Cooking up trouble

I'm waiting for dinner to cook so I thought I'd blog a bit until the brown rice is ready. I like brown rice, it's got this nice 'bite' that Thai rice doesn't have. Unfortunately, it seems to take forever to cook.

Hungry.

Cooking is a novelty to me. I've always had someone cook for me, especially boyfriends, who were convinced that if left alone in a room with a block full of knives I would manage to skewer myself. Either that or they would end the night in the emergency room getting their stomach pumped. Whatever. I didn't question their motives too closely when they were offering to cook me steak.

Don't get me wrong, I can make omelettes and make some kick ass instant noodles if push came to shove, but the upshot is that I'm not really the domestic type, and I've never been. I'm sure my parents worried that I would conduct my own version of Supersize Me when I came here, because the alternative was to starve. Me and cooking are like lions and sheep being put together. It just doesn't work.

The point is that I never, ever cook. And although I harbored noble, albeit vague, intentions of actually using the month I had off from work to learn how to cook, between running around on medical checkup, visa applications, accommodation snafus and spending as much time with everyone as possible without losing my mind, there just wasn’t time. Well, that and the fact that I didn't seem able to wake up before noon everyday. Or couldn't be bothered. Whatever.

The strange thing is that being stuck in a foreign country and being completely alone kind of focuses your concentration, albeit in a slightly delayed manner.

So for the past two days, I've been grocery shopping so I could cook myself something to eat (did you just see the pig pass the window?).

I've learned a lot of things in a very short space of time.

1. Everything in Australia is more expensive. I now understand my cousin's agitation when people keep telling her that Australia is cheaper, when it's just not true. Exchange rate aside, things are genuinely more expensive. Fresh seafood might cost you your firstborn child. Lobster might require sales of internal organs. This goes for toiletries too. I am aghast.

2. Almost-fat-free mayonnaise tastes like sweet glue.

3. Cooking your food which you have to pay for will result in even the most determined glamour puss turning frumpy HDB hausfrau, as I found out when I found myself complaining to my cousin that the chicken at SupaValue cost four whole stinking dollars more than the ones at Coles'.

4. When you're the one who's washing up, you don't see anything wrong with using the same plate for everything, from preparing the food to holding the food and mixing things on the plate and then using it for plating. Ditto for cutlery, saucepans and frying pans.

5. Leftovers, no matter how manky looking, are excellent breakfast foods.

6. Australian dairy is my kryptonite. Like, really.

7. Brown rice really takes bloody ages to cook. Like, forever. I think dinosaurs died because they starved to death waiting for their brown rice to cook.

Tonight's menu is stir- fried choy sum with country roast chicken with savory stuffing and brown rice. Don't start getting impressed, the roast chicken was from Woolies because goddamn if I'm going to attempt complicated poultry after another day which started at 6 a.m. and hasn't ended yet. I bought the choy sum because I am experiencing vegetable guilt because I haven't eaten enough of it lately. Ditto for the rice.

I had visions of choy sum in oyster sauce and soya sauce. Maybe with some mushrooms. I didn’t check whether The Raj had oyster sauce or soya sauce, because, hell, she's Asian. Asians have oyster sauce. And definitely soya sauce. Because it's a thing, like Michael Jackson and plastic surgery. One doesn't exist without the other. It's like the holy trinity in Asian cuisine. Cook, soya sauce and oyster sauce.

You know what happens next, don't you?

There wasn't any oyster sauce at all. Or soya sauce. I couldn't believe it. "But, she's SINGAPOREAN!" was the mantra my flabbergasted brain kept repeating. I couldn't get over it.

When she gets back I need to ask her how she cooks her stuff. Because I'm amazed. And I'm not gerogatory or anything. It's just that my little manjen mind boggles at the thought of not having it in the house.

In the end I got desperate and after much rummaging through the cupboards, I found a bottle of fish sauce. "What the hell," I thought, and splashed it into the pan.

The end result:




And it was good. :)