Ramadan is coming and I've never been more stressed. Haha. It's not the fasting or anything, I love Ramadan. It's the best month of the year and I'm always very happy to be staying near Geylang Serai where all the lights, liveliness, festive feelings and bazaar food are :)

So I guess the only stress I'm dealing with right now is thinking of what I want to cook for the month of Ramadan. Hahaha. My mother used to be the one preparing our meals but ever since I got married, I kinda have taken over the kitchen so my mom just relax on the sofa and watches her Astro channels. So for the past one week after work, I've been sitting on my bed with my empty notebook just planning our Sahur menu, and so far I only manage to think and write down one dish that I will be cooking: kacang botol goreng belacan. That's it, one. Affa was like "masak simple-simple je." But you know as a wife deep down you'll be all ambitious and thus the stress-yourself-for-nothing. Of course, there's so much lauk that you can cook, I guess my another stress as an amateur cook is the ingredients that you have to prepare in advance to cook that one simple lauk. I want to make my sahur meals prep as easy as possible for myself cause you know you only have that much time especially on a working day, I can't afford to be ransacking the fridge and going through my recipe book every 3 seconds so it has to be chop chop. Real masak-masak pros of course don't need note books to prep, they have it all in their head, but I'm more of a list it down person, for lauk A, I need this bunch of ingredients, prepare the bahan kisar etc and chuck them in the fridge so tinggal nak keluarkan and cook. I have siang and clean all the ikan, kupas all the kulit bawang and gunting cili kering and store them individually ✓

I only started learning how to cook a few months prior to my wedding, and I'm still learning, practicing and improving. My first few cooking used to taste like meh cause I didn't goreng my bahan kisar garing enough. I didn't know how to agak how much garam / gula needed but I got clever and it got a little easier over time. I think it will probably take me some time before I would be that pro, campak anything in the kuali and voila, siap! But young Ros is quite proud of the the Ros now cause young Ros used to not know how to even buka api, goreng telur or cook maggi packet properly #shame. The Ros now is a bit more comfortable in the kitchen, can flip the omelette confidently, handle the crazy popping minyak calmly and cook two dishes at one time, that's some serious accomplishment already. It's true they say, there's no excuse for anyone to say that they DO NOT know how to cook. I used to think that I do not know how to cook but truth is I was just lazy to then. As I'm blogging about this, my head is thinking about all the amount of bawang putih, bawang merah, bawang besar, halia, cili kering that I have to deal with / blend later on, and still thinking of what I want to cook (even google ain't really helping #overwhelmed #calmyosenduk #breathe)