Philosophy of cooking

Cooking is like math. You first cook with premade dishes, premade seasonings, premade whatever. Then, you axiomatize the theory you learned and blindly accepted. You try to recreate the premade theorems from raw and unprocessed ingredients. This is how you improve on the premade stuff. You question it ruthlessly, change the assumptions, and experiment.

I'm not quite there yet, but I'm working on it. It's also a bit more time consuming.

These were the main ingredients for a tuna mushroom cream pasta sauce:

Chunked tuna, Campbell's mushroom cream, green onion, mushrooms (cuz the soup is weaksauce), and garlic.

The proportions are approximate, let intuition build up from experience.

Fry garlic and green onion in oil, throw in mushrooms and let it get a slight burnt texture, throw in the rest. Adjust consistency with milk; adjust taste with salt and black pepper, but don't overdo it. I hate it how people don't even taste their plate and instantly put half the salt and pepper container. We live in the 21st century. The food is not rotten.

I don't have a end picture. It's not very interesting; it's a sauce...

The second well-made dish was steamed ginger beef. It's a secret recipe from mommy. That's all I'll say on it. I actually made it at a random girl's place, whom I met when the fire drill went off and was wrapped in a blanket. She liked it, and washed the dishes. End of story. No pictures obviously.

Another simple dish I made, shrimp and celery stir fry. Stir fries are really easy, just stir, and fry.

Shrimps, celery, oyster sauce, white pepper, garlic clove, ginger slice, maybe salt if you have a lot of celery.

Mix shrimps, oyster sauce, pepper, and set aside. Fry the garlic clove and ginger slice in oil to get some flavour out. Throw in the celery (cuz it cooks slower than shrimps) and salt if you need some. Let the celery soften up a little. Throw in the shrimps, do not overcook. Really, don't. Or else the shrimps get dry, and that is weak.

Ignore the pasta, it's lame, just for a random side. Those are mesquite spiced pork chops. This is one of those big-ass premade theorems I used without understanding it.

Pork chops (select the ones with a good amount of marbled fat IN the meat, not around it. I think it makes it much more tender.)

Onions

Mesquite spice (the heavy artillery)

That's it.. Dribble the chops with olive oil (to make the spice stick well) and cover with Mesquite spice, and let it sit for a while before frying. Fry the onions in oil, then fry the pork chops, sometimes turning it. Again do not overcook. Dry and hard pork chops are cafeteria signatures.

Will I ever discover the secret of the Mesquite spice mixture? Tune in..

Soon, I'll try to make pasta sauce from scratch, aka the tomatoes. I'll let someone else grow them. I'm not that hardcore.

PAYCE (peace, but gangsta like)

$42.98

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Random stuff:
I have Nazi food.

OMG is that the MC????? lol.. It's the MC of UofO

Fennel pork chops

I have been cooking these past few days. I must say it does bring a lot of personal satisfaction when you can concoct a great tasting dish from scratch.

Up to date, I have made 4 non-premade non-trivial dishes. Trivial stuff I made includes:

-Tuna salad [I have yet to make a REALLY good one, unlike whatever you can find pre-made on the market]

-Omelette

-Spaghetti [I mostly make my own sauce from tomato paste because it's like 5 times cheaper, and I can say it's my own sauce]

-Sandwiches [I have made pretty good sandwiches, relying on good ingredients]

-Oven-ready stuff

-Boiled vegetables

-Toast

-Instant noodles [Up to date, my instant noodle count is merely 2 cups in 17 days. I intend to keep this ratio, or make it even lower].

Ok..

May 10th, Fennel Pork Chops

The story of this dish goes back to when I first visited Xiaotian's place. He was paying 50$ more every month, but compared to my appartment, his is way cleaner, and have much better roommates. Anyways, I was looking around his kitchen, and I found an ample amount of interesting spices that the past resident left. As a firm believer in spices, and how they do not rot or go bad, I wanted to use some of it to make my first nice meal. I chose the fennel seeds. They smelled pretty good, but I had no idea they tasted kinda like licorice.

I looked up some recipe online, and I found one that seemed easy: fennel pork chops. It also required garlic salt and white wine. Among the other spices, garlic salt was already there. I was lucky.

I don't drink wine as of yet. Hence, I had to go purchase some at a local LCBO or Loblaws. I ended up going to Loblaws because it was the cheapest. No way I was going to pour half a bottle of $40 wine in a frying pan. I got a bottle for $7.50.

