Notes of a Desolate Libra

Being that now I'm living on my own and need to 1) eat, 2) save money, 3) explore cooking - the natural conclusion is that I should start cooking on my own. Another concern of mine is that I don't want to waste anything... the Evolution of the Plum Chicken is a very good example of what usually happens with my food...

When my housemate brought home some plums, both of us knew that they would all be in the garbage within 3 days since neither of us can possibly eat so many and she didn''t even touch them because she had too many already. So on the second day, I decided to do something about it so that the plums don't go to waste. The way I wanted to do it was to cook them. Since I didn't have the equipment to make jam, I decided to make plum compote.

1) There was still some rock sugar left from my Red Bean Soup so I decided to melt that for my sauce instead of using regular sugar (which I never bought).
2) I washed and cut the plums. The put them in the sugar water to cook.
3) The skin of the plums come off very easily after a few minutes in the bath of hot water. I picked out all the skins with chopsticks.
4) The finished products, which I split into two containers, were: plum meat and plum sugar water, which I stored in my gogo no koucha (yum) bottle.
5) Ok, so this wasn't really what I had in mind and was far from what the recipe instructed... but... at least now the plums won't go bad.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="576" caption="Plums, oatmeal, sugar plum sauce"]

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6) The plum meat I used for oatmeal topping - extremely delicious. I wolfed down the oatmeal (ok so I was hungry too).
7) I couldn't figure out what to do with the sugar plum sauce until I just figured I might as well try to make sweet and sour chicken with it.
8) I had some chicken breast meat that I removed from the chicken I bought 2 weeks ago, which I marinated with small amounts of salt, soy sauce, and corn starch and put away in the fridge. I stir fried it until about 80% cooked. (may need to add water in the duration)
9) I poured the plum sauce and stir fried some more, then finally added a bit of corn starch so the sauce would thicken.
10 ) And finally, the result:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="320" caption="Plum Chicken"]

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Amazing what a Chinese mind (Don't be wasteful! Be creative and you can put EVERYTHING to good use.) can do, right?

The remaining plum sauce became:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="360" caption="Yummy Sweet & Sour spare ribs"]

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Ah the life of a freelancer...

Ok,these days I've been working the most insane hours and I leave my phone on all day because I use it as an alarm (ok I know I don't need it on for just that reason) and I have to catch a call if an agency calls me (and they don't really have the same concept of "appropriate" time as normal people...). I sleep at 5am and wake up around 7 or 8am to see if there are new projects or do same day projects, then I plop back into bed if there's nothing else going on... waking up usually around 2-3pm... then cook/eat one meal for the day...

Life is not too exciting... so my new indoor hobby has become (as I expected) - cooking. It's actually very zen when you stand there and chop vegetables. And it certain takes a lot of innovation to figure out how to mix the left overs from last night with what's currently expiring in the fridge to make a decent meal... generally ending up eating the same thing for days because one batch from the supermarket is too much for one person to eat in one meal...

Today I had a vendetta against eggs (actually it's just because I'm excited to have eggs in the house - bought them 2 days ago), so I cooked steamed double eggs (salted and regular, 1:2) with vermicelli and also steamed eggs dessert (used condensed milk instead of sugar, didn't put plastic wrap on top because I didn't have any... and it still turned out smooth!)... mmmmm... cholesterol...

There are some others...

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="576" caption="So I see why freelancers gain weight..."]

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