When it comes to eating, I consider myself quite the foodie. Some people eat to live but there are others, like me, who live to eat. There’s nothing like a satisfying meal to make your day. In fact, having horrible food can be quite upsetting and ruin the entire day too. And that explains my intimate relationship with food. But when it comes to cooking, it is a whole different story. As much as I love to eat, I could not imagine having to toil in the kitchen just to satisfy my craving.
I must confess that I have hardly cooked during my two years as a stay home mother. At times, it seems like I have failed as a mother since most stay home mothers I know do cook for the family. And then there was me, the stay home mother who probably only made porridge for her then baby less than three times. And even burning the porridge on one of the occasions. I guess it was no secret that I was bad in the kitchen.
Sure, I could cook the occasional egg omelet, fried chicken wings (bought readily marinated from the supermarket) or pasta but that was just it. Though, I did have a brief brush with cooking when I was momentarily inspired though last year when Channel 5 had this new comedy called Koji Cooks. They had this segment where they listed down the recipe at the end of the show. I was so intrigued by one of the episodes that I decided to try my hand at cooking the angel hair pasta laksa. And this led to me experimenting with other dishes such as Yum Woon Sen; a thai appetizer dish which I absolutely relished, kimchi soup, wasabi prawns and so on.
However, having an active toddler around while you are trying to whip up new dishes each day was too tiring. I ended up skipping breakfast and lunch on days when I cooked and so the cooking spree was short-lived. So the cooking stopped for a year before I picked it up again this month. This time round, with newfound enthusiasm and passion, I started marinating my own meat instead of getting the ready made ones in the supermarket. And it took quite a bit of trial and error as well as lots of searching online for the recipes.
I could better concentrate in the kitchen now too because Asher has started school. I can easily drop everything aside and rush to the supermarket whenever I need some new ingredients for whatever I was cooking. Nowadays, I choose to whip up simple Chinese dishes to go with rice for dinners. I do not really have much hobbies so having cooking as one of them helps me to pass some time and also relax from having to deal with a mischievous kid going through terrible threes.
I also realized that there is so much science that goes behind a dish. Cooking is not just about transforming raw food items into edible dishes. The dish that I am currently struggling to perfect at the moment is the beef stew. I thought it would be so easy to just toss all the ingredients into the pot and let it cook by itself. But no, there is the selection of the right cut of meat, how to keep the meat tender and watching the temperature to keep it simmering well so not to overcook it. We could always just go out for dinners or takeaway food to bring home but cooking for the family makes me happy and I want to continue doing so.