My 1st Meal

Tadah! Here we are, after two-and-a-half hours of preparation and cooking, me still in my office wear, he so zonked he doesn't even know where the camera is.

... And here is a close-up...

In this next picture, the very burnt chicken wing was my tester wing. Other people would've used a bread crumb instead. But that's Ms Coddled for you. Half of the batch you see here were undercooked to varying degrees, and The Boyfriend somehow ate all of those.

And these is the dish I had the most problems with. First, I marinated the prawns in the sauce meant to be drizzled over the dish. Then, while frying the prawns, The Boyfriend noticed that they were drying up very quickly. Are you sure you're supposed to do it this way, he asks. I reply, yes, Alicia (my colleague and provider of recipe and cooking tips) said so. When do you pour the sauce in, he pursues. When the prawns are cooked, I say. Then he says, "I'd better pour some water into the sauce."

But clever me heard, "sumathing pour sumathing sumathing the sauce." And woo! In goes the whole thing, and let me tell you, grayish-pink prawns swimming in brown goo does not a pretty sight make.

He panics, I panic, and it took another 7 minutes or so before the prawns decided to curl up and blush in defeat. Here is the result:

Alicia will be very disappointed to see that I didn't arrange the broccoli neatly in a ring around the prawns. But by then, I didn't care. It was 9.30pm, for goodness' frigging sake.

P/S In case you were wondering, the soup was the best dish. No surprise there, it doesn't take an award-winning chef to throw in a few pieces of pork and lotus root and boil them in water.

P/P/S In case you were also wondering, no the food didn't taste horrid. (Disappointed now, aren't you?) In fact they were rather yummy, with the exception of the omelette, which was the first dish cooked and hence had to suffer the ignominy of my inexperience in front of the wok. (The Boyfriend actually had to come to my rescue, taking over for a few minutes. Oh, the disgrace of it all.) It was overcooked and, by the time we sat down to eat, hard and very cold indeed.