In love with cooking
One of the best parts of this South American journey is that there is a lot of time — to enjoy running, reading, writing and sometimes not doing anything at all. One of my latest hobbies has been cooking. We’ve a small apartment here with a furnished kitchen and I’ve spent the last few weeks learning to cook a decent bit.
New recipes
Learning new stuff is always exciting. Have tried my hands at a variety of things like fried rice, stuffed capsicum, broccoli soup, caramelized banana, braised eggplant, hash brown potatoes, pasta, and a lot more.
But it’s not all about the new recipes. Earlier, cooking always used to be about just getting something decent made in as little time (or effort) as possible. Even for things I knew, I never bothered with the details like texture of oats, boiling pasta in extremely salty water for a good flavor and using spices like cinnamon in desserts. Now, I’m learning such things to make cooking more fun.
Baking:
Yes! There’s also an oven in the kitchen and I just LOVE baked food.
Failures
Of course, everything doesn’t turn out to be good. I’ve screwed up a few things too: baked home-made bread which didn’t rise enough, pumpkin soup which went horribly wrong without a blender, fried rice which got too spicy because of the deceiving green chilies etc.
One of the good parts of learning to cook has been to become more aware of food. I have read a bit about nutrition too and know better what I am putting in my body.
