darkholme

Jaime Oliver, I am not

Well, after a pretty tiring night at Ministry of Sound, what better way to solve a hangover than cooking chicken curry.

When I was in JC, I toyed with the idea of becoming a chef! Yup, me in an all white uniform, cooking up a storm in my own restaurant. Even when I was in primary school and had those white Bata shoes - I would pretend to be cooking a fantastic dish, when I was actually just washing the shoes. The laces would be noodles or pasta, the shoes were the "meat dish" and if you remember Bata shoes, you had to use this white liquid to make the shoes white? I pretended to be "marinating" the "meat" when doing that.

My mum always scolded me for taking such a long time to wash my shoes... cos I was playing "masak masak" with them. :)

Anyway, I've always wanted to make good food. In secondary school I remember I made improvised pizza with pasta sauce, canned sausages, sliced cheese on toast! I remember making a really chocolatey milo too.

I just realised that I have always wanted been rather excited about the thought of cooking. In OCS, after I was commissioned as an officer and posted to be an OCS instructor, I remember my team all had these mini gas canister stoves. Like this one below:



We were often asked to "man" a checkpoint during the officer cadet's navigation exercises and wait for the officer cadets - a task which involved just being in one location for one to three days. As such, we came prepared with food, the stove, hammock and lots of reading material. One particular memory I have was making improvised pasta. The recipe is as follows:

Ingredients
01 pkt Maggi mee (or any other instant noodles)
01 can of sausages
01 packet of instant pasta sauce
Some oil

Steps
1. Boil the instant noodles until almost cooked, then leave one side
2. Fry the oil and the sausages
3. Add the instant pasta sauce
4. Fry.
5. Add the instant noodles and voila! you have Kelvin's Jungle-Style Improvised Tomato Pasta with sausages.

In Sydney, I lived outside in an apartment - so I cooked occasionally. Usually simple chinese dishes like garlic chicken, assorted veg... soup... nothing fancy. But I had friends who could make Chye Tao Kweh (carrot cake) from scratch. Interestingly, most of the better cooks I knew in Sydney (amongst students) were male, except for my last housemate, Jean, who could cook pretty much anything and make it turn out great.

I console myself by saying that I still make a pretty decent ham, cheese, mushroom omelette. :)

So today, I'm going to a gathering of friends from work and I've offered to make Chicken Curry. It's not exactly how I wanted it, and it's not very very Xiang1 (good smelling or tasty smelling). But it's not bad for a first attempt in a long time lah. Here's the pictures for you to see!! Too bad they don't have Smellorama or Tasteorama on the Internet.

There's quite a lot so if anyone wants me to keep them a portion, do let me know!


Curry boiling merrily away


My mum says that it's a nice colour - but what's more important is the taste isn't it???

posted by kelvin @ 1:27 pm