The Road to 40 Day 17/365: Experimental cooking

The daily blog is going to come across days like these when nothing much really happened.

Like any day, it started with waking up and cooking stuff for Vino to get ready for school. Then I take him to school, go home to an empty house because Che went to the office already.

This alone time allows me to do things I need or want to do. On this day, I decided to follow a want – sleep a bit with an NBA game in the background.

I saw the New York Knicks put up a fight in Indiana, so they are now trailing 1-2 in the series that most people pegged them to win.

Did my daily things and assigned a few articles before getting ready to pick Vino up again from school.

Walking home has become the norm for Vino, and though it’s a bit of a hassle because of the heat, I like it. I’m hoping it’s because he enjoys our talks while we walk up.

When we got home, I asked him to wash his own lunchbox, then I prepped some things before calling him over.

The other day, Che sent me a video of a dish that I was just watching literally before I opened her message. It’s a meat-stuffed eggplant dish, which I thought would be a good way to get Vino to eat more veggies.

One of my go-to lunch packs for Vino is meatballs, because it has meat, but I get to stuff it with carrots as well. This dish adds eggplant to it.

With that in mind, I got Vino to help me prepare the dish so he experiences how it is made.

He’s not really into cooking that much. He doesn’t really like touching different textures and would constantly wash his hands when I ask him to mix something I marinated. But I can’t blame him. I didn’t like cooking until I moved to Singapore, so I can’t really expect it to be an innate love for him.

Eating outside and watching food shows inspire me to try different kinds of food to cook. From simple recipes like this to more complicated dishes like Gordon Ramsey’s Beef Wellington, I feel a sense of accomplishment if I reach the taste profile I was going for.

Plus, it makes cooking not so monotonous. I have staple Pinoy dishes on my back pocket, but I can’t always default to them or else food – whether we’re eating it or I’m cooking it – becomes boring.

Food is something that should spark joy, so I’m hoping these random kitchen experiments from random videos could get Vino curious about different ways to take in flavors.

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