Birthday card recipe no. 8: Vik’s Cooking 101

This is obviously THE recipe of the cookbook. I mean, without it, I wouldn’t have been able to make Ayo’s Rice For All, Kcy’s Nasi Goreng (blog post to come), Jen and Luca’s spaghetti OR Florence and Britt’s amazing tomato pastaaaaa. And what would you have done without these amazing recipes to drool over and follow? Starve, probably.

I mean, Vik’s cooking class probably wasn’t the most challenging of the recipes (making it a. easy to photograph and b. easy to make. Oh and c. easy to snack on along the way – crackers=yum).



‘How to boil pasta?’ The recipe seemed to be questioning me to reply but, lo and behold, the answer was staring me in the face right below it. Fantastic. I’m also liking how short and concise the instructions are, no faffing around at this point! So off I went, placing the amount of pasta in the Large Cooking Thing and added boiling water.

10 mintues later, nothing seemed to be happening. 20 mintues later, the pasta was still dry (slightly soggy around the edges). Hm… it seems Vik was a little too concise about the instructions, not specifying that I needed to boil it for a set amount of time. See, common sense would have told me to boil it, but I was following these specific instructions.
It’s okay Vik, I like uncooked pasta. It exercises my jaw.

’How to cook rice?’. Now, being Asian, I should be able to do this is my sleep. But nevertheless, Vik did warn me about cup sizes. If only we knew that in Borneo before we ended up eating soggy rice for 3 days ;) Clearly this was a Very Important, as there were a whole Two Exclamation Marks telling me I should be careful about cup sizes!!


And voila! Perfect rice in a flash (may have also had something to do with the use of a rice cooker, but I won’t steal the limelight).


At first, I was wondering why the crackers bit didn’t have a ‘How to make crackers?’ format like the others did, but then I realised that to ‘make crackers’ probably required a bit more skill. And probably real ingredients (no offence to the humble rice and pasta). Unfortunately buying crackers from the Raleigh kitchen da little more effort than popping down to Sainsbury’s, so I bought some **** Jacob’s crackers (and by that I don’t mean the 4 star rating variety – although I do hold the Borneo cream crackers with pretty high regard), and placed them as delicately as I could in a mess tin.

Why didn’t we think of this in Borneo? It would have make PB and jelly time much more fun. Maybe…

And I was finished. I felt a strange sense of achievement at this actually, seeing as all I had to do was put some things into some other cooking things and add some more things (and sometimes not even that).

Well, cool, that’s that done! Oh, if only I could take this class instead of Introduction to Macroeconometrics.

Lesson learned today: well, it’s obvious :) I learnt how to boil pasta, how to boil rice and how to place crackers in a mess tin. And not just thrown in a mess tin; placed delicately, might I add.