Not the best way to light an image, given that it’s the harsh afternoon sun, and you lose some colour detail with it being too contrasty. Prepared some achar for a party tonight at my cousin’s place.

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It’s been an interesting two weeks, where we’ve been cooking lots of new things. Finally dug out the pasta machine my cousin and her husband bought for us for our housewarming gift nearly 9 months ago. We’ve been putting off making pasta and one day I was talking to a friend and he has been making fresh pasta over the last few days. I decided to just give it a go as I’ve seen many videos of it before, but just never got round to actually producing anything.

It was trial and error, pouring flour onto the bench top, making a well, pouring egg in, spilling the egg out of the well and trying hard to just mould everything back together. With pasta, you really need to spend time kneading it to get the gluten working, otherwise you’d have trouble trying to roll it out.

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Besides pasta, we have also tried making ban mien with the pasta machine. With all the leftover pork bones from my roast pig party, it was easy to prepare a soup base. Added anchovies, fried up some pork mince with dried black fungus, boiled some vegetables and a few poached eggs later, we had a meal for dinner.

I’ve been boiling sweet potatoes with ginger and pandan leaves for dessert as a sweet soup. I’ve also made some siew yuk, where I bought a slab of pork belly not too long ago. Vyanne used part of it for a dish for dinner and since it was defrosted, I decided to just give it a go. It was a frankenstein mix of recipes that i scoured through the Internet as I blanched the meat, marinated it, left it to dry overnight before roasting it in the oven. Strangely enough, it came out quite successful, with the most important crackling being crispy. Flavour wise, it was pretty similar to what you get outside, and I really need a proper cleaver to cut through bones when serving it up.

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Heh, I’ve come a long way with cooking. I still make some rudimentary mistakes at times, but these days my brain is slightly more involved in the cooking process, so even if you make some mistakes, it’s easy to fix it before finalising the dish and having it taste awful.

It’s like all the other things I’ve started trying out of late, like gardening, where you don’t have to know everything before you start, but you do learn quite a bit as you go along, and it gives you more confidence to tackle the more difficult situations later.