Part of living in China has been doing my own cooking, since I live in an apartment. While you can do this at some dorms, it’s sort of a crowded area, and wasn’t something I enjoyed.
People here (teachers, other students) are often surprised that I “can cook”. I explain it’s fairly simple stuff, but when I list off about 4-6 ingredients for a dish, they somehow think that’s quite a feat.
Usually, having someone over to share the food is best for this, but today I decided to must make some spagettii. Since I have some curry sauces (bought here), I thought I’d try that out.
My normal method (learned from my wife) is to improvise quite a bit with whatever I have on hand. Here’s what I did today:
- Peel about 5 cloves of garlic and slice into nice chunks (I like garlic)
- Chop up an onion (I like large pieces)
- Put in flat pan with enough butter to make you happy and start frying.
- Add some salt, oregano, sweet basil, and some spaghetti seasoning (several herbs mixed together, so I don’t know what they are).
- Start a pot of water (for the noodles). This takes 5-8 minutes to get the water boiling. I should have started it earlier, so perhaps you would want to make this step #1
- Chop up tomatoes into large chunks. I like about 1 1/2# chunks. So a regular tomatoe makes about 4 quadrants, each of them cut in two = 8 pieces per tomato.
- When onions are starting to become translucent, add the tomatoes. I don’t add any water at all, since the tomatoes are fairly juicy.
- When the water is boiling (about a minute or two of adding the tomatoes for me), then add the spaghetti and a little salt and olive oil to the water.
- At that time, put in a couple chunks of curry sauce. I have the kind that comes as large blocks of “solid” paste. They melt as you cook them. Normally I would add water to make a sauce, but this time I just put them in and let them melt in.
- I added a small amount of black sesame seed to the cooking vegetables.
- When noodles are finished in about 8 minutes, quick drain and put back into pot.
- Add all vegetables into the pot
- Add a little milk (a trick I learned from my wife). Here’s it’s all whole milk, which certainly makes the taste “rich”, but that’s up to you.
- Mix completely and eat.
It turned out surprisingly tasty. I was worried because I had never made curry sauce without adding liquid before, but the bricks just melted down and mixed in well.
Send me some vegetarian recipies you’d like me to try out 