How to know if you're ready to be married off

My first home-cooked dinner !

On the menu:

Dish #1

Mixed vegetables consisting of cauliflower, capsicum, corn, carrots and chicken gizzard, with garlic seasoning :)

Dish #2

Onion omelette (one of my most favourite omelettes !)

It doesn't look aesthetically nice, but it tasted fineeee (really !) :P

Dish #3

Prawn fritters - fresh prawns dipped in batter and deep-fried.

I had a craving for these for a long time, which actually gave me the motivation to cook dinner myself !

So thanks to these babies, my family had the privilege of tasting wonderful dishes cooked by my hand ! What an honour ! :D

Comments: Everybody (read: my immediate family) said it was pretty good :)

Overall, I think it was a success ! :D

Nobody had stomach trouble after dinner that day, or the next. So I would say that proves that my cooking is safe for consumption ! *teehee*

On another attempt:

I cooked meatloaf.

What is that, you ask?

Well, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure.

I got the idea from watching some English dramas. I'd heard "meatloaf" mentioned a couple of times as a dinner dish, the most recent one on an episode of Desperate Housewives.

So, I sourced for simple (in fact, the simplest) recipes for meatloaf that I could find.

Well, it seems to be a rather popular Western/American dish. They use certain ingredients you don't readily find here. So I chose one recipe to which the ingredients were simple enough to obtain.

And so, the experiment began:

1) Minced beef (500 g)

You'd think it's easy, but it took me some time to mince the meat properly. And you won't understand how really tiring it is to chop, chop, chop the meat finely enough so it will cook properly and you'll be able to taste the sweetness of the meat, until YOU have minced beef yourself. *cue nodding of heads here*

I also marinaded the beef with soya sauce and pepper (which was not in recipe) to add to the taste of the meat.

(Since this was an experiment, I tried out with only 500 g of beef. The recipe was for 1 kg of beef, so I tried to adjust the amount of all the other ingredients accordingly.)

2) Chopped onions

I have a thing for onions. They're really sweet and make any dish you cook them with smell really fragrant ! :)

3) Tomato sauce + brown sugar

Here (based on instinct) I mixed 2 cups of tomato sauce and half a cup of brown sugar (which I thought would be just right for now 500 g of beef). Stirred them well together.

4) Jacob's crackers (crushed)

My bro helped me to crush the crackers. I put in about 7-8 pieces of crackers (they were oatmeal ones, which I didn't like, but were all that were left in the house >.<) and asked my bro to help me crush them with the mortar.

5) Then, mix the beef, onions, crushed crackers and half the mixture of tomato sauce+brown sugar. After you've mixed them all well, you're supposed to place the whole mixture thingy onto a grease pan and shape it into a loaf.

Unfortunately, we did not have a flat grease pan, nor a huge oven. Just a round metal plate and a small microwave/oven. So I made do with what I had :)

Finally, pour the remaining half of the tomato sauce+brown sugar mixture on the top of the loaf.

6) Preheat the oven, then place the meatloaf into the oven. Bake for 45 minutes (for 500 g of beef. I think.) at 180 degrees.

And voila ! It's done ! :)

In my anxiousness to taste it and see if it's edible, I forgot to take a shot of it when it was done ! Or how the meat was steaming hot and juicy when we cut into it. :) *yum*

Comments: It was rather tasty, just a little too sweet for comfort ! o.O

Since none of us had ever tasted a meatloaf before, nor do I know of anyone else who has made a meatloaf before (we didn't even know how an actual meatloaf looked like =.=), we had nothing to compare it to ! Therefore, as long as it tasted good, it was a success ! :)

For the next attempt at a meatloaf, I will cut out the brown sugar. Maggi tomato sauce is already super duper sweet enough ! :O

I feel so....so....accomplished !

Can marry off jor! *just kidding*