The Two Odysseys

We have here my food odyssey; and then there's Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey where he travels to Bangladesh and discovers "bhapa shoshe illish" or steamed hilsa fish (in banana leaves). In recreating the dish back here in the UK, Rick Stein substitutes hilsa fish with cod. I substituted cod with sea bream. I began by making the masala paste, for which I combined onions, garlic, turmeric, chilli powder and tomato puree. The beauty of the dish is to fry these ingredients in mustard oil to get a nice...erm... mustardy kick to the dish. (One can even add ground mustard seeds to enhance the richness of the mustard flavour but when I tried this in my first attempt at the dish --yes, so I did have a first failed attempt-- it tasted not so nice; oh alright, I shan't mince my words (pun intended given that this is a food blog), it was absolutely disgusting and I had to chuck away the masala mix in its entirety.) The next step was to smother the fish steaks with the masala paste, raw onions, green chillies and coriander leaves before wrapping and steaming them in banana leaves.
An alternative was to use foil or grease proof paper but to quote Rick Stein, 'you won't have the same romance' as when using the banana leaves. Indeed he was right, for the emerald coloured parcels looked a right treat, even more so after they were unwrapped to reveal the beautifully moist and juicy steaks of spicy fish which I served with basmati rice and a lovely, fresh picante salad consisting of a mint and basil dressing.


To keep the (green) colours (and my spirits) flowing, Fuzz whisked up a luscious crème de menthe cocktail!

Gigot à la cuillère...

or in other words 'French slow cooked spoon lamb'! Over the Easter weekend, made this classic French Bistro dish whereby the idea is to roast the lamb for 7 hours in order that the meat becomes so beautifully tender that it can be carved with a spoon. The beauty of the dish is that it doesn't really involve much cooking so needless to say, it suited me just fine (and turned out to be a huge success if I may add)!

After seasoning and browning my leg of lamb on the hob, I added garlic, white wine, carrots and onions to the casserole, and put it in the oven for 7 hours (turning it twice in between). After 7 hours, all that was required was to boil the meat juices until they were reduced by a quarter, before adding some madeira wine to the mixture (I didn't have any madeira wine to hand so had to substitute with marsala wine but I doubt that it made a huge difference). Following a sprinkling of thyme, the dish was ready to be devoured at the table. And indeed the dish lived up to its name - the meat was wonderfully tender and succulent, and offered no resistance when being carved with the spoon.

(Btw, I apologise for the blandness of this post but thanks to the simplicity of the dish, there was no opportunity to go wrong and liven up this tale.)

Easy peasy lemon cheesy!

A dead easy dish only requires a dead short explanation so I make no apology for the brevity of this post! I was in the mood for something cheesy, so I thought I'd make something like tartiflette or cheese parcels using filo pastry. Unfortunately Canary Wharf Tesco Metro was out of filo pastry that evening so I had to make do with puff pastry instead (yes, ok I took a major short cut by not baking my own pastry.)! Following a generous sprinkling of garlic mushrooms (for the record, I cooked the mushrooms in garlic and onions myself) and one of my favourite French cheeses, Reblochon, out popped a wonderfully delicious tart:

Certainly a meal I'll be making more often - this is simplicity at it's best....mmm!

Sherry drunken crab

In the final countdown to the London 2012 Olympics (woo hoo!), I returned to the kitchen yesterday to try my hand at a making a crab dish using a recipe created by a dear friend of mine (thanks, Sujoy-da!). Sujoy-da treated me to this dish of his at his home in Paris and boy, was it yum!

The recipe is what I would describe as primarily French (rich in butter, herbs, garlic and onions; instead of wine which is more typical in French cooking, Sujoy-da's recipe prescribes port or sherry), but it has an eastern touch with the kick it gets from the spice of pepper and green chillies.

I'm more familiar with hard shelled crab but Sujoy-da created this recipe using soft shelled crab, so I switched my loyalty from the former to the latter on this occasion, and picked up a frozen swimming crab from my local Chinese supermarket.

