A college student's experiments in the kitchen: Content

Have you ever heard of that joke, well, it's not exactly a joke (Let's just say it's a story for the sake of it), where the sign in front of the laundry shop says their service is of high quality, fast or cheap. Yes, it was an 'or.' And they wrote that you can choose two of the three. If you want the service to be of quality and fast, it would not be cheap. If you want it fast and cheap, it would not be of high quality and if you want the high quality yet cheap too, it would not be fast.

That was what came into my mind just now when I was thinking of what to cook for dinner. For us college students, an ideal meal is cheap, fast, easy to prepare, delicious and nutritious. The trick is nd that ideal meal rarely ever happens. Then when I found that one rare golden recipe which fulfills all those requirements, I eat that for breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper for five days or until I get sick of it and don't even want to look at it again. So yeah, I believe you get my point. It's so darn difficult to just think of what to eat! And I believe there are many people like me out there, who wants to cry at the thought of having to prepare meals.

Hence..... I aim to blog about my experiments, my explorations and my success and failures regarding cooking. This post will be something like a content page for the blog and as I post, I will update this post and insert the links to all posts about cooking or just preparing meals. So, look forward to it! :)

Cooking? Cooking!

As someone studying abroad, away from home, I have to figure out my own meals. I never appreciated my mom's effort to prepare our meals until I have to do that on my own. Cooking is difficult enough on its own. But cooking is not just cooking. What do I mean?

To start cooking, you have to know what you want to cook. What do you feel like eating today? What do everyone else in the house feel like eating today? What kind of meat should I cook? What kind of vege dish should I make? Have I cooked this same dish within the week?

WOW

Did you know you can have that much questions? And a proper Burmese meal usually have two meat dishes, one vegetable dish, soup and side dishes so that makes the process worse (not that I've ever cooked a complete meal like that :P ).

I helped my mom in the kitchen when I was in Singapore but it was nowhere close to cooking up a meal on my own.

Anyway, so since I've been in the States, I had to start thinking of what to cook and start cooking. I ask my mom for ideas and recipes for dishes via Skype. I also follow blogs like Wutyee Food House and some chefs on Facebook. However, one thing I realized is that most of those recipes online involve a lot of ingredients. Whenever I find a recipe of a dish that I like, I would not have more than half of the ingredients that they listed there. And some recipes would list like ten different kinds of spices to marinate the meat.

Another problem is the measurements. I get recipes from many different sources. Blogs, Youtube, Facebook or just some random website that shows up on Google. Different sources use different kinds of measurements. Some use the SI system, some use the metric system, while some of the Burmese blogs use a different kind of measurement that I believe is only used in some parts of India and Myanmar. So yeah, long story short, some recipes really annoy me.

So, I thought, well, why don't I be what I'm looking for? I believe there are many other people out there who can't put in a lot of time into cooking because of school or work. So I decided I should share my experiments and my recipes. I almost always try to tweak recipes that I found online to cut down a few ingredients or just to make the whole cooking easier so I'll share those recipes and what worked out and what didn't.

And.. I plan to blog both in English and Burmese but my laptop is currently dead and it is such a pain to type Burmese on my tablet. I actually painstakingly typed a blogpost in Burmese but the Blogger app kind of crashed on me and I lost everything. But  I do want to blog in both languages. :)

Thanks for reading and do look forward to my posts! ;)

-Htet
March 23, 2015