A very cooking morning.

Not that I wanted to wake up at 4:30 in the morning, but there are advantages to getting up early. At least it was nice and cool still, and I was able to reward myself with French toast and strawberries. Also, I made a batch of them, so there is enough French toast for several mornings. And no, I don't put whipped cream or syrup on my French toast or waffles. Very interesting... Found 2 double yolked eggs. I buy jumbo eggs, so maybe not a surprise that I'd find double yolks on occasion, but 2 such in the same dozen is still unusual.



After being energized by the breakfast, decided to cook up the eggplants, so made Chicken green curry with Thai eggplant, and Szechuan eggplant.



Normally I wouldn't serve the dishes together, but since I worked so hard, I saw no reason as to why I shouldn't taste both. The curry paste was a commercial paste, and not too bad. But I keep forgetting that I need to add salt. Normally I don't use a lot of salt in my cooking, but the chicken dish would definitely benefit from some. No such problem with the Chinese one, since there was soy sauce in there. I've been trying different types of canned coconut milks to use in my Thai cooking, and this time I used a low fat one from Trader Joe's. It's not a bad product, but would not be my choice for the future. When we made Thai food in school, chef actually wanted the coconut product to have a thick part on top that we can separate out to sautee with the curry paste. No such luck here. But I was able to make a decent enough curry sauce to simmer the chicken and vegetables. I tried browning the chicken and onions a bit in a frying pan, and that gave a nice colour to the sauce. Otherwise it's just a pale white green. Not very visually appealing.

The thing about typical Asian cooking is the amount of slicing and dicing it takes to prep. The actual cooking time isn't much. Ingredients common to both that I used today were onion, garlic and ginger, and it's easy enough just to process it all at the same time and divide in half. I was also able to make use of the spicy bean paste I got at the Japanese store the other day.

Something that occurred to me this morning is that I cook very much by the looks of the dish. I don't have a recipe written out for the Chinese dish, for example, but based on the colour, or consistency, I might add more spicy paste or soy sauce, etc. This isn't so bad when one is familiar with what a dish is supposed to taste or look like, but probably not advisable for the novice cook. What I do these days, if I want to make something I have not made before, is to get a look at several versions of the recipe, get an idea of the ingredients and method, and then go off on my own. I find the process to be much more enjoyable that way. I have room to be creative.

After all that, and the clean up, all of a sudden I find myself at close to noon. I've already put in an 8 hour day by now! Dinner is going to be leftovers.