Some people find cooking therapeutic. I’m one of those people, though I’m not sure why that is so. Like earlier, I cooked and nearly cried when the oil started dancing high in the pan and I couldn’t prevent the pork chop from getting burned because I was too scared to go near it, then I scraped skin off my knuckle while peeling a potato. Doesn’t sound so relaxing, does it, and it actually sounds more like a recipe for disaster.
It all started yesterday, when I bought a splitter for our TV. Our internet router was plugged into the TV socket, depriving our TV of a clear reception. I decided that I had had enough of snowy reception that gave me a headache, so I found a shop that sold a lot of knick-knacks and asked the salesguy if they sold splitters. He showed me one and was nice enough to explain how it was supposed to be used. When I got home, I managed to connect the wires and stuff correctly to each other, and when I turned on the TV, I could see Rachael Ray in crystal clear reception. Yay! She was demonstrating a recipe to the audience and made it look so easy-peasy, so when I was at the grocery store this afternoon, I thought, why not make what she made? So I tried to remember the ingredients she mentioned and bought a potato, a small apple, a big red onion, and a bottle of Maggi concentrated chicken stock. I still had some pork strips left over from my last therapeutic cooking session when I cooked sinigang.
When I got home, I decided to google the recipe and realized that I had missed a few of the ingredients. I was too lazy to go back out and buy them, though, so I decided to wing it, which is what I’m best at. Pacham, here we go!
The first step was supposed to be to fry the pork in virgin olive oil, which is supposed to be simple enough. Frying is the easiest way to cook for most people, except for me. I hate frying! As I explained in the first paragraph, this did not turn out well at all, so I pulled the pan out of the fire in order to save the pork, which would have been burned to a crisp if I had let them keep on sitting there. I had already chopped up all the ingredients, so I couldn’t let them go to waste and needed to improvise. Below is the complete recipe of what I finally came up with.
Ingredients:
a twist of butter, or just enough to cover the pan when it’s melted3 cloves of garlic, diced500g of pork sirloin, cut into bite size pieces1 big red onion, peeled, root end trimmed but left intact, halved through the root, then each half cut into 6 wedges through the root (to help hold them together)1 medium sized red apple, cored and chopped into wedges1 big potato, chopped into wedges3 spoonfuls of concentrated chicken stock mixed with two cups of waterPreparation:*Melt the butter in a pan.*Saute the garlic and a wedge of onion.*Lightly fry the pork for about 5 minutes.*Drop in the potatoes, apples and the rest of the onions. Pour in the stock mixture. Let it simmer and stir occasionally, adding salt according to taste.*Turn off the heat after about 5 minutes.*Serve with rice, the Filipino way.
I have no idea what to call this dish, all I know is that the end result was surprisingly delicious, so much so that my flatmates and I had to take a walk after dinner because we were so stuffed. I guess what makes cooking therapeutic for me is the sense of adventure that comes from the process itself, because I’m never sure how it will turn out. Then there’s also the validation that comes at the end when I come up with something unexpectedly palatable and tasty, like, wow, I actually pulled this off? And the look of amazement on people’s faces. They’re always as surprised as I am and boy, do I love to surprise people. UPDATE: I’ve decided to call it “pork potapples.” Nyahahaha.
I now swear by Julie’sĀ belief in butter, by the way. It is magic.
“Is there anything better than butter? Think it over, any time you taste something that’s delicious beyond imagining and you say ‘what’s in this?’ the answer is always going to be butter. The day there is a meteorite rushing toward Earth and we have thirty days to live, I am going to spend it eating butter. Here is my final word on the subject, you can never have too much butter.”