To highlight the simplicity of the recipe, the hardest part was chopping the onion and garlic! Once that was done, it was just a case of combining these with the crab in a wok, along with generous helpings of a few other ingredients. It was clear from the taste that I had overdosed a little on the sherry (lesson learnt) but for a superbly simple recipe, the resulting dish properly hits the spot (pitures are below)!

Mixed doubles (well sort of...)

Team A: Me & Ma
Team B: Mr Crab & Mrs Crab

After a fairly long break from my culinary escapades, I ventured back into the kitchen for a cookery lesson from my mum, who I managed to prise away from the US Open tennis on TV.

The task at hand was to make a nice dish, using my mum’s own recipe, out of 2 medium sized crabs, one male and the other female. You maybe wondering why I am being so specific in terms of mentioning the gender of the crabs but that’s because there’s a slight difference in the way one prepares the female crab in comparison to the male crab, plus, the male crab tends to taste better (and for those of you with wandering minds…put a lid on those thoughts, please).

To begin with the preparation, Ma instructed me to finely chop 3 onions, 7-8 cloves of garlic, 2 inches of ginger, 2 tomatoes, and 3-4 sprigs of spring onion. Not satisfied with my haphazard chopping technique, Ma shared with me the technique she was taught during the days of her Cordon Bleu cookery lessons – Cordon Bleu often gets a mention in our home as you may have gathered from one of my previous posts! To be fair, the technique my mum taught me is one that does make the whole chopping process neater though and having Googled it, it appears to be a popular technique in the world of cooking.

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How to chop an onion (stylishly)

1)Leave the root intact, then peel away the skin from the top end. By leaving the root attached, it will help keep the onion together while slicing.

2)Slice the onion in half and place each half on a flat surface with the round side up.

3)Make multiple cuts vertically from the root end (i.e. from top to bottom) but do not cut all the way to the root at the end (i.e. make cuts ¾ of the way along the length of the onion, along the veins). Again, by leaving the root intact, it will help keep the onion together while slicing

4) Depending on the fineness you want , make horizontal cuts across the vertical cuts whilst you hold on to the root end firmly. The last cut will be the little root bit, and this can be discarded.
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Sharon's mountain of chopped vegetables





Next, came the fun, stress relief bit (or what I like to call the “bash the crab” bit): the crab was already cleaned and cut by our fishmonger, but one of my mum’s top tips is to make cracks in the tough crab shell beforehand with whatever tool one chooses (we chose a small hammer) in order to enable the diner to extract the flesh without having to fiddle aboutwith crackers too much at the dining table. (And going back to the point I made earlier about the difference between the handling of the female crab versus the male crab, as female crab meat can be more gloopy / moist in texture if she is carrying eggs, one may wish to put aside to add nearer the end (or discard altogether) some of the more softer parts of the meat; the alternative would be to avoid buying a female crab, of course – and apologies to those of you on the squeamish side, this is the end of the gory part).

Bashed up crab meat





The crab beating marked the end of the preparatory (and most time consuming) part of the whole cooking process, and it was now time to start cooking the ingredients on the hob. Another one of my mum’s top tips is to steam the crab before frying so that it requires less frying time and therefore remains more succulent.

Crab being steamed

Steaming over, it was then time to fry some spices (2 bayleaves, 2 cloves, about 10-12 peppercorns and 2 cardamoms) as well as all the chopped vegetables except for the spring onions, before adding the crab to thewok containing some hot oil. After seasoning it with salt and sugar, to give the dish a further burst of flavour, I added some cayenne pepper, green chillies and the previously chopped spring onions. Cooking over, the crab was now ready to serve.

(I admit that the finished dish doesn't look particularly appetising in this picture but it honestly tasted nice!)

Given that it was a labour intensive meal (getting to that crab meat ain’t easy but certainly worth the effort!), it was only right that we fortified ourselves and washed the crab down with some chilled white wine!

G&T or Gin & Ginger?

