Entry 4: Cooking


Introduction


Eating out and ordering takeout always costs quite a lot of money, especially in New York, one of the most expensive cities in the world. After looking over my bookkeeping app, I found out that roughly 30-40% of my money was spent on food and drinks (excluding buying groceries for cooking). During this week, I will try my best to cook at least one meal each day. To help myself achieve this, I started by uninstalling food delivery apps and kept reminding myself of the benefits of cooking:


Daily Log



Tuesday 26th Sep


Instant noodle pack + napa cabbage + Korean beef bulgogi


  • Easy to cook, it was basically adding whatever meat and vegetable I had to the noodles.
  • Didn’t know that soybean sauce could taste so well, it tastes a bit like barbecue sauce when it goes with the scallion pancake.


Thursday 28th Sep

Scallion pancake + two eggs + soybean sauce


  • The scallion pancake is about to expire so I must eat it.
  • Didn’t know that soybean sauce could taste so well, it tastes a bit like barbecue sauce when it goes with the scallion pancake.


Spaghetti + heavy whipping cream + spinach + codfish + mayonnaise


  • Cooking this was so complicated, I had to use 3 cooking pans at the same time!!
  • The spinach ruined my spaghetti, it was not fresh, tasted bitter, with a rotting smell.
  • Mayo fits so well with the codfish.


Friday 29th Sep

Knife-shaved noodles + napa cabbage + ground beef + bacon-wrapped scallops


  • It was impossible to have the scallops fully cooked, and if it stayed too long in the frying pan, the bacon wrapping would get charred.
  • The knife-shaved noodles are so chewy, loved it.


Saturday 30th Sep

Dumplings + Chinese cabbage + soy sauce


  • Soooo salty, added too much soy sauce!
  • This sould be easy to cook, the soy sauce ruined everything!!


Korean jjajang ramen + beef rolls + Chinese cabbage


  • Need to add less oil next time
  • Cooked too much, I was so full after eating this, feel like I’m going to throw up...


Sunday 1st Oct

Fish skin dumplings + meatballs + ramen noodles + scallion + soy sauce


  • This type of dumpling wasn’t as good as yesterday’s, I thought the outer wrapping/ skin part would be more crispy.
  • Could add a bit more soy sauce.


Monday 2nd Oct

Ramen noodles + fried egg + pork + fried gluten ball + Chinese cabbage


  • The two fried gluten balls on the top have absolutely no taste, whereas the cabbages under the noodles were a bit salty.
  • The pork is quite thick, hard to chew, but tastes good.


Reflection


After this week I have noticed my obsession with noodles, it is not that I hate rice, but I always subconsciously choose to cook noodles, maybe be its because cooking noodles is faster. I think that there is a huge improvement in my noodle-cooking skills and I am looking forward to cooking more dishes with different types of noodles.

The difficulties I found out this week in developing the habit of cooking:



Overall, I think I have done quite well, I am still far away from cooking three meals a day, but at least I didn’t get sick from eating food I cooked, or blow up the kitchen.

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