7
Just babbling
Posted by HuiHui
on
2:10 PM
My mother-in-law (MIL) is a good cook. Every time I tag along MH to KL, we’ll be greeted with ‘big fish, big meat’. She’ll cook up a storm for MH, and I’ll have a share of ‘eating luck’.
With my PIL in town this weekend, I finally muster enough courage to prepare a maiden meal for them. Shame to say that throughout the 4 years I know them, I’m always at the receiving end. Well, it needs some guts to cook for the experts who happen to be your in laws. No? Being an rare cook like me adds to the challenge because I’m not familiar with the ingredients; i.e which sauce is better, which brand to choose, etc. Even the basic condiments pose considerable trial. Each batch of salt and sugar has different concentration and when you try to marinate your raw ingredients with “salt to taste” it can be a real headache. Even cooking rice is not that straight forward as well. The level marker in the rice cooker may be a rough guide, but do you know that old rice will need a bit more water than new rice? And of course the amount of water also varies with the type of rice. Once, I came across some discussion on the thermodynamics of heat transfer in a baking forum; those enthalpy and entropy stuffs! Dry theories aside, common sense wise, baking time do depend on the apparatus, i.e the volume/size of oven, distance of the coil to the cake, type of coil, shape of the coil, heat transfer efficiency, etc. Ok, I should stop babbling before I make cooking sounds like rocket science.
Here is the humble meal I braved through. Green curry chicken, ridged guard, sweet sour fish and corn soup. Thank God, no one get food poisoning yet. :)
With my PIL in town this weekend, I finally muster enough courage to prepare a maiden meal for them. Shame to say that throughout the 4 years I know them, I’m always at the receiving end. Well, it needs some guts to cook for the experts who happen to be your in laws. No? Being an rare cook like me adds to the challenge because I’m not familiar with the ingredients; i.e which sauce is better, which brand to choose, etc. Even the basic condiments pose considerable trial. Each batch of salt and sugar has different concentration and when you try to marinate your raw ingredients with “salt to taste” it can be a real headache. Even cooking rice is not that straight forward as well. The level marker in the rice cooker may be a rough guide, but do you know that old rice will need a bit more water than new rice? And of course the amount of water also varies with the type of rice. Once, I came across some discussion on the thermodynamics of heat transfer in a baking forum; those enthalpy and entropy stuffs! Dry theories aside, common sense wise, baking time do depend on the apparatus, i.e the volume/size of oven, distance of the coil to the cake, type of coil, shape of the coil, heat transfer efficiency, etc. Ok, I should stop babbling before I make cooking sounds like rocket science.
Here is the humble meal I braved through. Green curry chicken, ridged guard, sweet sour fish and corn soup. Thank God, no one get food poisoning yet. :)
I learnt a tip or two in food presentation through food photography. Noticed that the color of the ingredient changed considerably after a short time, especially the green color. The green bell pepper, lemon grass, kifer lime leaves were in much fresher shade of green before or just right after touching the wok. Was it from the reaction with the heat or the sauce or something else? 
Some other food photos downloaded from the iphone.
