Cooking: I can haz it
I started learning how to cook around when I graduated from undergrad, for the obvious reasons, but I didn't really try it much until around 2005, when I was inspired by 
coffeeandink's forays into cooking to try myself. And then grad school hit, in which I would cook and wrap dumplings during the first month of each semester and gradually move toward take out, EZ Mac, and pizza as the semester wore on.
I enjoy cooking, but it may be one of those things I enjoy more when I have a lot of spare time; when I get a job again, we'll see how much I keep doing it! But so far, I feel like I've been learning how to cook all over again in the past few months. On the plus side, I think I've actually gotten to the point when I can kind of stare at the fridge and throw things together, which was my target way back when.
The really big difference, though, is that I've finally learned how to cook Chinese food.
I tried when I first started to cook, but I didn't trust most English cook books, and despite watching hours and hours of Good Eats, I had zero knowledge of the basics of Chinese cooking. As such, I could make around 3 dishes, and they all didn't taste very good. I eventually ended up mostly making vegetarian and Mediterranean inspired food when I took up cooking in 2005, largely due to the recipes my flist was posting.
For some reason, I thought I should just know how to cook Chinese food somehow, and not from recipes. I also have not the best relationship with my mother, which meant making her talk me through everything wasn't always feasible. (Sometimes I can deal, and sometimes it is just too much contact; also, as usual, please no advice or suggestions on dealing with my mom.) I got a few tidbits from conversations with my mom, but always in bits and pieces, and it was especially difficult translating ingredients from Chinese to English. Ranch 99 makes this less difficult, because the signs are often bilingual, but it's still a little frustrating. I mostly gave up after a while.
In 2008, before starting grad school, I spent the entire summer in Taiwan. My mom and her friends were going to cooking classes at that time, and I got to tag along. I never really put any of those recipes into practice, so I always thought I had forgotten most of it. My roommate in grad school was also from Taiwan, and she cooked a lot more (and a lot more Chinese food) than I did. I cooked some more Chinese food in grad school, going from 麻婆豆腐 and curry to 米粉, curry, and dumplings. A lot of dumplings.
My dumplings were terrible at first; my mother's reactions when she heard what I did was: "How much meat did you buy?" (4 lbs. ahahaha) "What do you mean, you put sesame oil in it?" and "Cornstarch what?!" I had made them before with my sister during Thanksgiving (dumplings are our school's Thanksgiving tradition), but mostly spinach and not so much meat. I then had a few dumplings parties with
rilina, in which we cobbled together assorted online Chinese and Korean recipes, experimented with percentages of tofu and ground meat and totally vegetarian dumplings, and we eventually got pretty good at it. I watched my roommate make her vegetarian dumplings (so labor intensive!), then had a few more dumpling parties with Rilina and
thistleingrey and
troisroyaumes, in which we all found out the different ways we wrapped dumplings and the different things we put in. I don't even have a recipe now, but when I make them, I generally know what to put in and in what proportions. I can't even articulate what the proportions are, just what amount of green onions or ginger or garlic looks right with respect to the meat.
On a side note, I also discovered why my pork dumplings always used to be dry. I told my mom I had figured it out, and she asked me what I did. "I bought the fattier pork," I said.
"You can put in oil and water to..."
"Yeah, the fattier pork still tastes the best." (50/50 also works fine.)
Dumplings don't sound like much, but I think that process of trial and error, of cobbling together different recipes and spending time with friends wrapping and snarking over kdramas, all that made cooking something that was mine, not something I performed, which is always how I feel when I execute unfamiliar recipes. Non-Chinese food has the element of the unfamiliar; I know the techniques from Food Network and Cook's Illustrated, but I have very few childhood memories associated with them. (Except baking. But even then, we didn't bake much until high school, because no one had ovens until then.) But dumplings are something I've done ever since I can remember, from before moving to Taiwan. We didn't make them as often in Taiwan because it was so easy getting good, homemade dumplings there, but they were omnipresent. There was a period of time in high school when I refused to eat 水餃 because I got them in my lunch box so often. (Also, sometimes there were pieces of cartilage in the filling.) And then, after living in the US for a while, I had 水餃 again for the first time in a long time, and OMG. It was the Best Thing Ever. That said, I usually make 鍋貼 instead of the boiled ones, largely in case my dumpling wrapping doesn't hold up to the water bath.