I’ve heard of cooking with port, wine, sherry and beer but never have I seen gin listed under the ingredients of any recipe. I was therefore quickly drawn to a recipe of ‘Red Snapper with chilli, gin & ginger’ that I came across in the “Chilli-lover’s Cookbook”by Jenni Fleetwood.

Being more partial to meat dishes, I’ve tended to neglect fish items as part of my endeavours to cook more, but despite my conscious choice of selecting a fish dish on this occasion, I was somewhat put off by the fact that this dish involved cooking a whole fish than fillets – call me a chicken (no pun intended), it was the doleful, glassy-eyed expression of the fish staring back at me that seemed to unnerve me. Doing my best to escape its look, I set about preparing the fish stuffing (trust my luck that I’d have to stuff this creature whilst it ‘kept a close eye on me’ from beyond the grave): a medley of onions, garlic and mushrooms fried in ground coriander and parsley. Stuffing made and fish stuffed, I then sprinkled a generous layer of ginger and red chillies on the fish before adding some water and popping it in the oven to bake for 40 minutes.

Now came the interesting bit involving the gin: after mixing a small amount of gin with cornflour, I added chicken stock to make what was to be the sauce accompaniment to the dish. Despite not deviating from the cooking instructions in anyway, this was the only stage at which I stumbled a little, as the sauce turned into something of a gloopy, lumpy consistency.

The end result of the overall dish however, wasn’t bad despite the little glitch with the sauce. Served up with fried plaintain and, a tomato, cucumber and onion salad in a light vinaigrette dressing, it turned out to be a tasty, little treat that reminded us of the flavour of one of our favourite crab dishes (“ginger and spring onion crab) from our local Chinese. The salad was my own substitute concoction that replaced the recipe's suggestion of a fried lettuce garnish – I couldn’t help but not get excited about fried lettuce which sounded a bit yucky to me.

Here are two very hazy pictures of the dish (hopefully, it's just about possible to make out the whole body of the fish):

Eggless and tasteless!

We were running thin on kitchen supplies and being too lazy to venture out into the rain to shop, I thought I'd rustle up a treat with whatever I had to hand. In other words, I had the brainwave of attempting to cook my first eggless, banana cake.

Feeling confident from my last couple of attempts at baking, I set about carefully preparing my cake mix using flour, baking powder, milk, sugar, butter and pureed bananas. The only ingredient I didn't have (apart from any eggs) was bicarbonate of soda and at Fuzz's suggestion, I used a bottle of beer as a substitute (his clever explanation of beer's yeast content managed to sway me).

With the cake happily baking in the oven, I moved into the living room next door to continue my lazy Sunday and eagerly awaited the homely aroma of baking that one gets when making a cake. Fifteen minutes later however, I began to get whiffs of a smell that I normally wouldn't associate with cake baking. On inspecting the cake, it certainly looked ok but of course, I was still puzzled by the none too familiar smell. When we finally sampled the cake, it tasted like..erm...how do I describe this...a type of bread that left a rather unplesant alcoholic aftertaste. I blame Fuzz...the failure of the task is clearly down to his lunatic idea of adding a whole bottle of beer to the cake mix (and perhaps with me a little for going along with his lunacy).

(And given the enormous "success" of this cooking experience, no pictures were taken for this post either, I'm afraid!)

Call the fire brigade...Angela's mushrooms have set my tongue on fire!!

Having sampled and adored Angela's magnificent mushroom dish on many an occassion, I thought it high time that I attempt the dish myself. Angela's recipe in hand, I went about adding all the ingredients and spices to the mushrooms exactly as stated: onions, stock powder, curry powder, thyme, black pepper, parsley and 2 scotch bonnet chillis which is the king of all chillis and described on Wikipedia as "a cultivar of the habanero, it is one of the hottest peppers in the world."

