Another Culinary Disaster saved by Grandmother

At this time, I should be out shopping with Quet, but since it's raining, and neither of us wanna get wet, we're both still comfortably at home. :p

So today I had another lame-brained, whydidithinkofthat, idea to cook something for lunch, instead of going out. For one, my finances were getting tighter, and cooking will allow me to eat more stuff at home. For two, I need more practice in cooking something other than pasta. For three, I felt adventurous.

My idea was for a potato-mince stew, recipe drawn up from watching Grandmother cook years, years ago. I was pretty sure I knew the rough technique to go about doing it.

[I realise that my cooking techniques are all very JamieOlivermeetsSurrealChef. I come up with recipes by vaguely thinking, "Oh, that should work..." and the way I add seasoning and stuff is by throwing in an amount that looks ok to me. Forget the measuring cups and spoons.]

Firstly, prep the ingredients. Slice and dice the onions, slice the potatoes, and soak the mince in a buncha soy sauce. So far so good, and it was even fun pounding the sauce into the raw mince. Sorta like working with play dough.

Secondly, fry the potatoes, and THIS is where the trouble started. To fry food properly, you have to get the oil to be HOT, and when I poured in the 2nd batch of potatoes, some of them must've still been quite wet, cos this DOLLOP of oil just jumped right out of the pot and onto my hand.

ARRRRGGGGHHH!!!!!! PAIN!! TONG!! TIAH!!! ITAI!! SAKIIIIIT!!!!! ARGH! ARGH! ARGH!

Somewhere within 2 1/2 seconds I managed to curse at the pain, shift my burnt hand to the sink, switch on the tap and allow the cool, cool ( aaaaahhhh...... ) water to flow onto the burn.

Something I did must've worked because thank goodness, no huge bubbles formed, and although it hurt like crazy after that, it was still a hurt I could bear with. *nurses her burn*

Anyway, thank goodness the rest of the mince and onions went into the pot without much trouble. :p In fact, it was a strange thing because as the soy-sauce soaked mince went into the pot, an aroma rose up that was strangely familiar.

It was the aroma of my grandmother's cooking once again, my favourite dish that she used to cook for me every week. So familiar, and so comfortably nostalgic was the smell, I could almost imagine my grandmother resurrected in my kitchen, standing over me, watching me cook. For that one instance, the dead became alive, to mingle with the living, and I knew my cooking was on track.

The mince now sits in a pot in my fridge and is lunch enough for the next 2 days. It's a little salty, so next time I'll add a bit of sugar to it or something to take away the saltiness. Meanwhile, it's nice to know that I wasn't the total disaster in the kitchen I always thought I was. :)

And I'm sure Grandmother would approve.