“If you knew you were going to dump me like this. You shouldn’t even agree to be my boyfriend in the first place” he said in agony. That statement on the other hand somehow stupefied me. How would I knew back then? Then I remembered a very nice lesson. A long time ago, while helping my grandmother cook the best traditional fried rice in the world, she in return said something very enlightening.
“Cooking is not so much different than relationships,” she said.
For the best possible fried rice, here you fridge the steamed rice overnight, choose the most tender chicken breast, select the freshest shoots of spring onions, prepare your fresh eggs, chilies, garlic and shallots. On the side you’d arrange your regular kitchen spices. Here we have salt and pepper, chicken powder, unrefined sugar, soy sauce and you may even have a bottle of fish-sauce handy.
“Now that you have the best ingredients available around you, how can you be sure that whatever you’re cooking is going to turn out great?” she asked. “First of all the temperature had to be right” she continued while heating up the frying pan and splashing some cooking oil, getting ready for her chopped garlic to jump first at the almost boiling point. I could hear the happy sizzles from the pan.
I then was assigned the task of marinading the chicken breast with salt, pepper and some other spices. After that I would have to mix the steamed rice with the spices, sweet soy sauce and two raw eggs by hand. Meticulously she then removed her garlic from her frying pan and poured the sliced spring onions in the hot oil. Heavenly smoke then started to fill the kitchen, especially when the diced chicken breasts joined the onions in the pan.
“Perfectly golden brown,” she said after a while, removing the chicken and onions to another plate.
The spiced-up rice went in immediately after a hot batch of canola oil was ready. I busied myself stirring and incorporating our Sunday brunch fried rice.
“Now taste it,” she asked me.
“Hmm, something is missing here. It’s still flat”
She then gathered her remaining ingredients, her chilies, her golden brown chicken and onions and shoved everything into the frying pan.
“Now try again…”
“Wow, it’s certainly kicked it up a notch, but Grandmamma.. Try this… Something is still missing”
She tasted our cooking, gave it a thought for a while and then she whipped up her secret ingredients. A spoonful of sugar.
“Wow Nana, now it’s perfect. It’s perfect!” I screamed exhilaratingly.
“Back to the story my child,” she continued.
“Imagine that you started a relationship with the best possible ingredients to begin with. And then you forgot to spice it up. What happened to your cooking?”
“It tasted flat”
“And even if you added all those extra efforts of spices, did it guarantee that it was going to come out delicious?”
“No, Nana, you still need to add a degree of sweetness” I replied.
“There you have it”. She smiled lovingly.
So don’t expect too much if you forgot to spice things up. Don’t ask for forever if you didn’t hear my callings to sweeten things up then and again. Don’t just rest there in your comfort zone and pray that everything was automatically going to come out delicious.
Just because we had the best ingredients to start with.
Not cooking tonight,
Prof. Utonium
Copyright: Opening Image. My Recipes © 2010
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