Cooking

I've been cooking for about 10 months now and every week, I'm looking at either perfecting my dish or finding new dishes to try. Dearie's work shifts are stabilized now and is rotating between morning and afternoon shifts.

I have more time preparing dinner so will usually try new dishes when he's on the morning shift. I'm actually pretty excited about cooking this week as I'll be trying out a number of new dishes. My trip to the Orient Market yielded fruitful results and I was really happy with my grocery shopping yesterday.

One of my grocery purchases included lotus root and I decided to boil lotus root soup today before it goes spoilt. This soup reminds me of my mum's cooking. It's one of my favorite soup as she will always add in chicken feet when she makes this soup. Lotus root is not something where it's easily found in the States coz it gets rotten pretty quickly. My preparation of the soup began and it included washing the lotus root. I must say that the lotus root here is already pretty clean as there is no mud as compared to those my mum buys from the market. But it was still a yucky thing for me to do. Having cooked for 10 months, I've encountered things that I had to wash and cut that I found yucky but because of the desire to whip up new dishes every chance I get and also the desire to cook nice dishes for us to enjoy, I had no choice but to just do it. One thing I avoided and will not handle is the chicken feet. Boiling this soup makes me appreciate my mum a lot coz I can really feel the love for us. Imagine going through all the effort of washing, cleaning, etc and handling of chicken feet is worse than handling lotus root.

Having cooked for about 10 months also made me appreciate people who cooks for a living besides my mum and mum-in-law. It is always so easy to request for your favorite dishes without giving even a thought to what goes behind that favorite dish. I'm glad Dearie doesn't have any favorite dishes so basically I can just choose to cook what I like to eat and enjoy cooking.

Kudos to my mum for all those delicious dishes. I truly feel your love in each of them.