6 O'clock comes. It was time to start cooking. I realize I do not have a corkscrew. No biggy, XT and I go google/youtube "how to open a wine bottle without corkscrew". A method we found consisted of hitting the bottom of the bottle against a tree. So we tried it for a while (not on a tree though), without success. Too bad I don't have a video of this.. it would have made a fine addition to my blog. So we google more, and found that this trick did not work with synthetic corks (as our cheap wine obviously has a synthetic cork). We weren't that much of failures.

Other methods used a screwdriver, a screw, and something to pull the whole thing out like a hammer or pincers, but we did not have that kind of material.

Desperate and lost, we resolve to chipping off the cork, bit by bit. After a while, we realize it was going to take forever. Especially when you get to the deeper part of the cork, the knife won't have room to cut anything.

Randomly, XT just stabs the knife in the cork deep enough.. and I was able to do something like this:

So we finally started cooking.

The last picture wasn't very clear because of the lighting, and my phone camera sucks. It looked pretty good. The taste turned out to be pretty mediocre, something you would find in the V1 cafs. However, the texture was so good, it even surprised me. The tenderness was beyond what most restaurants would offer. Maybe it was the way I chose the pork chops.

Verdict:

Screw recipes. You need to learn the fundamentals of where each ingredient fits in the cooking process in order to recreate the dish. Or else, lots of small mistakes will compound together and your dish will turn out not as great as it should be. The next 3 dishes I made without following any recipes, and they were, in fact, awesome. You have to start with the basics, and be able to improvise on them, because that reflects true understanding. And then, you can experiment slowly to understand how each product interacts with another. Blindly following a recipe calls for a bad dish. It is like applying formulas and algorithms without knowing the underlying concept. Or learning a piece of music from the sheets, playing the notes without understanding them.

I give it a 6/10. Even though everything else was good, the taste was not satisfying. I have high standards.

Next post: The 3 well made dishes

$42.22

What I do with my weekends

I have to work tomorrow, but I don't feel like sleeping.

Last weekend was my first weekend as a employee. It's the time of the week that everybody around my little cubicle looks forward to. Talking about around my cubicle, there is this woman, S., who from the first sight of her, I knew she wasn't like the rest of our group at Industry Canada. Picture a fake-tanned middle aged blonde (real or not? dunno) woman, neck to shoulder length hair, with slight weight due to age, but not exactly fat. The first time I was introduced to her, I felt some kind of negative "energy" (shit I sound like a freaking joke). Anyways, she was in the cubicle right next to mine. During the first week, I never really talked to S., just a slight smile when eye contact was made. I also avoided her when it was easy to do so. Days went by, and I obviously hear things from her cubicle. I first gather that S. was some kind of secretary for some bigger boss/economist, since he was always calling up on S. for administrative stuff. Little by little, I hear her sometimes complain to herself "shit" "fuck" "gimme a break gosh" "are you kidding me", sometimes calling up her friends to do some chit chat. And obviously, in front of M., she was always very politically correct and ideal, but I always felt some annoyance in her speech. I'm pretty sure she hates her job.

This is to show some iconic office life of the 20th century. People longing for Friday, hating Mondays, cursing their bosses in the back, complaining about the bureaucratic system, etc... Obviously This is not an ideal workplace. I am sure this has improved in the 21st century, with more innovative business structures and management principles, but the government always lags behind.

So onto the topic I originally wanted to talk about...

Last Saturday was rainy, so Xiaotian and I went to the Museum of Civilization, apparently one of the greatest museums of Canada. And like everyone, we walked around, not too impressed, and took photos of interesting stuff, with our cellphones...

This was apparently some thing to wack fishes with. But XT and I thought it was more some kind of prehistoric dildo.

Jen, this is totally your sweater with bears on it, but this one belonged to Amerindians.

No comments

Guess where did you see this before? and YES you DID see it before.

Glen Gould's Steinway. Too bad I never met him in person. Died so young at 50, in '82. One of the few extraordinary Canadian pianists.

And Sunday, I made fennel pork chops.

Long story... I will update this post later cuz I really need to sleep now. Check it out later, cuz there's a video of me. and videos of me are awesome

Jr. Economist at Industry Canada

Drinking Chinese sweat makes you good at basketball. Fact.

