By Amy Mei, staff writer
The new thing that I decided to try for the week was to cook new recipes that I’ve never tried before. I’ve had a passion for cooking ever since I was a little kid so this was something that I was super excited for. Recently I’ve only been cooking simple foods like toast, cereal, and basic Asian foods so my diet has been a little boring. I wanted to add some spice and flavor to my life by changing up what I eat so I browsed through social media apps like Pinterest, Instagram, and Tiktok to find new recipes.
While I was browsing through my apps, I would save recipes I liked into a folder so that I could choose from that list later on. The factors I had to take into consideration while choosing the recipes were how long the preparation and the actual cooking time would take because I wanted recipes that were quick. Since my online class lunch break is only forty minutes, I needed recipes that I could make in between that time frame in order to make it back to class on time. However, I was pretty open about how creative these recipes were going to be so complexity wasn’t a problem.
For the first recipe of the week, I made my regular vanilla cold brew but with cinnamon cold foam. It was pretty easy and it tasted really good. I poured store bought cold brew into a cup with ice and frothed some almond milk mixed with creamer, vanilla syrup and cinnamon. I like to play around with drinks and pretend I own my home cafe sometimes so I had a lot of fun.
The next day, it started raining after class ended so I was craving some warm comfort food. I decided to try making my own spicy udon recipe inspired from videos I found on Tiktok and it was absolutely delicious. I used frozen udon because that was all I had and made my own chicken bone broth. Topped it off with an egg, dried tofu, some spam, and chili oil. It was also very easy to make and just what I needed on that cold, rainy day. On Wednesday night, my mom and I baked char siu (Chinese bbq pork) for dinner. We’ve both never made something like that before so it was really new for us. It was pretty simple because the meat just needed to marinate in char siu sauce overnight and baked in the oven. The char siu was crispy and served perfectly with rice.
During lunch on Thursday, I needed to make something to eat really quick so I just whipped together a sandwich that came out better than I expected. First I toasted some sprouted whole grain bread, cooked an egg, warmed up some turkey, mashed an avocado, and put it all together into a really thick sandwich. I ended up being a little late to class but it was worth it.
The last recipe I tried on Friday was lemon garlic broccoli. It’s pretty much self explanatory. I boiled some broccoli, seasoned them, squeezed some lemon, and minced up a couple cloves of garlic to mix in. It ended up being very spicy but the flavors were well balanced.
I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to change up the foods they have been eating and want to have some fun in the kitchen. Every time I went to the kitchen, I was so excited to cook whereas before I would just go in with the idea of making the same old bland foods. Although it does take a little time to browse through social media because there are endless recipes and some people might now like some foods, it’s worth it in the end.
Going outside of my comfort zone and cooking things I’ve never tried before initially brought fear of failure and fear of wasting ingredients, but my chef skills didn’t let that happen. I think some people might not want to try this because of the same fear but unexpected outcomes lead to new experiences. If some foods come out burnt or end up tasting really bad, you can go over the process of how you made it and analyze it to see what you did wrong, to do better next time.
Pictures down below:
Vanilla Cold Brew with Cinnamon Cold Foam 
Spicy Udon 
Baked Char Siu (Chinese bbq pork) 
Sandwich 
Lemon garlic broccoli
