Cooking!

So when I was little, I wanted to be so many different things when I grew up: policeman, firefighter, artist, musician, doctor, professional chef... and the list goes on.

Obviously, at this point in my life I have little desire to be any of those things (though I do want to pick up piano again). However, one thing that I am still as passionate about now as I was back in the day is... COOKING!

I know. Total shocker, right? Who would believe that I, of all people, like to cook? Ignoring the fact, of course, that I am a huge glutton. :]

Actually, I got hooked on cooking not because of the allure of the fancy food I could make, but because of the mental challenges intertwined with it. On nights where I would finish homework at around 4 am, I would usually get really hungry, usually around midnight or 1 am. But my mom would already be asleep, and the only sounds in the house would be me typing as quietly as possible and writing as quietly as possible. What annoyed me the most about these situations was the fact that usually, when I had that much homework, it involved a writing assignment which then had to be printed. Unfortunately, my printer makes the most loud and obnoxious sounds EVER, which meant I had to email everything to myself and print them out in the syslab. Printing at the syslab was also annoying, because OOffice would often screw up the spacings of the document. But anyway, I digress...

Since I did not want to wake up my mom, I had the challenge, in addition to cooking something edible by myself (which was hard enough already), of preparing foods that did not require use of tools that made a lot of noise. This meant that among others, the microwave oven and the toaster oven that made the obnoxious ticking sounds as the timer counted down were disallowed. This certainly was a huge restriction; you can cook basically anything with a microwave! But I couldn't use such a versatile tool! Arggh!

This restriction on the available tools also placed a restriction on the types of food and ingredients I could use. Clearly I couldnt use anything my mom kept in the freezer, unless it was something I could heat up on the frying pan, without it making cracking noises. So basically, anything frozen was disallowed. Now I was left with 1. Ingredients in the fridge, and 2. Ingredients kept in the pantry.

Now the big problem was creating something edible out of the ingredients in the fridge and the pantry. When I was a novice, I had a lot of trouble with this part of the late-night cooking process. But as I started cooking more and more, I began to develop a certain level of food intuition, dealing with the ability to combine flavors and taste them together in my head (before I recklessly put everything together into something completely inedible, thus wasting food and a substantial amount of my time).

Late-night cooking was like a really fun puzzle for me. Kind of like a sudoku puzzle: Given the numbers already written in each row, column, or 3x3 square, the possible numbers that could fit in the empty spaces were restricted. And just like how mathematicians came up with theorems and formulas after "playing around" with numbers, I came up with a few recipes that I knew to be good, forever ingrained in my brain. In fact, just now I made a rice bowl with rice, fish eggs, artificial crab meat, tuna, and seasoning. It was delicious, although I had to give up about a fifth of my rice to Happy (Hey, YOU try eating the food in front of you while a cute little dog sits between your legs, looks up at you and begs. Can't do it? Thought so.)

Ranging from this sneaky way of preparing food without waking my mom, to randomly baking a vanilla cake in the middle of the day, to preparing a traditional, nasty-smelling bean curd hangover soup, my experiences with cooking have generally been positive.

I love cooking~ ^^