With the cooking having gone ultra smoothly and the kitchen having been a disaster free zone on this occasion, I was rather pleased with myself and served up the dish (along with some rice) with an extra proud heart to Fuzz and myself. The flavour of the mushrooms was deliciously explosive...exactly like dear Angie's. About a minute or so into the dish however, the explosion of flavour took a whole new meaning: with every subsequent mouthful of mushrooms, Fuzz and I were bouncing about on our seats with our tongues stuck out thanks to the fiery heat of the chillis (this dish clearly had nothing on suya!!). The pain becoming intolerable, it was a race to the kitchen to get our hands on the ice cream...and only from that point onwards did some life come back into us...

Moral of the tale: whenever Angela prescribes chillis, always moderate the quantity by half.

(And incase you're wanting pictures of the pain inducing mushrooms, there aren't any! All our efforts went towards relieving ourselves of the agonizing, fiery sensations!)

Gargoulette à l'agneau (or Tunisien lamb stew if you prefer)!

My tastebuds were tantalisingly tickled when holidaying in Tunisia a couple of years ago. One of the lamb stews --Gargoulette à l'agneau-- that I was fortunate enough to have sampled there was to die for and I set myself the challenge of recreating the dish at home.

It was a reasonably simple dish to make with little room to go wrong - except that I did go wrong somewhat by overdosing on the tomato concentrate when making the marinade consisting of onions, garlic, cloves, coriander powder, 4 spice powder, saffron, thyme, rosemary and olive oil. Moving on, the next step was to seal the earthenware pot in which the stew was to be cooked for 45 minutes (in Tunisia, the dish was cooked and served in a sealed clay pot like in the picture below). To recreate this effect, I used some dough to seal the edges of the earthenware pot that I was using.











All in all, despite the overpowering tomatoey flavour, it wasn't a bad effort (was scored 8/10 by my fellow diners). The meat was very tender and succulent, and there was plenty of rich sauce to douse over the cous cous that I had made as an accompaniment to the stew. (And if I may add as somewhat of an afterthought, the cous cous was very successful - I made it with avacado, lime, mint, chicken stock and scotch bonnet chilli.)










(In case you haven't guessed, the flaky coating on the lid is the dough that I used to seal the pot with!)

The world has gone bananas!

As if nudging me to embark on another culinary adventure, the Metro featured a banana pancake recipe on its front page about a fortnight ago. So I thought I'd try and follow the path that destiny was clearly trying to steer me towards. What was meant to be a special surprise breakfast in bed for Fuzz ended up turning into yet another "Fuzz saves the day" type scenario. :o(

Pinny on, sleeves rolled up and with all the ingredients and equipment before me, I set about preparing both my wet pancake mix and dry pancake mix. For once, I even found myself ingeniously improvising: made up for the lack of a sieve by using an oil splatter screen instead to sieve the flour and baking powder, and used a potato masher to mash the bananas. Having combined both the wet and dry mix, I was now ready to spoon out the mixture on to the hot pan and skillfully toss my pancakes with flair, Ainsley Harriot style. Alas, as luck would have it, the pancakes came out shaped like...erm...the various countries of the world map (which to be fair, could be construed as quite a skill in itself. I mean how many people can make pancakes shaped like Australia? I'd say that I must be one of the rare few that can.) Moving on though, the shape of the pancakes wasn't the only challenge that I faced here. Not only did I get a little stuck with the cooking at this point, to my dismay, my first pancake got stuck to the pan (quite literally)and stubbornly refused to free itself from it, despite me frantically scraping away at its edges (and I hasten to add that our kitchen was lacking a non-stick pan so I'm not entirely at fault here). As the burning smells got stronger and stronger, so did my calls to Fuzz to come to my aid. He was of course better than me at getting the cooker to behave and as a result of some clever control of temperature with it, we were able to make some almost edible pancakes - I say almost edible as they weren't really that nice to eat, for which I blame the recipe. I followed it down to the last full stop. Period.

Mmmmm moqueca, moqueca, moqueca!

