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A Dummy's Guide to Cooking

One of the main reasons I looked forward to my exchange was that it gave me an opportunity to further expand my cooking repertoire beyond the omlette and scrambled eggs. In the process, after a series of successes and failures, more of the former than the latter, I remain exceptionally bad at it. Though failure is always the first step to success and now that I can also make edible pasta, I believe that qualifies me to do share my experiences and advice for all amateur cooks and cook wanna-bes around the world. So here goes,
1) Listen to thy mother
As an amateur, never listen to your guts. This is all the more important if you are an engineer or a mathematician to whom logic is important, where input is equal to output and the amount of water you pour inside will determine the amount of curry you get. Cooking is not engineering, which should already be obvious from the differences in the gender ratio involved in either. So when your mother, whom with years of experience tells you the chicken curry only needs half a glass of water because the remainder of it will come from the chicken’s flesh, listen to her. This could make all the difference between a chicken curry and a chicken tom yum soup.

 2) Know thy audience 
I used to preach this when I advised people on how to give a good speech. Though somehow it did not strike me that the same law applied for cooking. Most Asians love spice and as eager you are to introduce your non Asian friend to your cultural delicacies, you might just end up making her gasp, then sweat, fan her tongue like crazy, drink a lot of water and finish off with a diarrohea the next day. Good friends are hard to come by, so don’t waste them.

 3) Use oil, VERY liberally
As concerned you are about depleting the world’s resource, the truth is that 90% of the time, it is the oil that gives the food the taste. Why else would meat taste better than vegetables? So try not pour just about enough oil as if you are marinating the frying pan. Just pour!

 4) If you can’t take good photos, use Instagram 
Instagram was a revolution in photography. Overnight, thousands and millions of photographers turned pro without really learning the difference between brightness and contrast. Cooking has had its version of Instagram for a long time: ready made mix. It comes for everything, from curry to chicken rice, which should already give you an idea of what a great chef that you can be.

 5) If you don’t know, watch Youtube 
Instead of wasting all that time watching the Korean girls poking their cheeks, spend some on watching those cooking videos. Become good and soon enough, you might get to poke those cheeks yourself.

 6) Read the instructions carefully 
We live in a world of data and information. To overcome the subsequent information overload, we have been taught to skim through our readings by just grabbing the key words. Though this does not apply to cooking because when the instruction goes, “Pour water…”, it makes a huge difference where you pour it, be it into the cheese cake or into the saucer containing the cheese cake(so that it acts as a water bath for better conduction). Follow the former and you will have to settle for a very soggy cheese pudding.   

 7) Appearance matters
If all else fails, at least make it look good. The people who see it on Facebook can’t taste it anyway. 

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