I was invited by a friend to her house. When I arrived at her house, there were already several people present, among whom I knew. My friend immediately welcomed me warmly and invited me to sit on the bar stool. After that, she stepped to the dish table and picked up a plate containing four different types of cakes. She delivered the plate of cakes to me and asked me to eat them immediately.
I examined the cakes in front of me. Then I asked her if she made them herself. She replied that she made them herself. I praised her and said that she was great at producing beautiful cakes. She smiled. Then I put a triangular piece of cake into my mouth and felt how delicious the cake was. I praised her again and said that the taste of this cake was very good.
During the covid-19 pandemic, all my works and activities outside the house were temporarily stopped. Almost every day I am always at home and occasionally come out for other purposes. This did not bother me since I am someone who likes to do activities inside the house. But after a month had passed and nothing changed, I began to feel a little sense of saturation. Memories of trips during the holidays that have passed have begun to emerge, but we must give up on all of them. The plane tickets that we had bought from last year and booked hotel rooms had to be let go too. Thanks God some of the plane tickets can be refunded.
I started to look forward and took the will to make changes because I felt that during the month, I had become less productive. Indeed, there were still some side jobs that I could do from home, but I felt that I could do more than that. I started writing blogs again after about eight months of inactivity writing. Even though the source of my stories that come from dreams always pops up every day, but I had never processed it because of many other busy activities. In addition, I also began to learn to make videos to be uploaded to YouTube.
Lately, I often dream about food. One of them is a dream that I told you in the two first paragraphs above. No wonder I often dream about food because for some time I often open YouTube to look for instructions to make cakes or process other foods. I not only watched them, but I also practiced them.
Let's take a quick look back. When I was married, I who did not like the affairs in the kitchen thought that over time I would get used to cooking and taking care of this and that in the kitchen. But after years of marriage, I always cook perfunctory. The only spices and other supplementary materials I know are salt, sugar, soy sauce, garlic, chili, pepper and occasionally turmeric and shallots. Yeah right, you guys didn't read it wrong. Those are all the spices that I use for cooking. There are no new cuisine innovations. Only what is easy and practical would I cook. I didn’t want to be complicated, I didn’t want to long, that's the hallmark of my cooking.
Was I not sorry for my husband who ate them? Not really, because I was not a fussy eater myself. Once my father cooked wet fried rice for me. The fried rice was really soggy, mushy and lacked flavor. I try to put it in my mouth, it didn't taste very good. But did I throw it away? No please, I appreciated his efforts to make food for me. So I ate it while drinking water. Likewise with my husband. He has never protested with all his mother's cooking and my cooking. He also has never asked me to make something he wanted. Even though I felt no pressure from my husband, but I myself wanted to be determined to provide better food for my husband. But that determination was only a determination without being realized because I did not like to cook. So, I just go back to the same dishes that I cooked.
For only three and a half years my husband tasted the same kind of cooking. Now I have changed. After more than a month all my work and activities outside were stopped, so I encouraged myself to start learning cooking and baking. Because of this pandemic, we have never eaten outside or bought food through online applications again. Finally, I started to open YouTube and looked for dishes and cakes that were easy to make for me as a beginner. The results were quite satisfying. Some were failures, but some were successful. I practiced baking more than cooking. Hopefully I won't stop to continue making good food. Now my seasoning supplementary materials has started to increase. There are shrimps, anchovy, onions, leeks, celery, chives, cinnamon, tamarind, ginger, brown sugar, and coriander. I can even add cornstarch to my cooking. Hopefully more spices will be used later.
Maybe for those of you who often cook, this is normal, but not for me. I really feel amazing that I can finally make other variations of food. Something I have never done before. How was my husband's reaction? Of course he was very happy and always praised the food I made. He even uploaded pics of them on his social media until my niece saw them, who immediately wrote a message to me via WhatsApp and asked me if the cake was unable to expand? I said, no, it's soft and squishy. Look, even my husband and I did not know whether the cake was hard. The important thing was that it still tasted good, that's more than enough for us.
Since I often try new recipes, I am more excited to learn to make more varied foods. Initially I was not very fond of cooking, now I began to be interested in doing it. So, we should learn to try to do something new if it is good and useful for us and the others. Maybe we didn't like it at first, but in the end we might like it. Maybe we can fail, but never give up immediately. We continue to try and try again. Keep the spirit!