Booboos in Cooking

Failures...are like pins in bowling that we want to eradicate. ---That is the first line of an article I was asked to write for HS school paper. (hehe see, yun level ko pwede na pla pangpublish). Segway: I used to like bowling but it doesn't seem to like me, thus the marrige is not successful :p

There are a lot of inspiring books. Rich Dad Poor Dad or some other success stories of millionaires. I just notice one thing. How come they only feature the SUCCESS part in full details, but mention the FAILURES in passing.

As a reader or a learner, I think it would be more effective to know WHAT TO AVOID, the common mistakes, the pitfalls. More often, recurring strategies might not work all the time, but recurring mistake experienced by many is what I'd be interest to know first, so I wont commit them again. However, probably it's the pride of the authors, they want to forget these failures and shrug it totally off their systems. That's why they dont want to showcase their failures. Thus, everyone keeps on repeating the same common mistakes.

Recently I had a failure attempt on cooking. I prepared steamed pork balls and guess what they look like after.. gross.. a friend even described it as similar to T-A-?. hahahaha okay what went wrong..





1) It's more common to prepare beef balls than pork balls. You would see beef balls in dimsum house, shade is dark brown. Using pork makes the color pale brown and not that appealing. But hey even beef balls look gross isnt it?
(First pic is mine, 2nd pic is beef balls taken from net)



2) It's my first time to do actual steaming. Steaming doesnt add any magic to colors, it's an 'as is' state, transparent, no camouflage. And even paler.

3) I was too lazy to buy siomai wrappers, it could have looked more delightful.

4) And most importantly the culprit, TOYO! Soy sauce in SG is different than in Ph. There are two kinds of soy sauce here, the light soy sauce that is very salty, the dark soy sauce which looks like squid ink but not salty. They dont have something similar to Silver Swan. It's kinda tricky using them. Actually overall taste is quite okay, but the appearance admittedly is bad, I think nobody will eat them even if I pay $ bucks :p

Because of wanting to erase that shame, just tonight I did a pasta dish. See for the first time I featured a non-Chinese dish. Carbonara. (bits of ham, chicken strips, mushroom and green peas in creamy white sauce) ...

Carbonara picture just POSTED! In fairness, good enough for me! dendendenden




P.S. It takes COURAGE to admit FAILURES! hahaha hope you had a good laugh. See that's why I dont want to cook for other people. Pressure! :)