Ready-made Alfredo Sauce

I bought the ready-made white Alfredo sauce on a whim. It did not turn out to be that bad of a purchase. I added it to boiled Penne Pasta and topped it with some Parsley.
Not bad, eh :)

Note to myself: Perhaps add some mushrooms to it, it will taste much better. 

My love story with Hummus :)

Hummus has been one of long time favorites, since about 8 years now- mostly since I discovered Middle Eastern Food! 

The love saw new levels when I moved to Paris, and ate a lot of falafel at local kebab places. 

Only recently I found out that it is not so hard to make hummus. So I decided to try it out. 

The photo looks pretty nice, isn't it? But to be honest, I threw away the entire lot of hummus two days after I made it, and I ate only one spoon out of it.

Why didn't it work?

A couple of reasons: 

• I put the chickpeas that I had soaked all night into a mixer. Apparently they were still not soft enough. What could I have done? Before putting them into a mixer, I should have put them in boiling water for some time, to make them even softer. (note for next time)
• I tried this recipe without Tahini Sauce . I was just lazy to go buy it. But it looks like an important ingredient. 
• The rest of ingredients were ok (mainly olive oil, salt, red chilli flakes, some garlic)  

Note to myself: Boil chickpeas once to ensure they are super soft and also buy Tahini Sauce.

Not proud of myself

Not that I am very happy to demonstrate this, but these used to  be, at one point in time, piece of bread. I put some cheese on them and then I put them in the oven.....and then I forgot about them.


:(

Note to myself: Don't forget when you put stuff in the oven.

My new love in the kitchen: Edamame and Feta Cheese

Even after spending some fabulous years in Europe, I didn't discover the joys of Feta. Funnily enough, Feta was introduced to me in Singapore, by a frenemy! That is a story for another day.

Edamame, I discovered in Singapore, thanks to my lovely aunt.

So I came up with my own idea to make Greek Salad without olives and cucumbers but adding Feta, Tomatoes, Onions, Olive Oil with loads of Edamame (that would make it super healthy), and a pinch of oregano.

This was a Monday evening, when luckily enough, I was home at 7pm. I had huge plans to go jogging 'finally' but instead decided to stay inside, giving my cold as an excuse, but also because I had a craving for a salty edamame salad (along with generous amounts of Feta).

Everything went alright. I was excited to have a great meal this evening, while I would watch re-runs of Friends. But just that I was hoping for too much too soon.

The last step in all of this salad-making process is adding some oregano. And in my absent-mindedness...I put a whole 300gm bottle of Oregano in my small salad bowl.

Even some post-damage control couldn't help the situation so much and my salad ended up looking like this:

Note to myself: Keep your eyes on the bottle of Oregano or any other herb/spice when putting it on something. If you don't look carefully, you might end up spoiling your entire dish, a lot of hard work, time and finally you will eat a whole bar of Dairy Milk because you were still hungry. This will give you 4-5 times more calories, and 4-5 times less nutrition. 

Just the regular dal-chawal girl

My expertise in Chawal is what I feel quite proud about in the kitchen. Each time in kitchen-sharing duties, I am giving the responsibility of making chawal. Maybe because they require just basic analytical skills. 1 glass rice, twice the water, some salt and fried cumin seeds. Also I've been quite lucky for almost never going wrong on chawal. Some saving grace there.

But dal is not my forté. Not even regular chana dal. Back home, of course there is mom who makes everything, but dal in 10 minutes (ek seeti hi toh bajani hoti hai :-), as she says)
In Paris, I had a friend famous Paris-wide for his daal. People would come from near and far just to eat his daal. Of course I didn't even have the courage to cook dal in his presence.

Fast forward to now in Singapore. I am home alone on Sunday morning. I decide it is finally time to give chana dal a shot. After all, how hard can it be.
I soak the chana dal for some hours until it becomes soft. Then I boil it until it becomes soft-est.

I cut tomatoes, onions, chillies, garlic- everything that the recipe on some website tells me. And then I start to fry and make the masala. It seems to be going alright.

Meanwhile chawal is almost done. It's jeera rice that looks good and smells even better. Only if someone was here to appreciate my rice-making skills.

