if there’s one thing that made me ultimately amazed with myself, that would have to be the fact that I’ve actually been cooking, and exploring with cooking, something I wasn’t doing AT ALL prior to leaving for France. If you backtrack a little bit with my entries, you’d see how I stalled learning how to make sunny-side eggs until the very last day before leaving for France.
i think it all started with breakfast food, which pretty much meant cooking eggs and some saussice to go with it. My sunny side ups still fail, as I ended up breaking the yolk when I cooked some this morning, but my scrambled eggs are just amazing . I do end up putting whatever random cheese I get from the supermarket on the omelet, and it may be that which is making the omelet amazing.
During the first few weeks of my exploration with cooking, I always took the liberty of taking pictures of almost every dish (and almost every step that went along with making it) I cook. It was a little souvenir of every productive cooking adventure that I embark on, thankfully with Bless being usually more than willing to tag along my adventures. I forgot to take note of all the food I’ve managed to cook, and honestly, had I known that my kitchen adventures would have blown up to proportions I didn’t imagine, I would’ve taken a video of every single time I did it. I eventually had gotten tired of taking pictures of the food I made and ate, as I found myself getting used to cooking — it wasn’t something new anymore, something that you take pictures of. It became just my everyday, commonplace cooking breakfast or lunch or dinner episode.
During the second half of my stay here, I’ve started to explore more with the food I cook. After all, one can only live so long on adobo and nilagang baka and stir-fry vegetables. Oh and I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but we cooked some 4 kilos worth of adobo for the international day midway through November. much as it took some 3 hours preparing and cooking that, Bless and I craved adobo so much (we weren’t able to eat some of our adobo, we just served) that we cooked and ate adobo the night we got back from serving everyone adobo — it was insane!
So anyway, going back to my kitchen adventures, I did end up exploring with pasta, first buying those premade pasta sauces they have so many of here (and not the Jollibee/fastfood style sauces!) and adding a bit more tuna or meat or whatever I can get my hands on into it, cooking some fusilli or farfalle (I just love those tiny pasta) — voila! more than decent pasta dinner or lunch. Eventually, I moved forward to making my own pasta sauces, with a little secret ingredient or trick of some sort, and voila! an even better pasta dinner. First it was meat sauce pasta, then carbonara, and then the al funghi sauce i managed to concoct last night. Somewhere along the way too, I ended up making crepes from scratch, and sloshing humongous amounts of Nutella on ‘em.
It’s all time consuming, really, and I couldn’t stop the whole cooking drama until I’ve cleaned up the kitchen after I’ve eaten. When I’m in the flat, it’s either I’m cooking, I’m sleeping, or I’m on my netbook. It’s almost scary. I have become a creature of the kitchen.
A little photoblog of my cooking adventures shortly follow, after the jump.
This nilaga was probably one of the best I’ve made, just because by the time we ate this, we were desperately seeking some Filipino sabaw, and my god, nilagang baboy, s’il vous plait.
This was a huge batch of mushroom and brocolli stir-fry that turned into stew because I didn’t know mushrooms could excrete that much water while being cooked. Excrete sounds like such a wrong word, but I can’t find any better translation for “nagtubig”. HAHA
BREAKFAST JOY #1: Eggy.
I’ve forever been intrigued by that toast V in V for Vendetta made Evey, so I Googled it, and voila! Eggy! Combined convenience of toasted bread and sunny side ups.
BREAKFAST JOY #2:
Omelet au fromage, saucisse viennoisie, and hot coffee. This was during the first month, and I’ve upgraded the meal to some Muesli cereals and I also have jus d’Orange with my breakfast now. Continental!
The lumpiang Shanghai we made for Aileen during her birthday here last November. Well about a quarter of it. We ended up making some 60 rolls I think. I never knew how simple the recipe is and how tiring mixing the stuffing and wrapping them are.
PASTA LOVIN: Pesto with Mushrooms and Tuna
Mixed up. Random experiment. Turned out better than expected. Pesto was premade and bottled, by the way.
Salmon & Boiled Potatoes. Some random dinner exploration, turned out to be better than expected! But then again, you can almost never go wrong with salmon.
Al Funghi Pasta, some pan-fried fish I over-buttered, and some apertifs (bruschetta, and some pate foie).
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