What do you make for dinner? Week-night, post-work dinner? Friday night, celebratory dinner? Sunday-afternoon-all-I’ve-got-is-time dinner?
Welcome to my food blog. Is it a blog? I guess I see it more as a brain dump of all the things I like to cook. It’ll be a collection of the common things that land on our dinner table so that I no longer need to filter through my mental archives.
Growing up with a Taiwanese mom and grandma, instructions were doled out as “a small bowl of this”, “a handful of that”, “fry it until it’s this color” - never in cups, tablespoons, or minutes. With a working mom, dinner typically landed on the table within 30-45 minutes of my mom pulling into the garage, made of whatever she could find in the fridge. Today, those frantic, on-the-fly meals she whipped up are the ones I try to recreate as an adult.
This will be all of the tried-and-true dishes that are constantly on repeat in our house. It’ll be the mantras that I cook by and the techniques that I want to master. It definitely won’t be recipes though. I don’t even know how to write a proper recipe. Instead, it’ll likely be scribbled-down lists of ingredients, vague instructions, some tips and tricks, and my general thoughts on cooking. Because even with a detailed recipe, everyone has different tastes, different preferences, and different items available in the fridge. Cooking shouldn’t be about following strict instructions or buying every single obscure ingredient the recipe demands. Instead, it should be about what you prefer, and frankly, what you have on hand.
It should be up to you.
