I just spent nearly 2 hours picking basil leaves, washing them, processing them, cooking pasta, washing all the utensils, eating the pasta, and then putting back all the utensils. I did that much effort just to eat a home-made pasta, guys!
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| harvesting my home-grown basil |
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| blendering the basil in mixture of: olive oil, garlic, salt, pine nuts, and parmesan cheese |
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| pesto fusilli with mushroom is done! |
While preparing this after closing off work at 7.30 pm, I realized that I liked cooking so much. (Well no actually this realization has come way before this, and I already wanted to blog about my cooking but I just haven't got the time yet!)
Me and cooking
I knew that I always liked cooking. This post
here is one of the example, back in 2012 I would spend my free time during school holidays to cook! The stories always ended with bad ending, though. Take that fried rice as my very first ever dish, I've made that too salty, too oily, too dry. I also tried making garlic bread, it ended up too soggy because I used too many melted butter. Also tried making fried eggs too back then and it was a trial and error too, I've always had problem with nailing the oil ratio as I was quite anti-oil haha.
If I ask myself, what do I like about cooking? Why do I cook? Maybe the answer lies in my innate pickiness towards food, but contradictively, I also like to eat a lot. I love to eat good food! I think it is a gift for me to be able to find happiness in eating good food. I'm not a big spender, but I do spend A LOT on food.
My very first experience with cooking during high school was because 1) I had too much spare time and I wanted to do something productive and 2) there was nothing to eat (that I liked) so I wanted to make the dishes myself. I asked my grandmom then to teach me how to fry eggs and make fried rice. It was tricky at first, with me being afraid with oil splashes etc but I kept on getting better!
Then came college days where I was super busy with school. The 4 years I spent at UI were undoubtedly my most productive years ever in life. There was no days without me having to do school work or internship or extracurricular work.
Then the pandemic hits.
With the pandemic, suddenly I had too much time on my plate. It was very healing for me too, because the weeks towards the pandemic, I was actually quite stressed with always having something to do on weekends. It honestly felt like my time was stolen away from me. I wanted to just laze around on weekend, but somehow the norms I had during college days had made me think that my weekend time can and should be spent on other people. The lockdown was a blessing in disguise for me because after finally realizing that my weekend time is mine and mine only to govern, I also found out that I now (then) had so much free time for ME!
All people back then did something new and tried to learn exciting things everyday. I remember that time tiktok is rising and people were making cooking videos on tiktok. I wanted to jump in the wagon! I know I like eating, I've established myself in office as a pasta lover back then, so I wanted to learn how to cook pasta on my own.
Now the reason why I didn't continue cooking after high school, aside from not having enough time, is actually about me not having the proper ingredients lol. I found that the available ingredients at my home couldn't quite cater to my aspirational menu: pasta and western food in general. During the pandemic, I've worked for a few months already and got some savings in my account. Therefore, I went straight to happyfresh (like most people did that time) and ordered my first ever groceries!
My groceries spending on happyfresh was quite hefty lol. I realized after doing the groceries, that there was reason my you should buy from traditional markets if you want to save as the price difference is quite significant. Also my very first cooking experience was basically a trial and error and I tried to follow everything the chef on youtube told me they used.
My very first experience ever (post high school)
I remember trying to replicate Willgoz's carbonara pasta back then. It was a weird fusion menu I'd say (from my 2023 quite expert perspective HAHA) as he boiled the pasta using milk while adding beef stock too. It's quite accurate in telling us to use eggs though for the sauce. I followed the recipe even to the minutes. I learned lesson 1 in cooking the hard way: always taste your cooking first.
Willgoz is using brand A pasta and he said to cook it for 7 minutes for al dente. However, I used an imported pasta so 7 minutes was too quick and my pasta was way half-cooked :) In an effort to salvage the pasta, my grandma made me reboil the pasta.. right after I've already mixed the pasta with my carbonara egg sauce... So my pasta was then al dente, but it was bland to the core as all the sauce was washed out! :(
Second try
This is quite phenomenal too. I tried making aglio olio this time. Alas, I also got it wrong this time with the pasta cooking time... I used fresh pasta and I didn't know that fresh pasta cooks way faster than the usual pasta, dammit. It should have been cooked at TWO MINUTES :))))) Since obviously the previous experience had made me worry over not cooking the pasta enough, this time I cooked it for way too long. My fettucine was super mushy and it felt like eating mushy noodles with too much black pepper T_T
After that
With my very disastrous experience in cooking pasta, I kinda gave up with creating the sauce on my own. Cooking was super tiring back then for me. I remember realizing that I clenched my jaw way too much when I was stressed, and I found that because of this cooking experience! For the few first times, after cooking I literally had trouble eating because I couldn't open my mouth properly as my jaws would get stuck. I noticed too that I would get super tired after cooking that I had to take quick naps, which would turn to hours of napping.
So I decided not to cook the sauce again on my own and turned into ready-made sauce. I like this store called Little Maria on Tokopedia and they sells various pasta cooking ingredients including the sauces. At first I bought the mushroom sauce from them, but then realizing that mushroom tend to expire quickly on sauces, I only bought their pesto sauce. To date, I still love their pesto sauce so much! However, it started to be so expensive when you think about how I needed to buy 60k a bottle sauce for 2-3 portions of pasta, when my very first reason to cooking (other than because I love doing it and I love eating) is that I wanted to save money hahaha.
