An Old Dog with New Tricks

Cooking with a twist: as exciting as spotting a  colugo on a ramble.

You know what they say: "you can't teach an old dog new tricks". There's still a lot of truth in that if the old trick the old dog has is in trying out dreamed up techniques. Then this mutt teaches itself new tricks.... Now that's a bag of bones I'll like to think myself to be in: always question the given paradigms.

So yes, everyone does this given: you first heat up the oven to the right temperature before putting in the hot cross buns to heat up. Well, I questioned that the other day. So I put the frozen buns into the oven before setting it to warm up till 180 degrees Celsius. Guess what?: it still took eight minutes to get to 180. But by the time the clock registered the thirteenth minute the buns have been in the oven, the latter was giving out a distinctive aroma of nicely warmed buns: they can be taken out. And they have been heated to the core. If I'd stuck to tradition, it would have taken another ten minutes for a 180-degree oven to do the same trick.

Well, I similarly questioned the rationale of stir-frying cubes of raw salmon first and setting them aside to heat up the fish sauce, kecap manis, lime juice, brown sugar, garlic and onions, before returning the lumps of fish back into the pot. I can understand doing that with chunks of raw beef as you'll be browning it first. But pre-cooking the salmon first serves no similar function. So I decided to cook the garnish and the sauce first and add the salmon in as I'm leaving the sauce to thicken in the pot. And hubby still found that the dish has surpassed every caramelized fish dish he has ever tasted.

So the trick to keeping cooking fun in the kitchen is in adding a new twist or two into tried and tested recipes. Then I'll be discovering something excitingly new each time I put on my trusty apron.