On: Cooking

This coming semester, I will be electing to not take part of a meal plan and will therefore be cooking all of my meals. Let's see how that goes. I will also be posting some sort of follow up to this once the school year starts to get up and rolling to see how my cooking journey works out. Hopefully, I will not devolve into eating frozen meals and instant ramen. Honestly, even if I did so, that would still be saving me money compared to purchasing a dining plan, and it might also be healthier.

Here are some recipes that I have currently learned, of which I will update as I learn more in the two weeks before I head onto campus.

1. Tomato fried egg and variants. Remove the skin of the tomato by first making some shallow cuts and then submerging it in boiling water for a minute. The skin should peel off very easily. Cut into small slices, making sure to keep as much of the liquidy stuff intact. Scramble some eggs and add salt. Heat up the pan. Pour oil onto the hot pan. The oil will be hot enough once it starts emitting some steamy-looking gas and also when it looks "runny," whatever that means to you. Pour the egg onto the oil and stir it around. Turn down the heat and pour tomato on top. Do your best to squash the living daylights out of the tomato. Add sugar. Consider adding vinegar. If it's not salty enough, add salt. One variant is making soup out of it. Just add water and a bit more salt.

It's my favorite home-cooked dish, which is great because tomato fried egg is also commonly known as one of the easiest dishes to make in Chinese culture. It goes very well with rice. I don't usually eat much rice, but if you add tomato fried egg to rice, I will absolutely demolish it.

1. Boiled vegetables. Very self explanatory. Get water, add a drop of oil, place vegetables in it until it is at the desired softness. Consume.

Actually, this is my favorite way of eating vegetables. Most vegetables have a slight sweetness to them and that really comes out when you boil them. It's also healthier than stir fry or some other means. It's probably not as healthy as eating the vegetable raw, but I don't think anyone eats bok choy raw. I even enjoy drinking the water that you boil it in (it has a slight vegetable flavor to it, and I would highly recommend boiling in chicken stock and adding some salt or other flavorings to make the vegetable "soup" taste more enjoyable), so if anyone tells me that the nutrients are actually escaping into the water, I'm also consuming that, so ha! Cooking deforms proteins and other cellular molecules, so it might be that I'm missing out on those, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

1. Fried rice. Basically, get rice, preferably not freshly cooked rice, chop up some onions, fry the onions, drop the rice in, drop the eggs on the rice and you get this really fluffy fried rice. It's an annoying process but it's really yummy in my opinion. I've never really got the salt ratio right because I'm a little bit careless.

This is a bit more impractical to make in college since fried rice is best had when it's fresh, and I would like to do as much meal prepping as possible when I'm busy doing homework and psets at MIT. Actually, scratch that. The other day, I made too much fried rice and set some aside for the next day. It tasted perfectly fine. I did find it a bit oily, but that was probably because I put too much oil in originally.

This is a problem, because I've run out of things to write about because I've run out of things to cook. In theory, I should know how to make some other things, like wontons and meat, but I've never actually done it. That's fine. It'll be a trial by fire. That's the best kind of learning experience.

I don't think I'm that suited for cooking. Ever since I was young, I've had a problem with carelessness. It's very prevalent when I cook. When I pour the salt in, I just go "oops" and I accidentally put in too much and I don't really care that much. It's unfortunate because I do really want to cook and do well at cooking, but I suppose I don't have the discipline for it.

Ah well, that's just how things are sometimes.

100Days: 3, 11