So after that, I discovered three things on my cooking journey:
- Pasta can be simple. I no longer need to buy fancy ingredients, aglio olio is very doable with just garlic, aglio olio, chilli flakes, and mushroom. Well, packaged parsley can also be added to add greenish look. These days I also like to inject more protein to my dishes by adding chicken breasts, more mushroom, or even scallops. I like prawns too but they are too frightening to process with the skin lol.
- After learning how to make the OG pasta like aglio olio and carbonara, I became a huge fanatics of Italian original pasta. That's what you became when you watched too many "how to cook pasta as an italian" videos LOL. But I can't deny, those videos of Italian chefs sharing their grandma pasta taught me how to cook pasta way more effectively than any Willgoz/chef Arnold videos can. Back to the first sentence, so me being a purist meant I detest adding cheese to my pasta 🤣 It was fine when it's carbonara, but I super can't adding it when I'm eating aglio olio because it's just garlic + oil, just that. Now I don't give a fuck anymore and just add cheese however the fuck I want!
- Home-grown everything! To be twice as rich (by not spending!)! Remember the price of pesto sauce per bottle I mentioned? To save on delivery fee, I usually bought up to 6 bottles per purchase. In bulk, the spending amount was quite heart-shattering. I could spend 400k just to buy pesto sauce! 🫠I did savor the usage and they can last me a few months, but it would make me dependent on them forever. So given my now added expertise in cooking, I decided to grow the ingredients for pesto on my own! At first I tried growing basil plants from seed but it didn't work well and the basil that grows is just not the type that I wanted. Luckily, youtube introduces me to basil propagation. I knew then that basil can be easily replicated from its stems! Therefore, I tried to look for genovese basil (the type that Italians actually use!) on Tokopedia. I luckily got a very good one and currently in my home, there are probably 3 other pots of mature genovese basil + 6 new small plants! :D Yep, the one you saw first on this post are the basil leaves that I grew on my own. Mind you, the result is very very good!
Other than pasta
I obviously try to cook other things aside from pasta. But to me, pasta is just the simplest and quickest delectable dish that I can make! And yes, from only cooking pasta during the weekends, now I sometimes cook pasta during dinner for the healing part and the eating good part, and I even dare to cook it during my short 1-hour lunch break.
Other than pasta, I also learned how to cook steak. I tried cooking several high grade steaks, I always buy MB6 above btw. But the result was just always so so to me. I thought it would be very economical as usually the one we bought on resto on 400k IDR was probably just an MB2 wagyu, but in reality making a high grade pasta tasty is so difficult. I am yet to nail the secret, is it my stove? Is it my pan? Steak is tricky because every video tells you different tricks. I fell to the same rabbit hole as with my very first experience with cooking pasta: believing blindly at what the youtuber told you. I was told to cook like 30 seconds per side for medium result etc etc etc but in reality you have to really know visually what does a good steak looks like etc etc.
So I haven't nailed steak and would like to just buy steak in a high-end restaurant lol, just wanna see if it's my taste buds that just can't accept steak or if it's my cooking skills. Hoping for the latter because I want to know what's good with steaks!
Me cooking thin sliced beefs + saikoro meltique is a different story by the way. They tasted good! I think the sauce is: oyster sauce, kikkoman, garlic, saori teriyaki, and honey. It tasted superb!
Also tried chicken katsu + japanese curry rice. Tasted superb but I'm yet to nail the water level consistency to make it into the right thickness.
I once made fried rice with dashi powder topped with runny omelette added with cheese. It was one of the most delicious fried rice I've ever cooked and eaten in my entire life... but again I've yet to make another perfect one! Fried rice is quite tricky because I need to prepare the refrigerated leftover rice from even the night before.
Yes i do the cooking yes i do the cleaning
I made this post late at night because I wanted to actually publish something on this blog after a long time not being able to. My friend posted a blog of his the other day and wow I was baffled at how he really managed to write that long ass blog post despite being busy with travelling etc (he ran a travelling blog and had just came home). Maybe he wrote that during the time he spent on airport/plane? Either way, I should also just write and let the mood lead me instead of postponing and daydreaming all day hahaha.
I realized I love cooking so much and despite the challenges it brought me in the beginning (the wasted ingredients, the TMD with my jaw, the failed dishes etc), it brings me so much joy. It became the thing I'm willing to do after a busy day at work just because I like it. And I would even do the cooking even when my sister (aka helper lol) is away and I got no one to do the cleaning for me.
To think that until a year ago, I still needed to watch a youtube video before cooking (bcs I'm afraid I'd mess up the recipe! lol) and now I'm the pan-flipping cook who can create (MAINLY PASTA) dishes however I want them to be, I'm immensely proud of myself. HEHE.
(Will add pics when I have the time! I always have pics because I've made it a personal commitment to always document the food I eat and we're talking about the food I cook myself here! haha)