After a long absence from the kitchen (yes, Sharon is finally back with her apron on!), decided to try my hand at a Brazilian fish stew (moqueca de peixe). Took a huge liking to this dish when I sampled it for the first time at "Barraco" - a little Brazilian bar / restaurant tucked away on a side street of West Hampstead. This fondness for the dish was reconfirmed when I had it for a second time at "Las Iguanas" at the O2 in Greenwich (although it was the version at "Barraco" that won first place), so I decided to recreate the meal at home.

Instead of the recommended monkfish, salmon and mahi mahi fish (this was the first time I had heard of mahi mahi fish - it sounded like a hawaiian cocktail to me. Although it turned out that I wasn't far off - mahi mahi is commonly known as dolphin-fish in Hawaii), I opted for seabream. And a superb choice it was: succulent, fleshy and flavoursome (and not too boney, if I may add). The only problem was that that recipe stated that I was to cut the fish into bite size pieces and this proved to be no mean feat. I also took it upon myself to skin the fish, so by the time I had finished my surgery on it, it resembled a pile of shredded fish than bite size pieces.

Surprisingly though, it was a plain sailing journey from here. With the messiest task out of the way, I was able to soldier on with the cooking without any upsets. Having marinaded the fish and chopped the vegetables, I layered my sauce pan as instructed: -- vegetables-fish-vegetables -- before adding the spices, coconut milk, palm oil and herbs. And 40 minutes later, I served up the bubbling pot of stew with fried plaintain, toasted cassava and rice!

Fuzz scored me 8.5/10 for the dish. However my joy was shortlived as a result of the dialogue that followed:

SHARON: Given the treat I knocked up for you, I thought it fair that you do the washing up.

FUZZ: But you promised to do the washing up as well.

SHARON: Oh well, I guess I'm entitled to change my mind....

FUZZ: A promise is a promise.

SHARON: Promises are made to be broken (well may be just on this occasion, hunny!)

(Suffice to say, up till now --the morning after the night before-- the washing up hasn't been done...how the war of wills is resolved remains to be seen...!)

Chinese food made easy...well, I don't think so!

After a gap of over 2 months, I put on my pinny again yesterday. I thought I'd try and create 2 dishes from what is my favourite cuisine: Chinese. I opted for one of the items from the list in my very first post, hot and sour soup, and to ensure that my tummy would be full enough by the end of the meal, I 'boldly' (bold by my standards, that is) took on another dish of crispy fried noodles with chicken and pork.

To start at the very beginning, I went in search of the not-so-easy-to-find ingredients for my hot and sour soup (as well as for my noodles dish) at Loon Fung Supermarket in China Town and that proved to be an adventure in itself. Despite the countless number of times I've had hot and sour soup, I wasn't fully aware of some of the weird and wonderful things that go into it, the most striking components being dried black fungus and dried lily buds (also known as golden needles or gum jum). As if on a voyage of discovery, I traipsed around the supermarket eagerly anticipating my encounter with the dried black fungus and dried lily buds. Whilst filling up my basket with numerous not-so-common items such as fish sauce, red rice vinegar and bamboo shoots and whilst also on the look out for my dried black fungus and dried lily buds, I had the pleasure of coming face to face with many other fascinating products such as dried fish bladder. Given the amount of dried products the Chinese have (believe me, they can make food out of anything, tangerine peel, lotus seeds, bamboo fungus, honeysuckle flowers, chrysanthemum flowers, white fungus, foxnut, mede berry or goji berry as it is commercially known, to name a few), it was with great difficulty that I found a very large pack (clearly this item is considered an invaluable addition to all Chinese kitchens that a small pack wasn't something they seemed to do) of dried black fungus. Little did I know that this product was going to give me a very rude awakening on my return home when I happened to skim through the receipt. It turned out to be the most expensive item of all --costlier than the chicken and pork put together-- and put a whopping hole in my pocket of £7.69. I mean it's bloody fungus as in "any of a diverse group of eukaryotic single-celled or multinucleate organisms that live by decomposing and absorbing the organic material in which they grow." I should be paid to eat the damn stuff, not the other way around. And by the way, I had no joy in obtaining the dried lily buds - I was told they had run out -- who would have thought that dried lily buds would be another highly sought after ingredient?)

