Therrysays.com

I’m not much of a cooker. I pretty much screwed everything I cooked before I actually realized that I’d been doing it somehow backasswardly during the process. It’s not that I can’t cook at all - I can, but it’s more like easy-peasy, cook-it-five-minutes-on-each-sides kind, and after about fifth attempts of it in doing so. There was a period where my man was obsessed about cooking me Sze Chuan Chicken With Noodles and because it sounded like a yummy idea, we decided to go ahead with it one weekend. I helped getting the menu from the internet, which was a bit different that what he’d had in mind, but what the hell, we gave it a go anyway. So there we were, slicing and dicing and cooking and fussing about how to put the bits of chicken in the wok because the corn starch was powdering on the wok and got a bit sticky, and that there wasn’t enough oil to fry it with and that we forgot to get some spring onions to sprinkle on - but it turned out pretty good.

There was a bit of panic followed by hysterical laughs, because we were acting as if we were in a cooking show like those ones on the telly, where we practically said out loud everything that we were doing, pretending like we were experts.

I have to admit, he’s been saving my stomach a couple of times whenever supply of food seemed to be in demand and all we had left were good old plain rice. He dished up some pretty mean fried rice - hot and spicy with just a hint of soy sauce. There was one time though when it didn’t turn out that great and it was only because I screwed up the rice - I didn’t put enough water to steam it and it became half raw. See, terrible cook.

It kind of makes me lose my self confidence a little knowing that he is a better cook than me, but he doesn’t care and it was either fried rice or delivery service and we were put off with take-away pizzas anyway.

And the only thing I could do to make up for it was making dessert in a form of fruit jelly with bits of fruit in it (that is if we had any fruit at all). I made it in a nice pudding bowl so that when I flipped it upside down and put the jelly on a plate, it looked nice and beautiful.

So it was to my horror when I told him to get the jelly ready (I use the words very loosely there) whilst I was cleaning my dog’s mess upstairs - that when I came back, the jelly was still in its moulding bowl, already 1/4 gone and it looked like it was taken out brutally by some unshakable force from within. I looked at him and there he was - eating the jelly from a small plate with a tablespoon which I assumed he’d used to scrape the jelly out brutally. I told him I might as well make in a plain soup bowl, in which his face totally lighted up and he went, “Hey, that’s a great idea!”

For my attempt of not wanting to be left behind (i.e. preventing myself from earning the reputation as being a walking hazard around the kitchen area), I decided to target my next cooking experiment in the pasta-based area. As I was browsing through Ivy’s blog, I found a picture of Fettuccine With Mushroom Sauce, which I admit haven’t had for ages and suddenly craving for it. After forcing her to give me the recipe, I popped to the shops for the ingredients and tried my sleight of luck for the second attempt in cooking ’serious’ food (though Ivy reassured me it was extremely easy).

Nevertheless, the nervousness of having to fuck it up really bugged me I even had nightmares about it - I dreamt I was making the mushroom sauce and somehow, my mother was there and she kept adding vanilla ice cream and mayonnaise to it whilst I wasn’t looking, making the sauce taste awful and salty sweet. Still in the dream, I confronted her for ruining my sauce, in which she casually said “Oh, I thought you were making dessert.” Thankfully the whole thing was a nightmare, but it still made me nerves shot to shit.

All in all, the result was pleasant enough to go down on our throats. Because in the previous hours, there I was, in the kitchen, working my way in - dicing, chopping, mixing, tasting - I admit I didn’t do the last part until the whole ingredients for the sauce had been mixed. As the sauce was starting to boil, I spooned a little bit and brought it closer to my mouth with much anticipation; and guess what - it was delicious! It didn’t taste shit at all, and I personally thought it tasted just like the ones I used to order at the restaurants.

I even took photos of the ready-made pasta (insert the obvious narcissistic joke here) to cherish the moment where I, for once, didn’t screw up!

This entry was posted Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.