cooking for yourself

first timer.

you know, despite what people might say, i’m kinda.. really proud of myself today, for somehow pulling off and cooking an entire meal for myself. i mean, i guess i cooked whilst in US for my housemates, but there was always this ever present fear that i would completely ruin things, under-cook or burn stuff (which coincidentally i also did this time.. lol) and well, i have had this constant fear of just messing up massively in the kitchen.

honestly i think cooking isn’t easy. lol.. i mean, somehow it’s not easy for me – first there’s the issue of judging when things are really cooked or not, which i think really does come from experience. then there’s the issue of multi-tasking and working with all the frying pans and pots without letting anything burn. so yeah i’m quite the klutz if u can gather. what’s worse, i’m an ambitious klutz — i never follow recipes, preferring to improvise and add stuff i think would enhance the flavor combinations.

so this time round i did a combination of recipes – pan seared salmon paired with a mushroom aglio olio tagliatelle and garnished with some cherry tomatoes.

pan seared salmon - hey, i honestly didn’t know salmon could be so simply cooked and yet so, so delicious! i simply bought a slab of salmon, rubbed in a little salt and pepper, coated it in olive oil, and dumped it in a hot pan for about 3 minutes on one side, then 4 minutes on the other. then i checked the cooked-ness by sticking a fork into it to see if it was flakey. then i transferred it to a dish and wrapped it in kitchen paper to soak up a bit of the oil.

mushroom aglio olio tagliatelle – hmm, this is where a little mishap occurred. i did the tagliatelle first, cooking the noodles for roughly 2 – 3 minutes in boiling salt water before straining it. but at the meantime, i was also trying to (i) fry my salmon, and (ii) fry the garlic bits. and well, with the salmon and noodles being the main ingredients, i forgot about tossing the garlic bits and they got charred. -_-. had to chop up a new batch and re-fry them till they were turning golden brown, then add in the porcini mushrooms, and dunking a little of the oil remaining from the salmon onto the mix to get some form of a “sauce”. mixed it together with the tagliatelle and well.. there goes! =)

to be honest, i don’t think the flavor profile of the aglio olio went too well with the salmon, because the salmon was overpoweringly flavorful (not in a bad way though), whereas the aglio olio was lighter and hence the taste got quite completely overwhelmed. perhaps i added too little garlic.

but it has been fun.. cooking for one is never easy to be honest, because most recipes call for like 2 – 4 servings.. but haha.. i guess I have a bit of the luxury to trial and error.

signing off!