(add "like a bauss" after each line)

1. My first Friday

2. A bit more than half a grand

3. Pay for my ridiculously expensive Donald Pliner dress shoes (though quality is quality when it comes to 300 bucks)

4. Meet two other Waterloo noob coop students

5. Study some microeconomics and statistics on the job, with my boss encouraging me

6. Pack my lunch myself

7. Learn how to use STATA

8. Teach my supervisor how to use STATA

9. Discover the beauty of pita breads over normal bread slices

10. Look down from the 10th floor and get sweaty palms

11. Proofread an economics paper

12. Go on eBuddy

13. Tell my boss that her paper sucks (indirectly)

14. Retrieve and optimize data by reallocating variable memory

15. Make a paperclip chain

16. Talk about Real Analysis with my other boss

17. Make the bauss sound when I walk with my $300 shoes

18. Go on Facebook

19. Go on the elevator with other people and feel good about myself when I push the 10th floor cuz it's the highest one (except for 11, but never saw anybody going for the 11th... maybe there are top secret documents)

20. Do a correlation analysis

21. Tell my boss I want a higher pay

22. Discover my other boss is from Montreal and commutes every weekend, so I ask to share gas cost with him

23. Run out of ideas

K remember my 30+ years old roommate who is married?

Well, apparently she's PREGNANT

WTFFFF????????????

I was holding my phone very VERY tightly... I think I'm scared of heights...

$39.96

Ottawa

So it's been three days here at Ottawa. Time for a post. Read it.

April 30th around 11:00am, I arrive to Ottawa. The sky is sunny, temperature is mellow, perfect day to be moving in.

I had arranged accommodation with a nice Korean girl (never met in person, but seemed pretty chill), graduating this summer, subletting me her UofO residence for a good price. I have the bigger room among my 3 other roommates as well. Apparently, one of my roommates was to be a chinese girl, nice.

After I arrived, I went to the housing office to pick up my keys. Having gone up the stairs, into the office, I see a whole bunch of people waiting in the room, and thought, damn it's gonna be a while. Weirdly enough, I was served immediatly, speaking English to a Quebec accented secretary/receptionist of some sort, and I realized that we were not to move in until May 1st. Only after some time I noticed that ALL those people waiting there we're in the same situation as me. We got struck by bureaucracy. ggnoobsglhf-ed by bureaucrazy.

Thankfully, there was a solution to this. I could contact my subletter and ask her to send them an e-mail saying she allows me to take over the room a day sooner. And I did. But bam, noon arrives, lunchtime. Only at 2pm I was able to get my keys.

Finally moving in, I opened my temporary 4-month home door, and I saw the foretold expected chinese girl. But, unexpectedly, she's extremely fob (not in the asianess kinda way, but literally fresh off the boat way), is at least 30 years old (graduate studies in UofO after working in China), and has a HUSBAND (not in rez though), not to mention not very good looking. gg...

5pm. I walk to the bus terminal to pick up Sylvia, a friend visiting Ottawa on the way back to Waterloo. (This is where the first picture of the dangling shoes was taken) So we took a quick tour of Ottawa.

This is me posing. I realized afterwards that I took this pose unknowingly from Usain Bolt.

I was gonna climb the statue, but my parents called while I was standing on the ledge.

No interesting comment on this one.

I also went to my workplace.

I didn't go in yet because there's a security guy guarding the elevator. I'm working on the 10th floor. If I get an office with a window, G_G.

May 1st. Another day to go chill out. The Tulip Festival is supposed to start today but...

Looks like everybody's a procrastinator.

Look at the squirrel with a bagel!

Oh wait! It saw me...

So it climbed on a tree with the bagel. I didn't pay attention to how it did that with a bagel in hands, but now that I think about it, wtf pro?

Anyways, this day we walked on Sparks, nothing too special, except the stamp shop/museum. And went to the currency museum.

Talk about inflation...

For the fobs out there who have never seen the 2$ Canadian bill.

And that was pretty much the day, with lunch at some modern business school offspring neo-fast-food called Toss It Up (it's not a chain. it's the only one). http://www.tossitup.ca/

May 2nd. I take Sylvia back to the terminal, and

On my way back, I run into Jeevan. o.O What ze fuck. He went to the same CEGEP as me, and I had absolutely no idea he was here at UofO. He's a big douche,

but he's chill. Gave me good Indian food, and showed me around town.

So this is pretty much it until now, 3:18pm May 3rd.

Xiaotian just arrived, gotta go crash his place.

Peace.

$39.78