While I was fondly wondering that, I look back at the dal in the pan. Still looks nice and yellow, like the afternoon sun. I felt like a success.

So I go and chill in the living room, very excited to finally eat a good hearty lunch and I get engrossed in the new season of Modern Family, my thoughts going back to my own modern family.

When I realize that I had dal on the stove, still getting cooked, I rush back to the kitchen. The only tiny mishap, if I may put it like that, the dal is soaked all the water and is now dry. So easy, I just put some more water in it.

Later, I put a huge dollop of rice in my plate topped by some yellow chana dal.

The moment I put it in my mouth, I know it is a disaster. I still can't explain why.

It just never tastes like the dal that mom makes. Never. And I refuse to take one more bite of it, until it tastes like that.


Note to myself: Call mom for the home recipe, and stop being stupid trying out unreliable internet recipes just because the attached photos look pretty. 

The Aglio e Olio Catastrophe

Here is what gave me the idea of starting this blog.

The Spaghetti Aglio e Olio that shall rest in peace, in a Mustafa polybag in some trash bin in Singapore!

I first ate Aglio e Olio, consciously, in Singapore recently. I took an instant liking to it. It's a very simple recipe any normal person could make. Almost simple like Maggi (which by the way, I also have a talent to destroy)

So Aglio e Olio only requires boiled spaghetti 'a la dente', as the Italians say, garlic pieces and olive oil. The other fancy elements include Parmesan cheese and Parsley (all this if you can get the basic recipe correct)

In my case, I started off alright. Boiled spaghetti to a reasonable softness. Fried garlic in olive oil with red chilli flakes (exactly as the recipe suggested). Then I added water from the boiled spaghetti into the oil+garlic+chilli flake combination, to make like a garlic sauce. I thought I was successful already.

But I am still clueless, as to, at what point, what went wrong and the spaghetti didn't turn out to be Aglio-e-olio, but just algio-burnt-olio-turned-black-and-ugly!
Like this...

Obviously rather than re-creating this horror for myself and wasting half of my Saturday morning, I would rather spend $12.5 and buy a good plate of Spaghetti Aglio-e-Olio. But no, the female ego inside me is hurt, and hurt really big this time, that it's enough. That I have had enough of kitchen disasters now. That this can't go on anymore. I am a 20-something something.. one day turning 30, and I can't be an embarrassment to my own self, and I need to stop these everyday misadventures from taking place.

Especially because I come from a family where all women are so Master Chefs in the kitchens. The bar is set too high. 

Note to myself: Make sure that the spaghetti is really "a la dente". Only correctly pronouncing a fancy name in a foreign language isn't enough. 

Why the "diablo"

Diablo/Diabla is just a funky-sounding Spanish word that means 'devil'.

The rest of the sentence would now explain itself.

It's a pity and shame that I am a disaster in the kitchen.

This is my last attempt to record my own follies, my mistakes and my stupidities every day in the kitchen to remind myself of the disasters I've created and perhaps not to re-create them.

As the lesson goes, I would like to learn from my own mistakes (literally by burning my hand in the oil) :-/

For the record, I didn't cook at all for the first 22-23 years of my life. Maybe a mere Maggi here or a plain white rice there. I was too pampered to step in the kitchen, I imagine.

Being a brat in Sevilla, Spain

But each time that I did step in the kitchen, even if to fetch a spoon, I would create quite a mess, and perhaps my mom then decided to at least not let me create further damages in our home kitchen.

My experiments in the kitchen started in my studio in Paris. But still I was pretty lucky because I had friends around who would feed me all the time, and my contribution of rice was considered sufficient. Or maybe they weren't so kind to feed me, but perhaps they were protecting themselves of my very damaging experiments, and since they were friends they would have wanted to be polite.. so instead they made it look like, they are pampering me too!

Now that I finally moved into an apartment with two wonderful girls, who if I may say, are experts of quite an order. On top of it, they are French. This means that they have a special sense of everything food- smell, appearance, taste, color, flavor.. I am excited to learn stuff from them but I am also worried of making a fool of myself and taken pity upon.

So my final attempt to save my grace. I will keep notes on what am I doing right and wrong.