Moving on to the cooking then, I began with the hot and sour soup. It was a pretty straight forward exercise with few highlights to report, I'm afraid. I was required to carry out some advance preparation involving the anger-inspiring fungus. The fungus and bamboo shoots needed to be soaked in water for a good 20 minutes to reconstitute and soften them. The bamboo shoots let off a none-too-pleasant odour and added a very unappealing flavour to the soup, which was also flawed by the fact that I had added too much salt (again, this whole pitfall about "salt to taste") and rice vinegar. Neither had I thought to slice the fungus into manageable sizes so that the diner was left having to crudely slurp up the slimy substances into their mouth. All in all, the fruits of my labour weren't sweet on this occassion (although the proof of my toil lies in the picture below) and my soup was more smelly and salty than hot and sour. I concluded that it is much better to just buy the hot and sour soup as a take away item from a restaurant. Making the dish at home is too labour intensive and costly an exercise compared to just forking out £2 or so to nip down to your local Chinese.

To move on, with the soup happily resting on the stove, I set about making the noodles. This was an eventful episode from start to finish and the dish started to go wrong from the moment the noodles came into contact with my pan (through no fault of my own, I must emphasise). To quote my recipe verbatim:

1. Soak vermicelli in cold water until soft. Let it dry for a few hours.

2. Heat the oil in a deep saucepan. Deep-fry the vermicelli, a small portion at a time, in very hot oil until crispy and golden. Drain on paper towel and set aside.

I followed these steps exactly as stated, only for the first half of my noodles to turn into a stone hard mass of I don't know what, the moment I submerged the noodles into the hot oil - see the following picture:

Not wishing to admit defeat so early on in the game, I laid the noodles aside on paper towels in the hope that they would magically come unstuck and take the form of the crispy noodles that I'm so used to seeing before me in Wong Kei. Needless to say, this didn't happen. In an attempt to rescue my dish, I chose to boil the remaining half of the noodles in chicken stock and then continued with the rest of the recipe as stated. I had a near miss when adding 3 beaten eggs to my pan as my slow stirring almost turned the dish into a chicken and pork omelette. However, despite all the mishaps and excusing the fact that the dish turned into something other than what was intended, the end result wasn't bad at all. My soft-instead-of-crispy-fried-noodles proved to be a tasty little treat which my parents nicely relished alongside some sake (so much so that my mum even asked me for the recipe for my noodles). So I'm pleased to say that my blood, sweat and tears weren't for nothing!

Sharon's first biryani

Had a stab at making my first ever biryani tonight, following one of my mother's recipes. Whilst cooking, I thought of the many cultures in which rice is used to make something special: Egg fried rice in China, paëlla in Spain, risotto in Italy, Jollof rice in West Africa and biryani in India. I say India but there are many variants of biryani popular not only in India but in other parts of South Asia and Arabia. According to Wikipedia, there are the following types of biryani:

Awadhi Biryani

Hyderabadi Biryani

Calcutta Biryani

Iranian Beryani

Sindhi Biryani

Memoni Biryani

Kacchi Biryani

Tahari

Danbauk

Thai Biryani

Sri Lankan Biryani

Enough of the history lesson though. So how did my attempt at biryani go tonight, you must be asking. I don't know what type of biryani my dish is - my mum describes it as a simple biryani topped with fried onions-- but it wasn't bad at all, even if I say so myself (see pics below...and I apologise for their blurriness).

The cooking went all too smoothly for my standards so no exciting stories to tell, I'm afraid. I certainly suprised myself because it tasted almost as good as my mum's. The only weakness to my dish was that the lamb needed to be cooked more and it therefore wasn't tender enough but all in all that was the only criticism that I got. I think that calls for a pat on the back...and a glass of wine. Off to enjoy some wine now.

Hot hot hot!

