I love being a student again. The rules of the "adult" world simply don't apply to a student. Today is an example - I don't have class today. While the rest of society are back to work after a 3-day weekend, I'm still here at home, taking the time to blog. Ahh, the simple pleasures in life!

I've been practicing cooking at home for the past 3 days. Its more in order to gain the confidence in the kitchen more than anything else. Last Saturday, I tried my hand at making stock. My chef instructor mentioned something during last Friday's class that struck a chord in me and motivated me to prepare my own stock - "You cannot call yourself a good chef, unless you know how to prepare a good stock." Thus, I took up the challenge and made myself chicken stock over the weekend. I'm pretty happy with the outcome. I could say that I made a textbook preparation of stock.

On Sunday, still feeling confident from the day before, I once again challenged myself to cook. This time, I tried making tomato sauce from scratch. None of that processed, heavily colored stuff. However, my tomato sauce was not as successful as my stock experiment. Taste-wise, I believe I made a passable, borderline good sauce. My shortcoming on the sauce were on two things. The first being that my sauce was not thick enough. The second was that it was not as red as we made in class. I analyzed where I could have missed something and I concluded that it was probably from the lack of flour (thickness) and tomato paste (color). Anyway, there will be more opportunities to practice to come, what's important to me was that I gain the confidence to cook.

Yesterday, I helped my mom prepare a traditional chicken milk soup, also known as "sopas". I did the mise-en-place of the vegetables as well as shredding the boiled chicken. We also used the chicken stock that I prepared the other day. The verdict: dishes really do taste better when made with authentic stock. It adds a different dimension to food. Using the processed stuff, laden with MSG doesn't give food the authenticity from preparing things from scratch.