Anyone who knows me (or rather, have me on Facebook) knows that I have this huge love for recipes and cooking my own meals. Ever since I moved to good all KL to lead the famed ‘student life’, I try my very best to not eat outside despite it being the most easiest solution to my belly.
I left home with little knowledge on cooking. All I know was boiling stuff, frying eggs and sausages, cooking rice and depending on the ever handy canned food, which, mind you, is not a healthy choice because of preservatives in them. So it’s safe to say that I do not know much about cooking. I know the basics, but it gets boring if you keep eating the same meal over and over again.
So over time, I get so into finding new recipes to cook. I’m glad I did because growing up, even though mom would always tell me to help her in the kitchen so that I would “know a thing or two about cooking”, I was so afraid that I would grow up to be one of those mothers who do not know how to cook and constantly depend on eating outside. It’s not a bad thing, but I do fancy the thought of growing up knowing what home-cooked meals look like.
First few meals that I cooked when I first arrived in KL.
But anyway, I forced myself to cook when I moved to KL. It started off with normal stuff like maggie goreng with eggs and then slowly to something bigger, like vegetables. I started with boiling vegetables first, and then ‘upgraded’ to actually cooking vegetable and adding more ‘big’ stuff like seasoning it with salt.
Then it was finally the tasting.
See, when you put so much work into cooking something, you barely notice the taste because you’re too consumed with making sure that it’s cooked properly and eatable. So when a friend tasted my food and said that it does not have any ‘taste’, I was so confused and depressed.
“Add a bit more salt and maybe some pepper. Oh, it’s best if you could add in some shallots and onions as well. Next time, experiment with ginger too!” She says.
Man, this is hard work!
One of my more ‘luxurious’ meals; carrot with eggs, sardine mixed with chopped onion and lime juice and fresh strawberries!
I constantly bug my mom and later, my aunt on giving me easy recipes for a basic meal. They would give me happily which I am thankful for. Mom would send me emails on recipes while my aunt would tag pictures of food that she made and thinks that I should give it a try too.
Now, even if it’s a good thing that they give me recipes, me going home meant that I were to put my ‘skills’ to the test with mom wanting me to constantly cook despite me wanting to taste her cooking instead. Meh!
Mom gave me the best present the other day. It was like Christmas for me!
After a good one year plus of living here, I am pretty happy to say that I became more experimental with my meals. I’ve cooked spaghetti, herbal chicken soup, ayam masak kicap, honey chicken etc etc… All with the help of recipes from family and packets from Maggi and various other brands I forgot :P
I still dislike the hard work of cooking my own meals, but the end product is always worth celebrating!
Tiger Lilly and Mushroom Soup. I added ‘real’ mushrooms and eggs to yummify it. :P
The packet that I used for the soup. This helps a lot!
Cabbage mixed with carrots and honey chicken (the ‘honey’ bit came from the packet too).
When searching for a recipe on cooking shrimp today (yes, I’ve upgraded myself yet again to seafood!), I stumbled on a very exciting website called Rasa Malaysia.
But don’t let that disappoint you if you’re looking for more non-Malaysian recipes because there are a compilation of meals from various other countries like Indonesia, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Vietnam etc etc… It’s awesome! And to top if of, there are also titles such as ‘Eating Light‘ and ‘30-Minute Meals‘ to name a few.
The fact that they are Asian cuisines, you can most definitely be sure that you’ll be able to find ingredients here :)
And they’re all relatively easy to do. The easy part is the availability of ingredients, whether they’re easy to cookor not, that is yet to be known, hence the ‘relatively’ part. Haha!
But anyway, here are some fab meals from the website!
Hope I didn’t make you too hungry looking at the pictures! Lol!
Let me know if you’ll try the meals on the website, I know I will!!
