My Daily Life

I don’t know why I never interest in cooking. My mom is a good cook, kind of expert I guess. But she never asked me to help her with cooking and I guess I was too ignorance to take the initiative. My late mother in-law was also an expert in cooking. She used to cook delicious meal for her family and my husband is very fond of her cooking. Nevertheless, she never critized my inability to cook.  Furthermore, although my husband loves to eat, he never insist on me to cook a "real" Indonesian food. Well, he sometimes teasing me, it’s true. But I continue living with my "self-indulgence" for not cooking for my family and keep rely on my "kitchen cabinet" to do that. Ironic but sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Now here comes the part when I have to leave to UK as a student. Since I must be able to survive with a "limited but appropriate" monthly stipend from the scholarship body, I know that I have to save money. One way to do that is by cooking for myself. However, even though I know the consequences before I left, I still hadn’t had the initiative to learn cooking. Wrong decision. I didn’t even buy a recipe book as I thought I can rely on the instant spices by bringing lots of them here. So, I bought many of them and thinking that I will only need to buy vegetables, meat, chicken or fish and cook rice to have a proper meal. Well, at least I can cook a very simple vegetable fry. But when my luggage was more than the allowed weight to carry, I had to make a difficult decision. I just realized that all of those instant spices was about 1 kg. Simply just because I didn’t want to pay extra money for an overweight, I left half of the instant spices I already bought and took out some other things. Life is just a matter of choice.

As a consequence of my decision, now I have to cook with what available here. It’s not too bad actually, because I found a chinese supermarket which sell almost all of asian ingredients. Superb. The problem is, I only have limited and unreliable knowledge about blending of all of those species into a cooking and making it a food. Tragic, isn’t it? Well, I know that I have no choice. I have to cook. So, I start using my limited knowledge to explore new recipe and start browsing some web to get some ideas. So far, so good. While I’m wandering around the chinese supermarket, I also think of what kind of food that I can cook with all of those "superb" spices.

I made rendang using instant spices last week and still have some left. So I only cooked long-bean fry for my dinner tonight. It was delicious. Unfortunately, I used the only rendang spices that I have. Should I ask my family to send some or should I buy a blender to mix the spices by myself? Well, if this is about survival then I should not ask for help from my far away family. Hmm…I wonder if I can find the recipe on the web or if I have time to cook rendang from the scratch…

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 16th, 2005 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.