Although our family doesn’t have a tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving, we occasionally cook and eat dinner together. This Thanksgiving, I decided to make paella with my family along with some yam fries and brownies (which are not pictured). I further challenged myself in cooking by trying out dishes I have never tried before.
Starting from paella, I followed the usual steps and prepared seafood, vegetables, rice, and spices (saffron!). Since it was pretty spontaneous, I only used common sense and my culinary knowledge to be a risk-taker in making the dish. I stir-fried the vegetables, poured in the rice, added saffron (which turned out to be the wrong choice), placed pre-cooked (half-done) seafood, and added broth. From the cooking experience, I realized that sometimes a recipe will still come in handy, but it is always enjoyable to take some risks. After cooking the dish, I surfed the internet and realized that there are a variety of ways of cooking paella: some added broth while others used turmeric powder to replace the expensive saffron. As seen in the photo below, the paella isn’t as “yellow” as it is traditionally perceived, that is because the saffron wasn’t soaked in hot water before it was put into the pot–that’s something to think about next time!
Along with the paella, I made some yam fries by chopping some pre-cooked sweet potatoes inside the fridge and fried them with a pan. It was an improvisational dish, and I think using the oven might be a way to cook it next time. For dessert, I made brownies. Something interesting is that Thursday (11/26) marked my second time of the week to bake brownies. My approach is slightly different since I think I adopted a more “eastern” way of making it–I began to eyeball the ingredients and relied less on the electronic balance the second time around, which was an interesting cultural blend for me since that’s our way of cooking dishes. In order to create less of a mess, I used the mixer to chop some nuts into pieces and added some crunch into the texture of the brownies! As a result of eyeballing the ingredients, I added less sugar this time around but realized that there was a slight change in texture: the new batch tasted more like a cake and less like a brownie. Time to do some research on the effect of sugar on brownie texture. 🙂
Overall, I loved the atmosphere of cooking because it naturally bonds family members together. Culinary to me is not only a creative journey but also one of the best ways of sharing–because who doesn’t love some good food!