I can't even tell you how many times I made terrible 米粉, from the time it was kind of pink and there was no soy sauce in Mariposa to the time I put in too many carrots and the entire thing was orange. Then my sister started sending me Chinese recipes, and a family friend who is much less Americanized than me moved here, and they cooked 家常 stuff, easy stuff, stuff like my mom used to make. And I started to as well in the past few months, using random recipes from my sister and friends, or from googling recipes in Chinese (I still don't much trust recipes in English, though this mistrust could be totally unfounded). When my sister stayed over for Christmas, we cooked for ourselves a fair amount of the time, and a lot of the cooking involved staring at the refrigerator and figuring out what we could do. (And we bought more meat than I have ever bought at a single point in my life, much of which is still in my freezer.) We did things like, "Mommy always says to do [blah]" or "Just cut the ginger into pieces and freeze them and take them out when you need," tips and tricks passed down through friends and relatives and personal experience instead of television or magazines.
Don't get me wrong, the tips and tricks section of Cook's Illustrated is my very favorite section. But it's nice to finally get some from people I actually know, to feel like part of a tradition.
Suddenly, in the past month, I was making Chinese food that wasn't dumplings. And it actually tasted pretty good. I have also learned more about cooking with meat, especially pork, although I still haven't tried stir frying it-my attempts at doing so out of undergrad were so disastrous I mostly stew. I was so surprised at making Chinese food that actually tasted good, that tasted right; I was so used to making it wrong and feeling less Chinese because of it. And even though I still like baking and making other kinds of food, there's something about making Chinese food that feels so homey and so right.
I don't actually eat Chinese food that much when I'm in the US, partly because it sucks eating Chinese food in a restaurant with just one person, partly because it makes me incredibly homesick, and partly because food in Taiwan is so cheap and so amazingly good that I'm usually disappointed with Chinese food here. And suddenly, in the past month or so, I've been eating more Chinese food than I ever have in the US, and although it still does make me a bit homesick, the comforting value is much higher. It's particularly satisfying being able to identify the nice smells from childhood as being cooking soy sauce, or 被爆香的蔥和薑. Is there a term for this in English? When you throw in the aromatics (ginger and scallion in this case) first to ... make it smell good/get the flavor out? Ditto with 把血水去掉... something about putting meat you're going to stew in water and boiling it first to get rid of the blood/fat/impurities in the meat.
But you see what I mean? I think mostly in English, although a week or so back in Taiwan brings back my Chinese fairly quickly. And I learned most of my Western food techniques from Food Network, again in English. But with things like this, I don't have the vocabulary or the phrases in English, because so much of it is from ahyis and my mom and Chinese friends, food names are from Chinese menus. And my spices and herbs are half in Chinese and half in English, because before 2008, I couldn't have even told you what spices are herbs are most commonly used in Chinese cooking. Scallion and ginger and garlic, of course, but I hadn't known much about 八角 or basil or cinnamon or nutmeg or 五香粉 or 陳皮 or what went into 滷味 (I do not actually know what this is in English. It is what you stew meat and eggs and ... everything in and has a bazillion spices and soy sauce?) and assorted 醬. I'm still not at the point where I can figure out what spice tastes like what and goes with what, but I was never there in other cooking as well.
Some of me is sad that it took me this long to learn, but most of me is just happy that I am cooking Chinese food that tastes and smells right, that I am cooking something where I know exactly how I want it to taste because I've eaten it so often, even though I'm not quite sure how to get there. I won't say I've never had that experience while cooking, because I love food, and I love eating, and I have very particular ideas of what everything should taste like, but there's a variety of what meatloaf can taste like for me, whereas with some things in Chinese food, it tastes like home or not like home. During cooking class, my mom and some of the ahyis would say that the teacher's 餃子 or her 滷味吃起來很舒服, and though I understood it before, I really get it now.
The other great thing is that so far, cooking is something I can talk about with my mother that isn't too fraught (although nutrition and weight and etc. still comes in). I am now making her hand write a ton of things she makes and mail it to me, since she hates typing in Chinese. And it's so good to I think I am finally at the point where I can get a list of ingredients and generalized instructions and actually know what to do with it.
When I'm in the US, I don't think about how much I miss Chinese food, because it makes me want to go back to Taiwan too much, or because I end up in restaurants here that aren't bad, but aren't home. And now, it feels like something has broken open, and the house and kitchen finally smell right. It also puts my mom's cooking habits in perspective; she cooked a lot when we lived in the US, but stopped making a lot of things at home when we moved to Taiwan. There are some things that are so time consuming to make that when she finally got somewhere she could buy something just as good (or better) than she could make, she stopped making it. And now I'm back in the US, and even though the Chinese food now is probably exponentially better than it was when she and my dad were grad students, it's still not the same.
Would people be interested in my completely off-the-cuff, untested, and very generalized recipes?
Also, switching between languages to type is SO ANNOYING. Hopefully I will soon memorize the bopomofo keyboard on Windows (pinyin on Mac is so much easier for me).
