The Newbie Cook project

As I mentioned yesterday, cooking has become my new interest and I would like to include some cooking and/or food photo stories in this blog. So just like I had a title for my batik project, I came up with a title for my new project : Newbie Cook. Now if you know me in twitter, I've actually used the hashtag #newbiecook a few times in my tweets, so this is kinda of making the whole thing official!

I'm pretty excited about this little photo project, because cooking is something I do on a daily basis now, so I don't expect to run out of photo objects too soon ;). Hence it'll keep my blog alive!

Anyway, I wanna start off by giving you a view of my cooking environment, i.e. the kitchen and the dining table. K and I live in a typical Dutch house with a reasonable sized kitchen and a living room which also holds our dining table.

Our kitchen and IKEA dining table.
For the record: I cooked the dish! K was just serving :P.

For me the kitchen is already nice and big enough, especially coming from my tiny house in Indonesia. It has all the equipments I need and enough space for prepping food. It has enough storage space... for now. I'm pretty sure we'll need to add more cabinets or such because we're already slowly adding small things like cake forms, tupperware, and quite a lot of basic Asian dry spices :P.

Our dining table is a small cheap IKEA table, hehehe. We plan to do a major redecoration of the living room in spring anyway, and we plan to get a decent dining table. I'm already imagining to host a dinner party someday! But first I need to get better with cooking ;).

Ever since K and I started seeing each other in Delft, our eating and cooking horizon has expanded a lot. We influence each other with our food culture, which has made eating an adventure at times. And now I can say that our kitchen is a mix of Dutch/Western and Indonesian/Asian cuisine.

I'm lucky that K is Dutch, and we live in Netherlands. Due to the obvious historical reasons, Dutch people are familiar with Indonesian food to some extend, and even infuse Indonesian stuff into their cooking. There are even quite a lot of "Indonesian" restaurant here, although as you can expect the taste has been modified quite a bit. The good thing for me is that at least I can get most of the basic spices here, mostly dried, and even a few fresh vegetables. Once a month K and I would drive up to Delft to a big Oriental supermarket and stock up on our asian ingredients. We even bought 20 kg of pandan rice! Hahaha... I'm sure it'll last us a looooong time :P.

Oriental Supermarket attack! Check out the big sack of rice on the bottom of our cart :P.

 That being said, so far it seems my western cooking has been more successful than my asian cooking. Indonesan cooking requires quite some "feeling" because in recipes they would just say: add a bit of this spice and that herb and a dash of salt and such... And I'm like... okaaaaay, how much is a bit?? So that's what I have to slowly catch, the "feel" of herbs and spices.

Anyway, being the Newbie Cook that I am, please don't expect any fancy cooking just yet. I'm just enjoying my "training" process, while keeping up with my photography and blogging hobby, and hoping someday I'll become a better cook!

Hope you'll enjoy my new project as much as I will! :)

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