厨渣的下厨初体验_大学英语阅读_大学英语-查字典英语网

厨渣的下厨初体验

My first encounter with cooking for myself actually took place the summer before I was a student at Georgetown University. I was staying at my parents’ apartment in Beijing. My mother had stepped out for the evening and left me to, shall we say, experiment with dinner on my own. Granted, I had already made a meal once under her supervision, so I knew how to cook, at least in theory. “Okay.” I thought. “Eggplant, garlic, and soy sauce. Shouldn’t be too hard right?” The next two hours would prove me wrong in every way possible. When I began to cut the eggplant, the knife wobbled to and fro. It was arduous work for a neophyte like me. At times, the blade would slip and glide along the skin of the eggplant, missing my fingers by a hair’s breadth. I kept trying to emulate mom’s deft technique when chopping ingredients at breakneck speed without even blinking an eye. My attempt left the eggplant in jagged shreds. Not so much luck with the garlic either. “Well, I’m only cooking for myself, so things don’t have to look pretty. As long as they taste good right?”That turned out to be a pipe dream as well. While stir-frying the eggplant, I gazed out of the window for a little too long at the Beijing summer sunset, only turning back to the wok when I started to smell something charring. Panicking, I grabbed the soy sauce in one hand and the salt in the other. Whoosh! In one broad sweep, the salt and the soy sauce splashed into the wok in a grand arc. Before I had even registered the ridiculous amount of sodium I had added to my dinner, I began to mix everything together. Finally, I had my meal: blackened eggplant soaked to bursting with salt. Beside me was a plate of flatbread, ready to mask any taste I would encounter. I took my first bite. Every drop of moisture in my mouth was wrung out as the eggplant touched my tongue. It was more like eating eggplant flavoured salt. Not even the flatbread helped. And there was still the entire plate to go. The rest of the night I squirmed on my bed, feeling miserable as I clutched my bloated stomach. The verdict: absolute failure.