My Cooking Chronicles

My parents left me home alone for the past 1 1/2 weeks as they went holidaying in China.

Being so used to eating home-cooked dinners but it's not very economical to cook for one person, I decided to invite my boyfriend over for dinner some nights.

Having tasted my cooking before, my boyfriend initially refused to even come over! However, after much persuasion that my cooking will be better this time around, he decided to take the 'risk'.

While I can't say I'm the culinary expert, I believe I can cook a pretty decent meal.

Or that's what I thought.

My boyfriend was the ultimate judge here. Bless his stomach.

Day 1

Menu : Noodles with chicken and onion broth, vegetables and meatballs.

Verdict : 7.5. A very simple dish that won't go wrong. As the chicken broth was left by Oka-san before she went for the trip, it was already full of flavour.

Day 2

Menu : Rice with cabbage soup, stir fry vegetable and fried egg.

Verdict : 7. The soup didn't have enough flavour, and he didn't like the idea of biting into peppercorn I put into the soup.

Day 3

Menu : Organic spaghetti with prawn and mushroom and homemade pesto sauce.

Verdict : 9! He loves this dish a lot. Then again he said no one could do wrong with spaghetti. I'm not too sure about that statement, but that was my favourite dish too!

Day 4

Menu : Rice with fried assam prawn, stir-fry cabbage and white carrot soup.

Verdict : 7. It took me 10 hours to cook the white carrot soup by using the slow cooker. I wanted to put more flavour into it, so I even included red dates into the soup. Unfortunately it was still lacking something, which I don't know what, even though there was a lot of flavour in the soup. The assam prawn didn't turn out well because I marinate with assam but not salt. So it was kinda tasteless. So no choice, still need to take it.

Day 5

Menu : Fried rice

Verdict : 3. Ironically the item I thought would be the easiest to cook in fact tasted the weirdest. One reason was due to the rice. I think it was too damp, even i stored it overnight in the fridge. So instead of fried rice, it was fried rice balls.

FINAL VERDICT : I still have A LOT of room for improvement, but I'm very proud of my star dish - The Pesto Spaghetti!



Perhaps I should cook more pasta dishes in future. And avoid cooking fried rice altogether.

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