Something else I really enjoyed on exchange was cooking. I’m definitely not the best cook around, but being on exchange has allowed for the opportunity to experiment with cooking in the kitchen.
I love being in the kitchen, for various reasons:
1. People and company
Four of my flatmates would usually have their meals together, with different people rostered to cook each day, and so if I went to the kitchen at the right time, there’d be company or people around, which is always nice :) While I don’t usually join their conversations, nor am I very very close to them, I’d listen in while cooking, and laugh along when they make witty comments. I love listening to the conversations my flatmates have, and how different my flatmates are but yet they’re all a lovable bunch.
Introducing the kitchen gang (penning it here because I don’t want to forget them) - Harry’s a very English guy. Sometimes he mimics people on TV shows and it’s funny when he does that. Louis comes across as this polite guy but he takes sarcasm pretty well and responds to remarks or jokes with calm facial expressions that are really funny. Amar is a very friendly guy – out of the four he’s the one who cooks the least, but he makes up for it for his friendliness. He mentioned before that he loves Asian/Chinese stuff and that his friends used to give him anything Chinese as presents, so he’s even got a 招财猫 and a Japanese flag in his room, haha. And Laura – she’s the one who would chase everyone else to clean up after themselves, and she’s a friendly girl who loves old-fashioned stuff. It’s nice cos she’ll play music while being in the kitchen sometimes and hum along to it. Whenever she cooks something English, she’ll very kindly and excitedly tell me about it, and I appreciate that!
2. Food for the day
Also I get to see what my flatmates are cooking for the day – they usually cook English-stye or more Western kind of food, which is cool cos back home, if my mum prepares Western-style food, it would be “special”, since they aren’t really 家常菜.
My flatmates would use the oven to cook roast vegetables, or do mac and cheese, lasagne. Laura made Yorkshire pudding once! Always so interesting to see what they cook, because it’s all new to me and I’d love to try them out one day. When I see something new I’d usually just ask them about it, and how they cook it. Haha every time I ask them they’d seem surprised and it’s probably because to them it’s a really simple and straightforward dish, but being the not-intuitive cook I am, I’d always want to know precisely how the dish is being prepared.
3. Cooking!
And yup I enjoyed cooking. I always find the kitchen scene pretty funny cos while my flatmates would be cooking smart, no-fuss meals, I’d always be fumbling with the different cooking ingredients. While my flatmates just pop something into the oven and leave it there to cook, or combine ingredients in a pot and make stew, I’d be marinating, chopping stuff, having different containers strewn around cos I’d need to store the extra unused ingredients, or having sauces around, or, if I use corn flour especially – it’d be messy. I bought chicken thigh meat a couple of times and I would be taking a long time to de-skin the meat and getting rid of the excess fat. But I decided that I’d just continue to do my Asian thing in the kitchen which includes fumbling with all the different cooking steps and learning along the way.
My meals aren’t very interesting because I’d be cooking for one person and would have to use the same ingredients for multiple meals, and most of the time I don’t put in a lot of effort to try cooking new food, so my meals usually feature the same few ingredients – meat (chicken or pork) and veg (白菜 which they call bak chye here, or capsicums, or broccoli and spinach). The food I cook would be very 寒酸, as the Chinese exchange students put it. I would have really loved to experiment more with cooking though - might cook more when I’m back in Singapore! Having more people to cook for is always good motivation, and brings great joy.
And here’s a photo spread of home-cooked food! Took photos of the food I cooked, to track the (baby) steps in learning to cook.
See I used so broccoli and capsicum pretty often!
Egg noodles and mee sua :) This is what I cook on lazy days – just boiling, and less things to wash! The picture on the right was what I first cooked when I bought minced pork from Iceland (a grocery store). The minced pork added an important flavour to the dish I felt!
Left: it’s always exciting to see fresh ingredients cooking
Centre: spinach with oyster sauce – loved this, had the taste of home
Right: black bean soup with pork ribs – it was a very ambitious attempt I thought!
I remember I had everything except red dates, and so walked to Chinatown after school just to get the red dates. The soup turned out sweet cos I added a bit of sugar – I should add salt instead in future. But it was comfort food nonetheless :)
Left: thinking of ways to cook chicken drumsticks that I bought
Right: another more adventurous burst, and fried rice rarely ever goes wrong
Of course, something that was very treasured throughout the cooking escapades was the mini rice cooker. It faithfully cooked rice, an important staple in my meals. On lazy days I’d do a “one pot rice”, as Mum calls it, which was comforting too.
And this – was making breakfast one day when I realized that the whatsapp emoticon of a sunny-side up was unfolding right before my eyes! Just had to get a photo of it :)
4. Hosting people
It would always be a joy to have people over for dinner. Earlier in the semester when school was less busy, Michelle would come over sometimes and we would cook together – it was great :) wished there were more opportunities to cook together with others, or cook for others, but next time I guess!
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I think other friends have had much more adventures with food! Every time the CAPT people meet up to travel, I’d learn of the kind of food the rest cook. And it’s always interesting to hear of their adventures – Daniel knows how to cook well and has learnt to cook well, he watches cooking shows when he has time; I think Bryan experiments with cooking quite a bit too with perfect scrambled eggs, cheese rolls, aglio oglio spaghetti, green bean soup, and the Leeds people have tried making sambal kang kong (from scratch!!). Zhi Hao has random experiments with food too that sound good, and some pictures he’s got of his food looked very yummy too. Vanessa and Elvis have been cooking a lot too, and their cooking skills were verified when they cooked dinner for us in Amsterdam :) My neighbour cooks very well and he’s definitely more adventurous than me, cooking wise.
Cooking has been a fun and useful learning experience! However, while cooking can be fun and therapeutic at times, it can get a little sian after a while. But I learnt that perhaps the trick to this is to plan meals ahead of time, to save the hassle of having to think of what food to cook on the day itself. Not sure if this really works, but anyhow, one of the things I’m looking forward to when I get home is helping mum out at the kitchen more often :)
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