My mother tried to teach me to cook when I was younger, but she got cranky because I was only slowing her down and crowding her kitchen. She didn't like having other people in her kitchen while she was cooking. And I didn't like being shouted at every time I cut the potatoes wrongly. Therefore, I never learned to cook until I had lived on my own for about 5 years. For the first five years, I worked in restaurants, so I didn't have to worry about meals. After that, I started working in a bookstore, and I figured I couldn't keep munching on the book pages all the time.
I had to use a camping stove with butane gas, as there was no kitchen in the house where I rented a room. So I cooked in my room and did the washing in the shared bathroom. As there was no fridge either, I had to buy just enough raw ingredients for one meal. That means I had to go to the grocer every time I needed to cook.
A couple of years later, I finally moved to another house. With a proper kitchen, I found out that I actually loved cooking. I liked experimenting with new dishes, but I'd stick to western food most of the time, because they just couldn't go wrong. You'd have to be a really terrible cook to mess up a pasta dish, for example. My specialty was breakfast.
However, I was not used to preparing more than one dish at a time. Usually I would take close to an hour to complete a single dish. So I assumed a 3-course meal would take me 3 hours to prepare. Fortunately, I managed to do everything in about an hour and a half. The dessert was prepared earlier and kept in the fridge while I cooked the starter and the main.
The starter was minestrone soup containing potatoes, zucchini, carrots, onions, tomatoes and spiral pasta. This was easy to make. I just dumped everything in the pot and put the lid on.
The main course was chicken with spinach, tomato and garlic. I wanted to make the gravy creamier, but we ran out of cream. I used milk instead.
I didn't have an oven, so my choice of desserts was very limited. What I made was Greek yogurt layered with corn flakes, chocolate digestives, frozen banana, dried cranberries and chia seeds. This was inspired by the popular breakfast muesli smoothie bowls on Instagram.
And there you have it, my first 3-course meal. There will be more to come.
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9th July 2018
My second time preparing a 3-course meal, I made creamy spinach soup, aglio olio spaghetti and egg pudding.
The highlight was the soup. It was my first time making a creamy soup, and I managed to do it without a blender. The spinach was a bit chunky but overall taste was good.
The egg pudding wasn't much of a hit because I did not have vanilla essence, so there was a strong egg smell. And the caramel sauce was too watery.
