Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.
It was November 2005. My 2 kids and I had just moved from Malaysia to a small town of Urasa in Niigata, Japan to join my husband who was studying there.
We arrived in late October, at the end of Ramadan and that year Eid fell on 4 November. That weekend, the Muslim Society at my husband’s uni held an Eid gathering. A senior student asked me to cook nasi tomato (tomato rice – rice cooked with tomato puree and milk.)
Now, I need to explain my situation again.
1. We had just arrived in Japan only for 5 days.
2. We had a second-hand rice cooker bought by my husband. Unlike a Malaysian rice cooker that had only one button to turn on/off, this rice cooker has many buttons – maybe 6 or 8 and the labels are in Japanese.
3. We did not have internet at home yet. I didn’t even have a basic mobile phone but we had a home phone. I could not google the recipe and at that point, Youtube was not yet discovered by many people including me.
4. I had never cooked tomato rice before. Yeah, I was 37 years old – but I never bothered to learn to cook it before. Other than the plain rice, the only variety of rice that I knew to cook then was nasi lemak, nasi ayam and of course, nasi goreng. Even cooking plain rice using the Japanese rice cooker was complicated enough.
5. Before we moved to Japan, I had not done much cooking for the family. I had a helper at home for 4 years and the helper did most of the cooking. Anyway, tomato rice was not in the list.
6. There was no recipe books – I shipped them from Malaysia together with many dry food items – but the packages had not arrived yet.
7. I told the senior that I had never cooked tomato rice before and she just told me to use milk instead of water.
Well, that’s where it went wrong. I took her words literally. I cooked the rice totally in milk and tomato puree, no water at all.
And it resulted with rice that was undercooked. It was too hard. My BIGGEST mistake was because I had not used water at all. Perhaps people would think that I didn’t have common sense. But nasi lemak is cooked 100% with coconut milk, so when they told me to replace the water with milk, I followed blindly.
Because the rice I cooked couldn’t be eaten, the senior had to come to the rescue.
It’s been 18 years since that disaster. I’d learnt other variety of rice now – biryani, nasi minyak, nasi dagang, nasi kerabu. I never made sushi roll though. I’d just leave some matters to the experts 😁
Fragrance in My Garden 