Cooking Made Easy

I am not a good cook nor am I interested to being one. I love it when someone else prepares my meal and I don't mind doing the clean up afterwards. Yes, I can do some simple cooking i.e. cooking noodle, frying eggs, or stir fry vege...but I usually keep it to the simplest act. When I was young, mom prepares the meals. After I left home for uni and when I was working in SG, it's so convenient to get delicious yet affordable food from those hawker stalls. At night, I would just steam corn and make myself some oat to go with my bread. If I really felt hungry then I cook myself some noodles. Simple.

After coming to UK, my eating style changed and I started cooking (to save money). Breakfast is still the same with coffee and 2 slices of bread. For lunch, I would pack my own sandwich (usually 2 slices of bread + ham + lettuce). The company has a canteen and they subsidize pretty heavily so that you can get a sandwich for GBP1.60 or a hot meal for GBP2.15. It is considered cheap especially if you go for the hot meal. In the first month, I would go over the canteen and grab a sandwich. After that, I started packing my own sandwich because it costs so much lesser. By doing this, my lunch for a week would only cost me less than half of what I used to pay. One down side is my lunch will have the same filling everyday for the week. Good thing I am not fussy about food and I don't get bored easily. I can have the same thing for months before I actually yearn for some change.

Dinner is the biggest meal of the day for me now. I get really hungry when I get home. Probably due to the coldness and also the light meals during daytime. I first started with what I am 'good' at, cooking soup noodles. It's fast, simple and the bowl of hot soup warms me up. Come weekends, I sometimes cook some rice and stir-fry vegetables and fried eggs or cook pasta. I still kept everything relatively simple.

Over the months, I have learn to add some variety into my meals. The first meat- based food I tried is grilling drumsticks. It's actually very easy to do when you have an oven. Just have to coat the drumsticks with some pepper powder, mixed herbs and salt, then set it into the oven to grill and its done. Same thing applies for steaks. Then in today's market, there are tonnes of pre-mixed sauces which helped poeple like me to cook up something decent. Just need to buy the meat, stir-fry some garlic and onions, dish in the meat and the sauces. Woala, you have yourself black-bean paste chicken, sweet and sour pork, curry chicken etc. just like those in the restaurant... well, maybe not as nice but hey, definitely no complains from me ;)

So yes, being here in UK has forced me to learn to do some cooking. Although I am no master, but I am pretty content to what I can dish out now. After all, good or bad I am the one eating it and so far I think I'm doing pretty good. Again not being fussy and not easily bored helps a lot.