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coffeeandink's forays into cooking to try myself. And then grad school hit, in which I would cook and wrap dumplings during the first month of each semester and gradually move toward take out, EZ Mac, and pizza as the semester wore on.
I enjoy cooking, but it may be one of those things I enjoy more when I have a lot of spare time; when I get a job again, we'll see how much I keep doing it! But so far, I feel like I've been learning how to cook all over again in the past few months. On the plus side, I think I've actually gotten to the point when I can kind of stare at the fridge and throw things together, which was my target way back when.
The really big difference, though, is that I've finally learned how to cook Chinese food.
I tried when I first started to cook, but I didn't trust most English cook books, and despite watching hours and hours of Good Eats, I had zero knowledge of the basics of Chinese cooking. As such, I could make around 3 dishes, and they all didn't taste very good. I eventually ended up mostly making vegetarian and Mediterranean inspired food when I took up cooking in 2005, largely due to the recipes my flist was posting.
For some reason, I thought I should just know how to cook Chinese food somehow, and not from recipes. I also have not the best relationship with my mother, which meant making her talk me through everything wasn't always feasible. (Sometimes I can deal, and sometimes it is just too much contact; also, as usual, please no advice or suggestions on dealing with my mom.) I got a few tidbits from conversations with my mom, but always in bits and pieces, and it was especially difficult translating ingredients from Chinese to English. Ranch 99 makes this less difficult, because the signs are often bilingual, but it's still a little frustrating. I mostly gave up after a while.
In 2008, before starting grad school, I spent the entire summer in Taiwan. My mom and her friends were going to cooking classes at that time, and I got to tag along. I never really put any of those recipes into practice, so I always thought I had forgotten most of it. My roommate in grad school was also from Taiwan, and she cooked a lot more (and a lot more Chinese food) than I did. I cooked some more Chinese food in grad school, going from 麻婆豆腐 and curry to 米粉, curry, and dumplings. A lot of dumplings.
My dumplings were terrible at first; my mother's reactions when she heard what I did was: "How much meat did you buy?" (4 lbs. ahahaha) "What do you mean, you put sesame oil in it?" and "Cornstarch what?!" I had made them before with my sister during Thanksgiving (dumplings are our school's Thanksgiving tradition), but mostly spinach and not so much meat. I then had a few dumplings parties with
rilina, in which we cobbled together assorted online Chinese and Korean recipes, experimented with percentages of tofu and ground meat and totally vegetarian dumplings, and we eventually got pretty good at it. I watched my roommate make her vegetarian dumplings (so labor intensive!), then had a few more dumpling parties with Rilina and
thistleingrey and
troisroyaumes, in which we all found out the different ways we wrapped dumplings and the different things we put in. I don't even have a recipe now, but when I make them, I generally know what to put in and in what proportions. I can't even articulate what the proportions are, just what amount of green onions or ginger or garlic looks right with respect to the meat.
On a side note, I also discovered why my pork dumplings always used to be dry. I told my mom I had figured it out, and she asked me what I did. "I bought the fattier pork," I said.
"You can put in oil and water to..."
"Yeah, the fattier pork still tastes the best." (50/50 also works fine.)
Dumplings don't sound like much, but I think that process of trial and error, of cobbling together different recipes and spending time with friends wrapping and snarking over kdramas, all that made cooking something that was mine, not something I performed, which is always how I feel when I execute unfamiliar recipes. Non-Chinese food has the element of the unfamiliar; I know the techniques from Food Network and Cook's Illustrated, but I have very few childhood memories associated with them. (Except baking. But even then, we didn't bake much until high school, because no one had ovens until then.) But dumplings are something I've done ever since I can remember, from before moving to Taiwan. We didn't make them as often in Taiwan because it was so easy getting good, homemade dumplings there, but they were omnipresent. There was a period of time in high school when I refused to eat 水餃 because I got them in my lunch box so often. (Also, sometimes there were pieces of cartilage in the filling.) And then, after living in the US for a while, I had 水餃 again for the first time in a long time, and OMG. It was the Best Thing Ever. That said, I usually make 鍋貼 instead of the boiled ones, largely in case my dumpling wrapping doesn't hold up to the water bath.
