Kitchen Sessions

Maggie's Kitchen proudly launches her cooking lessons called Kitchen Sessions :-)

So I love cooking, but I don't just love cooking to feed my family nor to sell my dishes. I believe that home cooked food is more wholesome, more nutritious and is of better value than eating out. Eating out may be quite cheap at times, depending on what you get, but the ingredients used may be questionable or of lesser nutirtional value. I'm also not against eating out, as we do eat out once or twice over the weekends. But if you want a good nutritious meal out, chances are you'll need to pay quite a lot for it in higher end restaurants who serve food of good quality. You can have good quality food at home too. The difference here then is, you pay for the experience and pleasure of fine dining, which, let's face it, not many of us will be able to do on a regular basis.

And so I feel that if one wants to eat, one should be able to cook despite the convenience of takeway and frozen meals, because everyone deserve good health. I'm not talking about gourmet cooking, we can leave that to the professionals, but rather basic I-can-take-good-care-of-myself cooking. And if you want to step it up a little, cooking to entertain friends and family as well. Because eating together is a great social gathering.

So here's my first cooking lesson customer, a young foreign student who had just recently finished high school, and is looking to move out on his own next year for uni. And his foster parents have done the right thing by helping to equip him with some cooking skills so he doesn't need to rely on takeouts when he's on his own. I chose the Basic Asian Cooking class for him, and chose dishes that I did when I first learned how to cook and foods that I grew up with.

A typical Asian meal would consist of steamed rice, a soup, a meat dish and a veggie dish. So I chose Jasmine Rice, Winter Melon Soup, Chicken Braised in Soy, and Chinese Broccoli Stir Fry.

First, the rice. We've come a long way from cooking rice on the stove top. However I like the romance of vintage so I must say that any self respecting Asian should learn how to cook rice over the stove top. It is much easier to cook rice in a rice cooker, and even easier, faster and cheaper to cook rice in the microwave. I chose the third option for him. Taught him about washing the rice, how much water to measure and how long to cook for. Yes, very basic, but if not done right, you get stodgy or undercooked rice. We went through tips like which dish to cook first in a full meal, aromatics pairing, seasoning pairings, how to prep ingredients efficiently, where to shop, and how to cook efficiently to save time and minimise washing up.

We did all this in 2 hours, from scratch. You may think, geez I couldn't be bothered to put in 2 hours after work to do this. Well, 2 hours is with talking and teaching, so it would be less when you're working on your own. This meal was for 6 people and it took only 2 hours, to teach. You probably won't be cooking an elaborate meal on a weeknight, and if you're cooking for 1 or 2, a soup or 1 dish is sufficient to have with rice, so that cuts your cooking time to even shorter. Another trick is weekend or bulk cooking, which we'll cover in the future.

So I had a lot of fun, and I think he had fun too. His foster family loved coming home after work to their home smelling like a Chinese restaurant, and tucking in to some wholesome home cooking. Who wouldn't, right? And they loved how the food tasted. Win!

#kitchensessions #basicasiancooking #dinners #mainmeals