Hold Your Thought

This blog might not help you with your cooking (but maybe will make you feel like a better cook after you read my posts). Reason why I make this blog / journal is because when you ask me two months ago if I like to cook, I will come back with : only if that's the only way to survive on earth. 

I can list of things why, in my 28 years of living, I don't feel like cooking :

1. I always have somebody who cooks for me. My maids who doubled as our cooks or my mother.
2. I can always buy some food. Here in Indonesia, finding good food is amazingly easy. You can go to street vendors or small restaurants in your area, we even have merchants with food carts strolling down our street 24/7. Name all kind of courses : appetisers, main, desserts, snacks, drinks. Food is everywhere here. My next door neighbours sell food too! 
3. Delivery. If you feel like couch potato-ing and too lazy to get out from the house to buy food, dial up! All those fast food restaurants deliver anywhere, and  my favourite is Pizza Hut's Tuna Melt.
4. Instant food. Indonesia has thousands of dishes you can possibly imagine. It says that the world's best dessert and food are from Indonesia, but most of the population here just can't get enough of Indomie, our world-famous instant noodle. I'm not kidding, this stuff tastes ridiculously good! Although it takes more effort than point 3 and 2 - because you actually cook something here , you can add scrambled eggs, poached, corned beef, some veggies and chili - it makes the whole real cooking idea seems absurd.Think I'm exaggerating this Indomie thingy, check this review.
5. Cooking show. Despite the goal of the show to make cooking easier for common people, the mutants on TV (aka chefs) make cooking seems like a rocket science. ( Until I discover Jamie, but that's another story). I like to watch Australia Junior Masterchef and sometimes I like to believe that those kids are robots. I guess it's true that some say, cooking shows are like porn, most of the actions happen on screen are never happen in real life. 
6. I'm busy. (Yes, I know that this is used for answering questions when the real answer actually is I'm lazy). I worked as a teacher in a language school and usually get home from work around 10 or 11 pm. I'm just too tired to even hold a fork. But maybe that's just an excuse.
7. I don't give it a chance. I always say that I don't like it and make myself think that I won't be good at it. I grow afraid of the idea. I guess this is the hardest obstacle and the first every cook has to conquer. Sadly, I can't tell you how. Some get it while watching someone else's cooking, others while in a desperate situation. Well, this is how mine happened :

Because of my tight schedule of crazy children (and sometimes adult), I really look forward for my days off. I don't have Saturday because it's the busiest day of the week so I have Sunday and Monday off, which are pretty good because having Mondays off feels so good when everybody's complaining about Monday. 

I usually spend them with movies, couch and pizza delivered to my door step. I swear the lady on the phone knows exactly what I want because I always call at the same time and order the same thing. If not that, I spend it with my guy, Hendra. Movie night on the cinema and dinner before that. Until one weekend he said what if we just stay at home and watch movie on DVD since he had bought some new movies. I thought, yea.. maybe I can fried some nuggets or karage (another instant food I love!) and dip it with chili and thousand island, but then.. I stumbled into this book

I bought this months ago for my little sister. Of all the three girls (and four counting my mom), she's the only one who shows interest in cooking - especially dessert and chocolate. Plus, this was on sale. Originally it was around 500.000 rupiah, but I got it for around 100.000. I know zero about cooking and reason why I bought this because I fell in love with the graphic design.

All the recipes in it were written simple and short, not intimidating. Of course it was also a trap to put common people like me into thinking that French cooking was a piece of cake. 

So, I was really in the mood to play 'a good cook' that week and decided to buy the groceries and cooked! Long story short, we had a really good time and bad food. It was so bad that we decided to give  all the meat to Alf, his Saint Bernard. And spent the rest of the night laughing cause we decided to do point no 4 : cook Indomie.

Back home, I thought.. those groceries we bought would be a waste if I didn't use it, of course I could always hand that to my mom and she'd be happy but.., there was something in me that said " I won't give up that easily you Ginette Mathiot! I can prove it to you that I can cook!" Although of course, I have no idea who she was. 

So the day after I was back to Hendra's kitchen and also the day after, too. I think he was a bit surprised to see me really wanted to cook. He knows better than anybody else that I despised cooking. He was really supportive though, didn't really mention all the meat I've burnt, milk I've wasted and the kitchen I've messed.  

All the things I post here mostly about how I discover the world of cooking. I learn a lot in these past few weeks, not only new vocabulary and phrases, but also how to be fearless and like Julia Child's quote on her book My Life In France :

Maybe the cat has fallen into the stew, or the lettuce has frozen, or the cake has collapsed. Eh bien, tant pis. Usually one's cooking is better than one thinks it is. And if the food is truly vile, then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile, and learn from her mistakes.  ― Julia Child, My Life in France 

Eh bien, tant pis. Oh well, too bad.