RETIREMENT PART 1
I guess I’m finally retired. I did my first cooking in Bangkok since our initial day in this house.
Why did I cook on the first day? Because The Jungle Princess had informed me she didn’t cook. No problem, I told her, I will show you how. I sautéed some pork and onions with lots of olive oil, threw some rice on top and, there you go, a meal.
Of course that got her hackles up, as it was meant to. She enlisted aid from everywhere and took over all the cooking from that time forward. Sometimes the product is pretty good.
In one of my previous lives, the one in which I was married for seventeen years, I did all the shopping and cooking. I enjoyed it. I got the shopping down to a science which I wrote about elsewhere in this blog. (*HERE*) (Scroll down.) The cooking was something else. My ex-wife once commented on my cooking method. “You just look on the shelves to see what we have and then make a meal of it.”
She was right. I never used or made recipes. I just imagined how a combination of ingredients would taste and went to work. I once took a large crock-pot of chili to a potluck buffet at our middle school. It had pearl onions, black olives and I put in rice instead of flour to thicken it. That stuff disappeared in a flash. When they asked me for the recipe I had to tell them there was no recipe. I made it up as I went along.
That makes cooking a problem here in Bangkok. I look on our shelves but see little that I recognize. The nearest supermarket is a cab ride and four subway stops away. And then there is not much familiar to me even on the shelves of that supermarket.
But despite all that I decided to cook. I looked up a recipe on the internet for pot-roast. It was kind of an odd recipe in that there were no condiments or spices in it. What the hell, I got all the ingredients and made a pot roast. It was more like a beef stew except the beef was whole. Needless to say, it was bland. But the beef was delicious. My family loved the beef, hated the rest. I can’t blame them. The beef was gone in a flash, leaving all the rest for me. Thanks.
Oh well, not bad for a first try.
Why did I cook on the first day? Because The Jungle Princess had informed me she didn’t cook. No problem, I told her, I will show you how. I sautéed some pork and onions with lots of olive oil, threw some rice on top and, there you go, a meal.
Of course that got her hackles up, as it was meant to. She enlisted aid from everywhere and took over all the cooking from that time forward. Sometimes the product is pretty good.
In one of my previous lives, the one in which I was married for seventeen years, I did all the shopping and cooking. I enjoyed it. I got the shopping down to a science which I wrote about elsewhere in this blog. (*HERE*) (Scroll down.) The cooking was something else. My ex-wife once commented on my cooking method. “You just look on the shelves to see what we have and then make a meal of it.”
She was right. I never used or made recipes. I just imagined how a combination of ingredients would taste and went to work. I once took a large crock-pot of chili to a potluck buffet at our middle school. It had pearl onions, black olives and I put in rice instead of flour to thicken it. That stuff disappeared in a flash. When they asked me for the recipe I had to tell them there was no recipe. I made it up as I went along.
That makes cooking a problem here in Bangkok. I look on our shelves but see little that I recognize. The nearest supermarket is a cab ride and four subway stops away. And then there is not much familiar to me even on the shelves of that supermarket.
But despite all that I decided to cook. I looked up a recipe on the internet for pot-roast. It was kind of an odd recipe in that there were no condiments or spices in it. What the hell, I got all the ingredients and made a pot roast. It was more like a beef stew except the beef was whole. Needless to say, it was bland. But the beef was delicious. My family loved the beef, hated the rest. I can’t blame them. The beef was gone in a flash, leaving all the rest for me. Thanks.
Oh well, not bad for a first try.
posted by Walter Guest at 7:23 PM
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