Cooking Success!

   After my failed cooking attempts have been recorded on this blog, I need to redeem myself with stories of cooking triumphs. 

“She can be taught!”

So while success stories do not have nearly enough drama to make an interesting tale, they do bring fond memories to mind, and tasty food to the lunch…bowl. 

Cooking story #1: Tacos.  Tacos are super easy, even for this girl.  Everything was washed thoroughly and cut properly (ok, Maak helped out with the cutting) and the meat ended up being pork.  The pork was actually kind of fried and then taco seasoning was added.  I showed the host fam how we eat tacos (in hard shells purchased in Phnom Penh) and won rave reviews.  Ok, well not really.  My host mom liked them, but the boys didn’t.  She told me that it was an expensive meal to make though, mostly because the taco shells were like $6 from the supermarket and everything else added up to about $1.  She was right. 

Cooking story #2: Eggplant Marinara – This lunch is pretty self explanatory.  I got some eggplant from a stand nearby, marinara is a purchase from the city (Phnom Penh, as it happens) and the grocery store, and I chopped some onions because I figured that with only two ingredients I couldn't call it “cooking” – that’s just “mixing”.  Anyway, the sliced eggplant, together with marinara sauce, ended up quite delicious.  And if you’re wondering if marinara sauce keeps for the next day with no refrigeration, no, it does not. 

Cooking story #3: Pumpkin Soup!  Very exciting to attempt, even if it is just soup.  For this one, I had less than an idea of how to go about making soup from pumpkins, much less what other kinds of ingredients to include or how to begin a recipe.  So I used my problem-solving, highly educated, 21^st century American brain: I googled it.  Google gave me a few recipes on how to make pumpkin soup using actual pumpkins, and I had to modify the recipe because when I tried to make pumpkin soup, I didn’t have any butter…or spices…or anything but pumpkin, canned milk, and carrots on hand.  So it goes.  It was delicious.  Also I would have eaten pumpkin-anything at that point. 

And of course, there are the baking items.  Baking, I can do.  Baking is pretty exact, requires instructions and measuring and order. Baking is fun and easy and not like cooking.  Thanks to the toaster oven gifted to me by a K5 Volunteer who left, baking is relatively easy.  I have successfully only made muffins though, because when the angel food cake was attempted, I tried to improvise and add cocoa powder, vanilla powder, and cinnamon.  Not all in the same cake.  Not even the boys would eat it.  But they do like chocolate chip muffins *fist pump*.

I asked my parents what they thought about my self-depiction of cooking debacles on my blog.

Supermom tried to be generous, “You don’t portray yourself as bad at cooking so much as accident prone!”

Fair enough, I do go through a lot of band-aids. 

xo-Amanda