How white is a white rose?

Cooking experience

I always have interest in cooking, even since I was a child. My mom is a marvelous cook, she taught her daugthers (me and my younger sister) to cook since we were still very young. Do you know how she taught us to cook? She only gave us permission to play with our friends after I finished my obligation to help her with her cook, and I was only like 8 or 9 years old(my sister always have a better excuse to miss these things). Actually, she only asked my to grind some ingredients for her cooks using the grinder (yes indeed, a very traditional one my friend, the one made of stone). I was very upset at the time but have no choice to avoid the job. Anyway hesitation then grew to curiousity because sometimes she used different inggredients for different cook and lots of it (for those who don't know, Indonesian dishes use a variety of inggredients to create good taste, different region even have their own style and off course with different inggredients although it falls under the same name of dish).
I start asking questions each inggredients used for cooking, the name, the function, why we use a certain inggredients instead of others. Soon, after I have enough knowlegde, my mom start teaching me how to deal with pan and stove, believe or not, I enjoy it very much and learned more. We have a maid to help us maintain the house and off course to help her to cook, but this is a way of her to teach me how to cook. She's very traditional, she told me as a woman I have to learn how to cook, at least a simple one. Why I asked? she said, someday I will have my own family, eventhough I probably will have enough money to pay a maid to cook, it will different if you do it your own, your husband and your children always proud of your cooking, event for a simple dish like friend rice (one of the most popular dish in Indonesia). I learned alot from my mom. Eventhough I live in a very modern world where I only need to pick up a phone for a delivery order, it's always feel different when you make it on your own.

My first attempt to have my cook try by public was in my first year of junior high. I was a member of girlscout and one time there were a cooking competition for groups in the girlscouts. Each group had to cook friend rice and we were free to create any style of friend rice and we have to prepare everything from raw materials, for example, to make a fried rice, we need rice that already steam (steam rice) but since we have to prepare from material we have to steam the rice first which was spent much of our time, but that's the rule and my group appointed me as the chef for the group. Guess what? our group won the competition and we got the first winner, but it was not the prize that really made me feel good, but when our seniors said the taste of the fried rice was very good (well very good means, not bad for a 12 years old girlscouts hehe).
Then from that moment, I turned to love cooking and it then became a hobby. Years afterward, the hobby turned out helped me when I have to study abroad. I'm not very fond of western food, it might good when you have it once in a while, but when you have it everyday, there's no fun in eating anymore. So, for daily meals during my study I cooked the Indonesian dish (rendang, semur, soup, ayam goreng, bakwan jagung-corn fritters- and more), usually I cooked enough for few days, put it in a storage before it landed in my fridge). I survived the days of study abroad with Indonesian dish :)

You know, my dream house would be the one who have a modern kitchen equipped with the latest kitchen appliances where I can try all the recipes from my cookbook. When it happen you are welcome to come and try one of my masterpieces :D

posted by weetha @ 5:16 PM