Made a delightful chilli prawns dish yesterday comprising 8 large green chillis! Got off to a bit of a rocky start. Recipe said to fry the prawns in a cornflour and egg mix. Little did I know that I was meant to dip the prawns in the mix and then fry them. Instead, emptied the cornflour and egg mix into a pan of hot oil, followed by the prawns. The cornflour and egg mix did it's own little dance in the pan and turned into a sort of omelette whilst the prawns sizzled away on their own.

Removed the 'omelette' from the pan and continued as normal, thereby managing to turn around the dish. And in the end, boy, was it hot, hot, hot in every respect! 9/10 from mum and that says it all!

A glass of Sauvignon blanc, a pinny and a cake tin...

Made an impromptu decision to bake my first ever cake today --a Victoria Sponge-- using a recipe from my mum's Cordon Bleu cookbook set! Glass of wine in hand and with my pinny on, I endeavoured to work some magic in the kitchen. Highlight was seeing 2 yolks come out of one egg.

Looked up the occurence to confirm that I wasn't just dreaming. Found the following info online:
DOUBLE YOLK EGGS: Double Yolkers appear when ovulation occurs too rapidly, or when one yolk somehow gets "lost" and is joined by the next yolk. Double yolkers may be by a pullet whose productive cycle is not yet well synchronized. They're occasionally laid by a heavy-breed hen, often as an inherited trait.

Whatever. Cake's in the oven now...has to be there for 40/45 mins. Outcome to be announced ...

Outcome:

Dad and I really liked the cake. Mum thought it was just ok. Make of that what you will.

Can't cook won't cook or Masterchef Sharon?

- Using butter (instead of oil) to cook paëlla...
- Frying raw lentils in the hope that they will turn into a nice daal...
- Placing a ceramic fondue pot on a hot hob to make a cheese fondue (needless to say, within 10 minutes of me placing it on the hob and to my sheer bewilderment, the fondue pot cracked allowing the cheese to serenade the cooker)...
- Liquidising raw vegetables and then simply boiling the mixture to make cabbage soup...
- Adding uncooked/untenderised cow feet to a stew five minutes before I'm due to take it off the boil...
- Being shown up by a child when pounding meat in dear Angie's kitchen...

...these are some of my culinary disasters to date. Couple these with the acclaim and accolade that I got from my loved ones after they had sampled the fruits of my labour...and what does one get? A no-goer in the kitchen.

Well, after much coaxing from the boyfriend and taking some inspiration from Julie Powell in the film "Julie and Julia" (http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/julieandjulia/), I've chosen to turn around my "Can't cook, won't cook" ways to being "Masterchef" Sharon...one of a few New Year resolutions, if you will.

Yesterday, I started off my food odyssey --if it can be called that-- by making a fish curry. I wasn't clever enough to take any photos of the final outcome, but I scored a modest 6/10 from my mum (which in my books is good as it's like getting a 2.1 for a degree). The reason for the deduction of 4 marks: (1) there was no chilli in the curry (not my fault as the recipe didn't say I should add any), (2) not enough salt in the dish (not my fault either as the recipe said "salt to taste" and to my taste, my sprinkling of salt was enough) and (3), too much onion in the dish (possibly my fault).

So, where does one go from here? Unlike Julie Powell, I won't be setting myself a challenge of mastering the art of French cooking or aspiring to cook 524 recipes in a single year (least of all making use of recipes that involve boning a duck...i.e. stuffing a duck with meat and baking it in pastry). What I will do is set myself the task of mastering some simple favourites, which friends can add to, should they please. The list goes like this (not necessarily in that order though):

1) Bengali mustard fish curry
2) Nigerian red pepper soup with Okra (attempted before but not quite mastered)
3) Pork and prawn dumplings
4) Hot and sour soup
5) Paëlla (attempted before but not quite mastered)
6) Soupe de poisson
7) Coq au vin
8) Spicy crab (attempted before but not quite mastered)
9) Moquecas
10) Biryani
11) Gigot
12) some sort of an English roast
13) Jollof rice

This is all I can think of for now but I will continue adding to the list and will await any suggestions.