The Art of Cooking

Cooking is never a plus point of me. I never really cook at home and I am used to eating outside or if I am lucky, I'll eat the dishes that my grandma cook (She's the best chef ever!)

I'll give you an idea on my cooking level:

1. I can cook instant noodle the best :)
2. I can't fry an egg (I meant mata kerbau- without destroying the egg yolk is IMPOSSIBLE for me).
3. Of all meal, I can prepare breakfast the best: red beans, scramble eggs (which my lil brother loves very much and I'm so proud of myself with that), toast bread, etc.
4. I know how to cook rice (yes, the one where you wash and put the rice grain into the rice cooker). Eh, I can cook white porridge as well larh :)
5. I've never prepare a typical Chinese 3-dish-1-soup (or even less) dinner for my family before. *I've cooked vegetable once and it tasted really bad :(
6. I picked up FRIED RICE just before coming to Manchester
7. I CANT COOK!!

SO what I did to improve my cooking was watching my grandmother as she cooked dinner whenever I can. Read that right: I WATCHED her cook only. I put little notes on my 'recipe book' on what's the dish, the ingredients used (without the measurement) and how to roughly cook it.

BASED ON MY 'RECIPE BOOK' or not (some I just cook based solely on intuition), here is what I've cooked so far:

Food looks pretty oily because we weren't expecting the meats have fat/oil with them so still there's room for improvement.

Jon is really good with fried rice and we've eat it for numerous times and Jon cooked most of the time. I only cook fried rice ONCE for myself to tapao to university.

We were happy to have our college friends to stay with us for few days when they were kind of on a transit back to Malaysia. So when they arrived, we have Mavis VS. Jon's fried rice. We agreed that both taste delicious :)

I am salivating as I see this picture! Mavis and Pui Yeing cooked it, actually. They taught me how to cook it and I am earning some credit here because I HELPED SOMEHOW OKAY!

This is totally my very own recipe- based on intuition! Surprisingly, it tasted very good (comment is not biased as it was from Jon and another friend).

Of all the dishes I have cooked so far, I love this the best:

Thanks to Grandma for the recipe! I even called her to double confirm the ingredients okay. This is the one that I took the most time to prepare because I boiled it from morning till late afternoon(at least 4 hours). So it tasted very good and I dare to say it's almost as good as my grandma's =) =) =)

We usually cook for dinner only since we have most classes in the afternoon. In the morning, we survived on flakes, milk, breads, American-style breakfast, etc

On our typical-dinner menu, we have at least 3 dishes which 2 are compulsory meat (chicken and pork) and 1 vegetable. On certain days, we get to have soups :)

Paiseh but I've forgotten to label A1 Chicken Soup! It tasted very much like ba ku teh but we weren't using pork, just chicken. Very delicious as well.

There's another soup that I've prepared twice before but did not have a photo of it :( It's dried seaweed soup which I really like back at home as well. I am relying on the only packet of dried seaweed that I brought from Malaysia so have to jimat-jimat eat!

The fried bacon looks so little because it's quarter-way to the meal that I realized that I've not taken a photo. Veggie remains a lot because Jon doesn't really like anything green (ironically, his favorite color is green -__- )

Steamed vege dish is the easiest of all. Perhaps healthier as well :)

Oops! Another missing photo. This time is my white sauce pasta. It was really good because the white sauce is of Campbell's. I got add ingredients to it okay!