The Road to 40 Day 163/365: Joy in Cooking

I never knew how to cook when I was younger, but now that I do, it’s become one of my greatest joys.

Sometime last week, I posted a photo of something I cooked and got a reply from an old friend, Lara. She said she missed the cauliflower that I did, so I said I’d gladly do it for her next time we meet.

The KFC, Korean Fried Cauliflower, is one of the first true specialties I’ve done. I don’t usually write recipes for the food that I cook, but I just had to for this dish after a couple of tries. I wanted it to be consistent so that it’s going to taste the same everytime I make it.

I now have a staple list of ingredients, but as someone who constantly sees opportunities to improve, I do experiment with tweaks here and there, especially for those who have tried it before.

A few months back, when Steph was surprised with a bridal shower here in Singapore, with friends coming over from the Philippines, adding to the usual crowd here in SG. The afterparty happened at our house, so I made some soup for them. Lara and Shara slept at our house. The next day, I took the chance to cook the KFC because I didn’t know when I’d be able to cook it for them.

I guess she liked it enough to request it from me. She said they will actually be in Singapore this week, so we aligned our schedules to see if we can squeeze in a meetup. We found that our best time was Sunday night. I learned that they were coming late, so I decided to just cook the cauliflower and just have snacks since everyone already had dinner.

The wet batter I usually make is a combination of flour ang corn starch to make it crispy. However, I saw a post about using potato starch on batters and I tried it in my last attempt at this dish. It gave the fried cauliflower a bit more bite and chew, so I let this batch try it out.

Thankfully, they still enjoyed it.

I think I have the flavors right, the tricky part of this is really the cut of the cauliflower and the batter that I use. But I’m fairly confident when cooking it for people.

The kids played and watched TV while the adults were drinking the night away. We don’t usually get together, but it’s always fun to catch up with friends who we share a connection with even though we rarely get together.

We ended the night around half past midnight, as it was Lara and Rodel’s first day in SG.

There were plenty of trash to be thrown and a lot of dishes to be washed, but both Che and I decided it’s a problem for tomorrow us again.

At least today’s Che was able to finish packing all our clothes for Korea so tomorrow’s us will just need to clean up and maybe even go out while SG is on holiday.