I've been cooking more for the past few months since my mom's stroke, and 90% of the time I've no idea what I'm doing. 10% of the time I'm either just frying or cooking adobo (pork, my self-proclaimed specialty). But as you know, stroke patients are kept on a strict diet. So at first steamed fish, chicken and vegetables were all she ever ate. But who wouldn't tire of that after two months?! So out with the cookbooks it is.
Everyone in my family cooks because we love to eat. But in every family there's that one person who can't do anything right. In the kitchen, that person is me. When we were teenagers, my sister loved to bake and ofcourse I loved helping her. She has very long patience for my inadequacies but the last straw came when I got the table knife stuck between the electronic whisks! And they still laugh at the time my mom was coming home late and I was the only one left at home, so she asked me to prepare the food she was going to cook. She instructed me to cut the veggie (cabbage, bokchoy, I really can't remember) in half. Apparently I cut the wrong way, you get the picture. My garlic was always burned, was, because now they only happen occasionally. There're a lot of other 'minor' mishaps but I'd still
like to keep my dignity.
Although I've gotten better through the years, only after Mama's stroke did I realize how much I relied on her instructions and opinions whenever I cook (and everything else actually). So I was left clueless in the kitchen. I suddenly found myself faced with different spices and types of fish. Googling recipes didn't help much because most of them were from abroad and required ingredients not locally available. Local recipes are... Intimidating. In my desperation to make sauces to accompany Mama's steamed
dish, I tried some sort of vegetable soup with soy sauce (Kikkoman's low sodium soy sauce) and ginger. And it was awful! It went down the drain because it was so inedibly horrible! And recently I found out that kikkoman and mascuvado don't go together. It tastes really weird and down the drain it went. I tried again with regular brown sugar and it tasted way better. Good thing I was only making these for one because I'd hate to waste all those ingredients. This definitely feels like chemistry. One wrong ingredient thrown into the mix spoils the whole dish.
So after 6 months of cooking I'm finally slowly starting to try other recipes. Mama's stubborness demands that she eats regular food meaning she eats whatever we eat. So we're now not only making tasty food but also something healthy and that is what this cooking idiot is learning to do these days. And hopefully I get better because apparently some of the dishes I cook leave people confused as to what the dish actually is. And to their question "What dish is this?", my answer is always "experimental!". And to every complain, "Sorry, you have no other choice because I'm. The. Cook."
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