Creative Cooking (1)

Well, just yesterday I've read about this prata goreng in the news paper. They make a crispy prata, shred it off and toissed it in the wok like mee goreng (Indian fried noodle.

It’s kinda crazy but again it’s an idea that actually works. And someone beat me to it. The fundamental of this menu is so simple. You see:

prata is basically flatbread made from flour.
A majority of noodles has flour as basic ingredient
Why don’t we just treat prata as a noodle? Shred it and fry it?

There you goes, a new food item for this year Festival of Light (Deepavali/Divali).

Don’t you just hate it when someone beat you to a new menu and makes you feels like bonking yourself in the head and muttering “Why oh, why didn’t I think of that?”

My friend the sushi chef invented the prawn and mango salad which was absolutely delicious. Well, I indeed improved it to my Seafood Fruits salad. (salade de fruits et fruits de mer) Heh, I’ll post the recipe tonight. But again it’s not something new.

I can whip up honey glazed chicken wing in 10 minutes with only honey, chicken wing and oven toaster. Throw me some cloves and I’ll make this extra-fast food as if it’s come out of 3-star hotel’s kitchen. I might improved the “how” but the concept of the honey glazed wasn’t even mine.

Nevertheless, there’s nothing wrong if you try to imitate somebody else’s. Especially in cooking, there’s no such thing as copyright for recipe. That’s why instead of copyrighting it, KFC just put the papers in a vault! There’s no way they’ll even put that in digital storage. (Note: Original recipe for Coca-cola is also written in papers and locked in vault.)

But then, how are we going to find something new? Assuming you’re interested in cooking, you can start by putting attention. There are 3 main items in cooking which I will elaborate at later part. They are (1) ingredient, (2) technique, and (3) presentation.

After you collect and gather information about all three of this, all you need to do is mix and match it. There you go, a new menu of your own!

To be Continued

Cons