no.35 130604 Thank you for allowing me to try something new (at cooking)

My first attempt at making tempuras - success!

I made tempura for the first time today!

Well, the menu I selected for tonight's dinner was 'gan-poong-gi' which is a Korean Chinese dish - deep fried boneless chicken in a sweet and spicy chili sauce. It's something similar to sweet and sour chicken that you can find at a Chinese restaurant, but gan-poong-gi has more spicy kick to it (we use a lot of garlic to bring out the flavour as well). I told my dad what I was making for dinner, and he was like "why don't you make some tempura as well?" I thought about making some tempura too, but I was way too focused on making the chicken dish. Tempura was a good idea since I will be using lots of oil anyways.

I added veggie and shrimp tempura to the menu and started cooking. It was extra work for sure, but it was worth it because everyone enjoyed it! And that makes me happy. In the near future, I am planning to share some of my recipes on my blog. I started off with mixed veggie tempura, then sweet potato tempura, and lastly shrimp tempura - me and my sister's favourite. By the end of deep frying shrimps I was covered in tempura smell - which is not pleasant at all, and I was too tired for more cooking. I still had my chicken waiting for me to be deep fried. Eventually, I ended up deep frying everything I prepared for tonight.

Originally, I was going to leave it at that and make the sauce tomorrow or some other time, since I can just eat the fried chicken by itself. So I asked my family for their opinions - if they wanted to eat gan-poong-gi today or tomorrow. The answer was yes they wanted it tonight.. so I made the sauce super quick. I didn't even refer to the recipe I found this morning. I just put the ingredients that I remembered seeing in the recipe and from my personal experience. It looked okay and it tasted okay as well. I find it a bit salty but considering it my first time cooking this dish, I give props to myself!

I am thankful that I got to try something new today. I'm happy to make something delicious for my family to enjoy. I think I shared this on my blog before, but one of the things I really like to do is to cook for people I care about and watch them enjoy my food. I guess in order to see them enjoy my food, I gotta be good at cooking! I have a long way to go for that!