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cook and then play some music

Ever since I first watched the Asian Food Channel, my interest in cooking came back but I never really had the chance nor the time to actually try some real cooking other than doing lamb grills using the microwave. Quite some time ago I’ve graduated into cooking spaghetti but using bottled sauce from Prego, that was simple and nothing much to shout about. Last two weeks when I was in Tioman island, I tried cooking spaghetti for my dive buddies using self prepared sauce and quite proudly I must say, that it tasted quite good and puts a lot of smiles on their faces.

Suddenly cooking has been my new obsession now, other than photography and scuba diving… since one has gotta eat well then one might as well learn how to cook, isn’t it? Hoping that I’ll be quite good at it, some day.

So when Kak Ti called yesterday saying that she and Nancy will be staying over at my place for the weekend, I went to Carrefour with Aldin and Aliff looking for some ingredients. At first I thought of serving my version of spaghetti but figured that since Nancy is from the US, she most probably prefer to eat local food, so last night I decided to cook chicken curry instead of spaghetti. If I go all the way to Kathmandu for holiday, I don’t want to end up eating nasi lemak for breakfast isn’t it?

It took me a while to figure out the right technique because I tried the same recipe the night before but didn’t turn out quite well. This time I had some help on how to get the curry aroma to really come out of the spices. The result? Everyone especially Nancy loved it, even my simple mixed vegetables were a hit. The curry was tasty and now I know how to make a really good curry.

We all had really good dinner, even Aliff who always shy away from food had quite a lot. I feel good, because I cooked :-)

After dinner, I grabbed the guitar for another thing that I’m quite obsessed about – the solo and riffs of my favorite songs. There’s an app for iPad that shows the Tabs for popular riffs so I choose something that’s not so difficult, Mark Knopfler’s Sultans of Swing intro riffs. After trying for about 15 minutes, I managed to get it right and by midnight I could play it according to my own feel and taste of how I wanted it to be presented. Gotta play it my style, my way.

I’m so gonna go check that Taylor acoustic guitar at Bentley one of these days :-)