For the love of cooking

My cooking skills have seen a slight improvement over the last few weeks, when I occasionally force myself to get off the couch, turn off the TV, and pitch in to help Mom make dinner. Prior to this, most of my cooking experience came from 'Cooking Mama,' the Nintendo DS game I was obsessed with a while ago. So this has actually been pretty rewarding, especially when savoring each bite of the food that I helped prepare. I don't know why I don't do this more often... Oh yeah, I'm too lazy.

Couch potato me.

Cooking takes up time and energy - washing and preparing the food, baking/frying/boiling/steaming it, and then cleaning the dishes afterward. It's about a hundred times more work than simply tossing a frozen dinner into the microwave and eating it 1 minute later, which I did a lot when I spent a semester living with 4 other girls in an apartment. It was mostly out of laziness and convenience. We also never cleaned the apartment until the day before we moved out, but that's another story.

We live in an age where everything's become so efficient that we expect instant results all the time. Frozen microwaveable dinners, instant macaroni and cheese, powered eggs, powered mashed potatoes, dishwashers, cake mix, cookie dough... It's hard to watch a pot of soup simmer over the fire on the stove for the longest time, but I'd say it's worth it.

Like Jamie Oliver advocates - fresh, healthy food made from scratch is the way to go!
I pretty much love Jamie Oliver. I think it's awesome how he's trying to educate the world on eating healthy and staying away from processed food.
High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) = EVIL.

So anyway, here's some documentation of our dinners over the past week.

I washed, peeled, and sliced up potatoes and carrots...

To make vegetable curry...

Which Mom made us eat with orange juice, because she claimed it would wash down the curry, or something like that.

Half Hawaiian-half Italiano sliced pizza, taken from Sarpino's. I just love the gorgeous vivid colors of the Italiano - a result of bright red and green capsicums. So pretty, I could stare it all day (which I do).

Fish, beef, chicken, satay, mushrooms, and vegetables.. all ready for teppanyaki!

Jedi - master teppanyaki chef and rice fryer. Mom - master eater. haha.

Frying the beef and fish in soy sauce.

Garlic fried rice with fish and chilli. So. good.