I can't even tell you how many times I made terrible 米粉, from the time it was kind of pink and there was no soy sauce in Mariposa to the time I put in too many carrots and the entire thing was orange. Then my sister started sending me Chinese recipes, and a family friend who is much less Americanized than me moved here, and they cooked 家常 stuff, easy stuff, stuff like my mom used to make. And I started to as well in the past few months, using random recipes from my sister and friends, or from googling recipes in Chinese (I still don't much trust recipes in English, though this mistrust could be totally unfounded). When my sister stayed over for Christmas, we cooked for ourselves a fair amount of the time, and a lot of the cooking involved staring at the refrigerator and figuring out what we could do. (And we bought more meat than I have ever bought at a single point in my life, much of which is still in my freezer.) We did things like, "Mommy always says to do [blah]" or "Just cut the ginger into pieces and freeze them and take them out when you need," tips and tricks passed down through friends and relatives and personal experience instead of television or magazines.
Don't get me wrong, the tips and tricks section of Cook's Illustrated is my very favorite section. But it's nice to finally get some from people I actually know, to feel like part of a tradition.
Suddenly, in the past month, I was making Chinese food that wasn't dumplings. And it actually tasted pretty good. I have also learned more about cooking with meat, especially pork, although I still haven't tried stir frying it-my attempts at doing so out of undergrad were so disastrous I mostly stew. I was so surprised at making Chinese food that actually tasted good, that tasted right; I was so used to making it wrong and feeling less Chinese because of it. And even though I still like baking and making other kinds of food, there's something about making Chinese food that feels so homey and so right.
I don't actually eat Chinese food that much when I'm in the US, partly because it sucks eating Chinese food in a restaurant with just one person, partly because it makes me incredibly homesick, and partly because food in Taiwan is so cheap and so amazingly good that I'm usually disappointed with Chinese food here. And suddenly, in the past month or so, I've been eating more Chinese food than I ever have in the US, and although it still does make me a bit homesick, the comforting value is much higher. It's particularly satisfying being able to identify the nice smells from childhood as being cooking soy sauce, or 被爆香的蔥和薑. Is there a term for this in English? When you throw in the aromatics (ginger and scallion in this case) first to ... make it smell good/get the flavor out? Ditto with 把血水去掉... something about putting meat you're going to stew in water and boiling it first to get rid of the blood/fat/impurities in the meat.
But you see what I mean? I think mostly in English, although a week or so back in Taiwan brings back my Chinese fairly quickly. And I learned most of my Western food techniques from Food Network, again in English. But with things like this, I don't have the vocabulary or the phrases in English, because so much of it is from ahyis and my mom and Chinese friends, food names are from Chinese menus. And my spices and herbs are half in Chinese and half in English, because before 2008, I couldn't have even told you what spices are herbs are most commonly used in Chinese cooking. Scallion and ginger and garlic, of course, but I hadn't known much about 八角 or basil or cinnamon or nutmeg or 五香粉 or 陳皮 or what went into 滷味 (I do not actually know what this is in English. It is what you stew meat and eggs and ... everything in and has a bazillion spices and soy sauce?) and assorted 醬. I'm still not at the point where I can figure out what spice tastes like what and goes with what, but I was never there in other cooking as well.
Some of me is sad that it took me this long to learn, but most of me is just happy that I am cooking Chinese food that tastes and smells right, that I am cooking something where I know exactly how I want it to taste because I've eaten it so often, even though I'm not quite sure how to get there. I won't say I've never had that experience while cooking, because I love food, and I love eating, and I have very particular ideas of what everything should taste like, but there's a variety of what meatloaf can taste like for me, whereas with some things in Chinese food, it tastes like home or not like home. During cooking class, my mom and some of the ahyis would say that the teacher's 餃子 or her 滷味吃起來很舒服, and though I understood it before, I really get it now.
The other great thing is that so far, cooking is something I can talk about with my mother that isn't too fraught (although nutrition and weight and etc. still comes in). I am now making her hand write a ton of things she makes and mail it to me, since she hates typing in Chinese. And it's so good to I think I am finally at the point where I can get a list of ingredients and generalized instructions and actually know what to do with it.
When I'm in the US, I don't think about how much I miss Chinese food, because it makes me want to go back to Taiwan too much, or because I end up in restaurants here that aren't bad, but aren't home. And now, it feels like something has broken open, and the house and kitchen finally smell right. It also puts my mom's cooking habits in perspective; she cooked a lot when we lived in the US, but stopped making a lot of things at home when we moved to Taiwan. There are some things that are so time consuming to make that when she finally got somewhere she could buy something just as good (or better) than she could make, she stopped making it. And now I'm back in the US, and even though the Chinese food now is probably exponentially better than it was when she and my dad were grad students, it's still not the same.
Would people be interested in my completely off-the-cuff, untested, and very generalized recipes?
Also, switching between languages to type is SO ANNOYING. Hopefully I will soon memorize the bopomofo keyboard on Windows (pinyin on Mac is so much easier for me).
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