The Art of Doing Everything and Making Nothing...

-

I love trying out stuff! Recently, ads from a meal prep service called EveryPlate kept showing on my feed. I decided to try it out since the first box was on sale anyway (it was about $5/meal). 

Upon opening the box, I immediately realised that I wouldn't be able to follow their recipes because they required you to use the oven. I've never baked or used the oven before, so I do not have a baking tray or the confidence to use the oven without an experienced friend's supervision, just so I do not set the fire alarms off. 

In the end, I decided to wing it. Here is what I started with:

  • chicken tenderloin (about 250 g)
  • panko breadcrumbs
  • egg - 1
  • soysauce
  • spices (salt, paprika, chilli powder, oregano)
  • Indian spice mixes: chings masala, maggi magic masala, garam masala, and my favourite biryani masala 😭)
  • cream
  • tomato paste
  • ginger garlic paste
  • cucumber
  • onion
  • capsicum
  • veggie salad
  • vegetable stock
  • butter chicken premade sauce (from the supermarket)
I intended to make crispy chicken using breadcrumbs accompanied with yummy sauce (never got to what flavour because plans got ruined), veggie salad and rice. 

Minutes into frying chicken tenderloin with breadcrumbs, I realised that I did not have enough oil to deep fry the chicken. That meant, there had to be a change of plans since my chicken was pretty raw. 

I am not going into the specifics of a recipe that didn't work out, but I used all of the spices I had on my chicken. Now that my chicken couldn't be deep-fried anymore, I decided to make a curry.

This was the same as opening a can of worms. First, the vegetable stock did not add to the flavour. Further, the tomato paste was VERY sour. I diluted my curry in order to make it less sour, but I had to pour in a lot of water because the paste was so sour. 😭😭

As a result, all of the spices that I had previously added - both in the chicken and the saucepan were diluted. The tomato paste was still quite sour and in a minute's desperation, I added some cream. This worked, but my chicken curry now tasted only like tomato. 

I added some more spices but it didn't really improve the flavour. I also wanted this to end asap, so I poured in the remaining egg batter and panko breadcrumbs. The curry didn't taste bad, but you would think that it was just tomato paste and salt if you didn't see the huge range of spices next to my saucepan. 

Here is a picture: 


Packing my lunch, I had one layer of rice, followed by a layer of tomato chicken topped with veggie salad, capsicum and cucumber.

Here I am now, writing this blog while eating my spice-loaded but truly bland lunch and drinking some hot chocolate which honestly, I am enjoying more...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2023 Women* In STEM Leadership Conference

-
Image
One year ago, I was a bright-eyed first-year university student who was happy just to get involved in the things around me. In 2022, I attended the Women* In STEM Leadership Conference. The main aim of this conference is to inspire, empower and educate female, femme-aligned and non-binary undergraduate students at the ANU about leadership in STEM. In 2023, I returned to the conference as Education Coordinator and organised an Orienteering Challenge and an Opportunities workshop. The Orienteering Challenge was meant to acquaint new students with the Science Precinct on campus, and later-year students to find places and things that they had not seen before. This activity also created opportunities for early-year and later-year students to collaborate and solve a set of puzzles. It was intended to be light-hearted and fun, and it was great to see all teams running around enthusiastically trying to find clues and taking photos together.  I had a lot of fun as well while designing the puzzl
Read more

Duoversary

-
Image
7 years!!! Seven years ago, I started learning my fourth language, and the first foreign language of my life - French. I joined French classes a year after everyone began, as a result, I was very behind on the content. I absolutely hated learning languages back then. It was more of remembering how different letters came together, but none of that made sense.  I did not know the difference between e, è, é, ê or ë. Initially, I thought that my teacher had unique handwriting :O I was too embarrassed to ask questions in class. Signing up for Duolingo to catch up on French was a very desperate attempt to learn the language. For the first couple of months, I did not enjoy Duolingo either. It was words, words and sentences. So, I left it for a while, struggled even more with the language and forgot about Duolingo. I wasn't a huge fan of the UI either - it was not very kids friendly. Seven years ago, I was 12, turning 13. Probably the UI today would have been more appealing to the 12-year-
Read more

Looking for a Language Study Buddy in ChatGPT-3

-
Image
So I decided to try ChatGPT! ChatGPT has been making quite the buzz lately. Functionality-wise, it is Aladdin [1] that appears at the controls of your machine. If you have been in the loop of recent developments, ChatGPT has left impressions of future chatbots and personal assistants. So far, people have used ChatGPT to create games, do assignments, do software programming and so much more. In this blog, I shall talk about how ChatGPT could support a language learner, more specifically, as a study buddy. Image generated using DALL-E Testing Looking for resources on search engines can be overwhelming. Instead of having to hop around websites to find quizzes and resources to test on a topic of choice at the appropriate level, ChatGPT provides you with a set of questions in your desired question type, level and topic. Even better, you do not have to check your answers after attempting the questions. ChatGPT will do it for you. Looking for language resources online vs ChatGPT, a workflow
Read more