enhanced the flavour. After dipping, grill it on a pan until a bit crispy. Repeat the process with a few slices of bread. What's left to do now is to eat. Dip the bread into the soup and voila! That's the taste of halcyonity.

2) Mayonnaise with Fried potatoes
This was discovered, actually, just two or three weeks ago, when my friends (Song, Big Cow, Ah Beng, KCV...) and I were cooking on a Saturday. We were making potato salad, yet somehow when I ate the salad, the taste of potato with mayo stood out the most, and again, it's so simple to make. First of all, peel the potatoes and slice them up into thin slices. Heat up some oil in a pan until hot (bubbles form around wooden chopsticks). Fry the potato slices until both sides are golden brown. Drain the oil and absorb the excess oil with kitchen towels. Sprinkle some salt and oregano on the potato slices and toss it in a big bowl. Finally, add enough mayo and toss it again. Mmm-mmm...

3) Stir-fry
This is what I eat most of the time! I devour greens like wolves wolfing down their dinner. The only not-so-convenient part is the washing of the vegetables. Normally I would buy Chinese cabbage, 'yao-mak-choy' and tai bak choy because they are crunchy! So, after washing all the vegetables cut them diagonally or julienne. This speeds up the cooking a lot. Trust me. Later, heat up some garlic oil in a pan and fry some dried anchovies. They are a much better choice compared to chicken because they have a stronger, richer flavour. Plus, you won't need any salt because the anchovies are a bit salty in nature. After the anchovies turn crisply brown, add some fried minced garlic and the vegetable into the pan. Fry until the colour of the leaves turn a deeper shade. This way, the veggie will still be crunchy and sweet. It goes the best with rice congee.

Food Fiascoes:

1) Tea-rice congee
Okay, this is what happens when imaginations go wild and uncontrolled like a loose cannon. Initially, I thought that tea and rice go well. With the faint scent of Chinese tea blending with the aroma of cooked rice, the resultant product would be a delicacy. Somehow I managed to forget about the bitterness of Chinese tea. When the mixture was boiling up in the rice cooker, the aroma escaping the lid was truly nice, it had a calming and soothing effect for me too! Yet smell and taste don't always cooperate, and this time smell was the misleading one. I think I put in a little too much tea leaves and the bitterness was not compensated by the aroma of the tea. Eating it with the stir-fry made it worse. Henceforth I came up with an equation: bitter x salty = disaster.

2) Laver, anchovies and cabbage with noodles
Another catastrophic combination. Don't think that both laver and anchovies come from the sea they are a good combination. They just don't match. Moreover, the anchovies caused the texture of the noodle to be kind of sandy. The cabbage's natural sweetness and flavour together with the too-rich flavour of laver was deadly. So, in the end, I was forcing the sandy, gym-sock-flavoured noodle down my throat. The worst thing is I thought it would come out well and I cooked a lot of it. Just recalling the taste turns my stomach and leaves my spine quivering.

3) Anything with too much garlic in it
Sometimes I crossed the line and put too much garlic in my cooking. Eating it was fine. It's the after taste that matters. It can last until before I sleep. That was when I feel relieved as I do not have to taste the garlic anymore. Let me tell you, the garlic thing, is what evil must taste like. It lingers in your mouth. It makes your breath smells. It causes your burp to smell even worse. Burping is the worst, it somehow concentrated the foul smell. Drinking water is useless and only makes you want to pee more often. The only good solution is drinking something protein-rich like milk or soya milk, which is almost always absent from my pantry.

These are only some of the examples that I can remember right now. Some are so bad that my brain have already blocked the memory. As for the good ones, these are the three best, at least for me, examples as they are easy to prepare and simply delicious. I exclude all desserts as my only dessert here is fruits.

Cooking is fun, eating is fun. I feel sad for a lot of people who doesn't cook just because they feel troublesome to go and purchase the ingredients, prepare them and wash the dishes after that. Remember the phrase 'culinary art'. The word 'art' is not just there for fun. It is there because cooking allows you to imagine, to be creative, to be innovative, to express yourself. For those who have all the cooking appliances, don't just deep fry processed meat. Go for natural food and cook them a la yourselves. Start today, and venture into the culinary realm. It will be fun. I promise.