.jpg)
I CANNOT RECALL the first time I cooked something entirely on my own, but it must have been when I was quite young. By the time I was 17, I had gotten myself embroiled in a pet project I called “Cooking the World”, where I aspired to cook traditional dishes from around the world à la Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen—ironically, it would take me years before I mustered the courage to attempt a French dish, having been intimidated by Julie Powell’s excruciatingly documented kitchen disasters.
A gourmand aside, I probably inherited this passion for cooking from my mother, who used to experiment in the kitchen when I was growing up—though not always successfully. My school lunch boxes were a constant source of curiosity for my classmates; I would turn up with pesto sandwiches, proper spaghetti Bolognese (instead of the local version with medallions of cut-up cocktail sausages) and squares of Lamington cake. This was back before grocery stores became globalised, and their aisles became as well-stocked with international products as they are now.
When I went to college in the States, my cooking evolved to suit the needs of a broke college student missing Asian food in a predominantly white Oregon. Stuck far away from any place with any semblance to a Chinatown, that was when I learned to make claypot chicken rice, Mamak-style Maggie Goreng and even Char Koay Kak—dishes I never needed to learn to cook back in Malaysia; they were simply too conveniently available to purchase.
Perhaps because I had been grocery shopping, budgeting and cooking for myself since a relatively young age, I had always been cognizant of how much I spend on food. In college, I set myself a monthly budget of USD100 on groceries; my staples were vegetables, beef, chicken, milk, cheese, eggs, pasta and bread.
10 years later, my grocery staples have not changed much. However, the cost of these items has surged exponentially, even though I am now living in a country where the cost of living is relatively lower.
