8/30/2017

In the wake of Hurricane Harvey's destruction, I've finally been able to get out of my house and help out with collecting, sorting, and putting together donations. Having to sit at home while most of the ways out of my neighborhood were flooded entirely, I had a lot of time to think about the impact of natural disasters and really take in all of the news coverage of the flooding and resulting displacements of people. Seeing the devastation at an age when I'm actually capable of really comprehending just how badly people are affected by severe weather only gave me the desire to get out and do something, and today has been a good start to get myself working. With Post Oak hosting their donation drive, I decided I would head over and not only donate, but stay and help organize the supplies other people were bringing. Working there really helped to serve as a reminder that there is still hope after a disaster, because even if everything is going awfully there's still a chance for recovery with people working together.

Summer Cooking- the Reflection, part 1

Over the summer, I worked on many occasions on improving my cooking, focusing on learning new recipes and then further improving them as much as I possibly could. For a large part of the second half of summer, I first learned, then gradually improved my bread baking skills, messing around with different ratios of white to wheat flour, allowing it to rise for different times, changing cook times and temperature, and adjusting the amount of time I was kneading the dough for. While cooking has always been a favorite activity of mine, if I want to get anywhere in the culinary industry I not only need to work on the quality of my cooking, but also on the speed which I can get good food out of the kitchen and onto the plates of any customer.

One of the dishes I worked on this summer was a stir fry, which I cooked alongside Caleb Han. The two of us decided to make enough stir fry for 12-15 people, since I was hosting an event at my house, and we both wanted to do something relatively simple as part of the process.

The meat portion of the stir fry was a teriyaki chicken, which we mixed with a vegetable blend containing sugar snap peas, mushrooms, carrots, water chestnuts, and more, all designed to be both healthy and filling as possible. 

 This is only about half of the meat and the vegetables mixed together- the other half is in the pan from the first picture! The hardest part of this process was making everything cook evenly, since we were working with such a large quantity of ingredients. If anything is under-cooked, it can ruin someone's day with food poisoning afterwards, and that's something I'd rather not cause anyone.

After everything was cooked, all there was left to do was mix in more teriyaki and finish cooking the rice! As most of stir fry is the vegetable and meat mix, there wasn't as much rice as there was other ingredients, but there was still enough for most people to get themselves a second helping.