Experimental Cooking Day!

Thursday 28 January was experimental cooking day! I decided to go for an Eastern theme and finally had opportunity to plan one of these days properly! Due to the slightly unusual present domestic situation I invited myself to my sisters to experiment, initially I went totally overboard and planned to do Chinese, Malaysian, Thai, Japanese, Indian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Filipino, Korean and Taiwanese dishes before realising that I was overcomplicating things, couldn't source many of the ingredients I needed and couldn't afford all of the rest! There's a fantastic website full of eastern recipes here!

I eventually settled on Japanese Shoyu Tamago (boiled eggs coated in soy sauce - popular in bento boxes and at Japanese street martkets)for the office.


Image by Rasa Malaysia

Vietnamese Bo Luc Lac (aka shaking beef - rump steak marinated in all sorts of stuff served with watercress, tomatoes and picked red onion),


Image by Rasa Malaysia

Thai Gai Pad Krakow (spicy minced chicken with chillies and basil),


Image by Rasa Malaysia

Jasmine rice and a bottle of Korean plum wine were the choices for the evening 'experiment'!

Unfortunately other commitments (well, flexi leave) dictated that the office part of experimental cooking day be brought forward to Wednesday 27 January - well done to Paul, Denis and Martin for being willing guinea pigs (well we only had to force Denis a little bit lol)! I boiled the eggs 3 at a time (largely because I know exactly how long to boil 3 eggs for whilst avoiding the horrid green/black line that appears around the yolk when they're cooked for too long!)so ended up doing 4 batches of the things, by the last batch I was getting the hang of it although the house did have a not entirely pleasant aroma of burnt soy sauce!

Experimental cooking day itself was great fun, after viewing the perfect property (which the owner then decided wouldn't accept pets) Bernie (sister) and I headed back to hers to do as much prep work as possible in the latter part of the afternoon. Occassionally Bernie and I spend time together when we both seem to be 'on form' and life becomes like a episode of Friends - this was one of those afternoons - I love it when we spend 'quality' time together lol!

Bernie often says that if there's a hard way to do an easy task I'll find it (I'd like to say that this generally happens when I'm stressed and concentrating on several things at once - which is true - but I can't deny that often I'm dim witted with no excuse whatsoever!) and this was never more true than the black pepper incident! It made perfect sense to me at the time to measure out half a teaspoon of black pepper by putting the measuring spoon on the counter and grinding the pepper mill over it!

Roll on broccoli appreciation day!