Dining-in

I think i have take the DIY cooking the wrong way. I just realized dat its kindda silly to cook Asian when I'm not in an Asian country. It's rather expensive to be eating Asian food as its considered something exotic. I also think its a bit too kiasu to eat Malaysian food when there is a cheaper alternative. A visit to the Asian store drains my money like how American cars drain petrol. I said to myself "i have to find an alternative". The other day one of my floor mates baked some bread in the kitchen. The smell of the bread really got to my stomach. Its smelled so nice, even though it was only bread. So I thought i wanna give it a try.

You can by unbaked bread at the supermarket for around 3 cents for 6 pieces. each piece is about the size of your fist, so about 3 is enough to get you full. So i tried it for breakfast where i cooked some scrambled eggs and cut up some tomatoes and pepper aka paprika to be eaten with the bread and its really not bad at all!! it was great actually plus it was relatively cheaper and healthier than a typical Malaysian dish that i cook, with the limited ingredients. I think it makes practical sense to adapt to the local food.

So,I got a bit more adventurous and decided to make some pasta with spaghetti sauce. A packet of the cheapest pasta is 29cents for 500 grams compared to rice which is 1euro per kilo of non-lousy rice. and 500 grams of pasta can last for 3 meals, which was great! So i got 2 packets of pasta, some tomatos, paprika, a pack of tomato puree, a pack of halal sausages, garlic and some oregano, all costing around 6 euros. I looked up the simplest spaghetti sauce on the Internet and started cooking. The pasta was not a problem to cook, in fact if you don't know how to cook the pasta, you shouldn't have been cooking in the first place. Its just a matter of boiling some water with raw pasta in it for 12 minutes. The recipe that i got from the internet was quite simple. Simpler than i expected once you have all the ingredients with you. At first I was just blindly following the recipe but as soon as i put in the tomato puree and left it to boil for a few minutes, that familiar smell you get from a italian restaurant quickly reassured me that i was in the right track. It took about 20-30 minutes for the sauce to be ready but it was worth the wait as it turned out really well. Surprisingly well. It tasted like what u would taste in the Italian restaurant. All thanks to the simple recipe that i downloaded from the internet.

So from now on i'll be searching for regional recipes that i can try cooking to save more and more $$$. I think the question of getting used to it does not really matter since this is not the first time i lived abroad. So, bread and pasta is acceptable to me as much as rice and curry puffs are.
So see how it goes...

Tchuss