COOKING 'OUTSIDE THE WOK'

Along my delightful journey of cooking, I have tried different types of cooking methods: stir frying, deep frying, braising, and even slow cooking (all inside the wok) but so far never try ‘baking’.


Why not baking?

I thought I am not a baking type of a person and I did not even know how to handle the oven. I am the type of a person who prefers simple, easy and free style cooking, and to me baking sounds rather intimidating. For so long, I have been comfortable with cooking inside the wok …….

Until one morning …….

while sipping my coffee, I was craving for oatmeal cookies which I once bought at Star Buck. But I didn’t feel like going out that day and the nearest Star Buck Coffee is around 5 km away from my home …..then I said to myself ‘why not trying to make my own oatmeal cookies?’

But…it means I have to bake.

‘So what if you have to bake’, I challenged myself. The worst thing could happen is I screw-up the cookies. After weighing the pros and cons, I decided to give it a try and start ‘cooking outside the wok’ – get out my comfort zone and start to bake

I checked my kitchen cabinet and yes, I found a bag of oatmeal, brown sugar and unsalted butter. I thought these 3 ingredients were sufficient to create the cookies. I got excited…and here was my simple oatmeal cookies experiment

Ingredients

• 100 gram quick cook oatmeal
• 3 tablespoons brown sugar
• 50 gram unsalted butter – leave at room temperature to melt
• 5 tablespoons water

Method

• Combine the oats, brown sugar, water and melted butter
• Mix the combined ingredients thoroughly into a dough (note: it would be nicer if the dough is added with raisins coz raisins will give more flavor to the cookies).

• Take 1 tablepoon of the dough and shape it into a cookie-form
• Repeat until no dough remains and you will get around 24 cookies
• Cover the base of a baking pan with aluminum foil
• Arrange the cookies on the pan

• Bake in pre-heated oven at 150 degree Celsius (or 300 degree F or Mark 2) with both upper and bottom flame for 30 minutes.

Hey, finally I can bake… and it’s not as intimidating as I thought. And my invented oatmeal cookies were not bad at all …. I love the cookies and it goes very well as ‘the companion of a cup of hot coffee’.