Experimental Cooking

When I’m having a particularly good week it shows in the kitchen. I love to cook. Growing up my family ate pretty traditional meals, meat and potato. Spices were not a thing I ever learned about, and we didn’t try a whole lot of cultural meals or really eat outside of our comfort zone. We had a lot of meat and potatoes, spaghetti, Sheppard’s pie and things like that. My family was also pretty strict when it came to meals. If we wanted a snack, we asked first. I didn’t experiment a lot with cooking, and groceries were not the exciting times that they are now. None of this is ‘bad’ per say, I know money was pretty tight and my parents both did the best they could with three kids but it’s the background as to why I get so dang excited now when I cook or buy groceries.

Lately I’ve been watching some pretty amazing ASMR type cooking videos on YouTube. Some are Japanese, some Korean. They’ve got millions of views and they make cooking look simple and relaxed which it rarely ever is in my house. Best of all, the food looks amazing.

With this newfound interest, I bought a bunch of basic Japanese cooking ingredients last week and I’ve been experimenting with my own flavour profiles. I made chicken tonkatsu, and udon noodle miso soup (pictured above) that turned out incredible. I made onigiri. I have plans on doing some fried rice, and some shrimp balls, and all sorts of other yums. I’m experimenting with different types of heat – the heat you get from one spice can be very different than another. Take franks buffalo sauce and sriracha for example. Both are ‘heat’ but they’re very different in flavour profiles.

It has been amazing to experiment and play and explore. Not everything turns out, I’ve definitely had some failures, but it’s all a lot of fun and I’m having a great time learning what types of food I actually truly enjoy vs. those that I’d rather stay away from.