How/What to Eat?

Imagine......

That during the day you felt like you wanted to go grab dinner together with your best buddy. However, you realise that you are only left with $10 and your friend is out of money. Knowing that going out to eat would be too expensive, you decided to invest the $10 to try cook something.

In all seriousness, this is what the assignment is basically about: "Cooking/preparing balanced/healthy dinner for 2 with only $10 to spend!" So here are the few steps that I took to completing this task...

1)The plan

First up is to plan exactly what I would want to prepare for the meal, given that I have a limited budget of only $10, I had to decide and choose wisely about what I want to prepare in order for the meal to be balanced in terms of nutrition. I decided to go for a more western approach by not having any rice or noodles in the meal. This would open up the selection of ingredients and reduce the cost needed for the meal as I feel it is not necessary to have such common staple food found in Singapore.

Next, I knew that I was going to include meat into the mix, but the question is 'what kind of meat should I include?' The first kind came into my mind was salmon/fish as it is proven that fishes have a multitude of vitamins and do also contain a good amount of proteins in them. However to my shock, the fishes that were sold in the super mart near my house cost almost $6 to around $8. Without a choice I had to choose the next best thing, either chicken or pork.

After comparing between the two, I decided to choose pork as I managed to find a relatively big portion that was also cheaper then the average chicken that I could find which were also big. Aside form the pork, I also got egg as I knew that both my friend and I enjoy eating eggs. The good thing about eggs are that they contain vitamins A, D, B-12, B-6 as well as iron and proteins.

Vegetables were next as vegetables are known to be good sources/common sources of carbohydrates. I decided to get both carrots and baby fine beans as they were rather cheap and are also easy to prepare. The total cost of the ingredients is $7.44.

2) Preparation prior cooking.

This stage is where we get all the the food ready and prepare the necessary cooking equipment that we are going to use for the meal.

1) Frying Pan & Cooking oil

2) Chopping block

3) Small bowl & Salt for Eggs

4) Cooking pot with water to Boil Vegetables

5) Defrosting of meat.

6) Defrosting meat 6 hours prior to cooking.

3) Cooking of the meal.

It was 6:25 pm, 35 minutes prior to the appoint dinner time...

First off, I rinsed the defrosted meat, chopped it into halve and also cutting each pieces in the middle horizontally to make each piece thinner. Before moving on, I realised I made a mistake of not marinating the meat a few hours before hand. So I marinated the meat with both light and dark soya source, leaving the source to be absorbed by the pork. It was the only chance left to marinate.

Next, I shredded the outer skin of the carrot. After which I chopped the carrot along with the fine baby beans. After chopping the vegetables, I turned on the kitchen stove to start the fire to allow the water boil and placed the carrots in first to start boiling it.


Taking the small bowl, I cracked 2 eggs and stirred them together after adding a small pinch of salt.

Next I took the frying pan and added oil and heated it up over the fire. Once heated, I poured the egg onto the frying pan for a few seconds after putting onto the serving plate, resulted in the egg becoming a scramble egg. This step was repeated because there were two people and there were also more then enough eggs to go around.

After the scramble eggs were finished, shifted my attention to the meat and placed a layer of corn flour over the meat to improve its texture.

I cleaned up the remains of the eggs that were stuck to the frying pan using water and drying the pan using kitchen wipes. After the frying pan was wiped clean, I added oil and placed it on the back on the stove.

At this point I quickly placed the fine baby beans into the same boiling pot to boil the beans together with the carrot after checking if the carrots have already soften. After this step I took a rough 7 minutes break in the kitchen to give the meat more time to marinate before I placed it on the pan.

Once the 7 minutes passed, I turned the stove on to heat up the frying pan. When the pan was heated enough, I placed the meat on the pan to fry. During the early stages of the frying process, I turn the stove to a lesser fire output to check on the vegetables. Having used a fork to test if the carrots and fine baby beans softness, I decided to leave it on for another 8 minutes and set a timer as I decided that they weren't soft enough.

Shifting my focus back to the meat, I resume the original output of the fire from the stove and focused on not getting the meat to become overcooked until the 8 minutes timer was up.

This time when I checked on the vegetables, they were soft enough for my liking. I turned off the stove and served roughly equal portions on both plate. Now all that was left was the meat.

To my delight, the meat was more or less ready. It was at this time the door bell rang and I went to check, it was my friend! So I invited him in and got him a cup of water and informed him that the meal will be ready in another 5 minutes.

The meat was ready, so I served the bigger portion to my friends plate and the other on my own plate.

3) The meal (conclusion)

So dinner was served, the review went down like this....

I got my friend to try the meal and had him give a rating ranging from 0-10 and also some feed backs on the pros & cons of the meal. Here is the response:

Rating: 7/10

"Despite the slight budget constraints to prepare a meal for 2, there was enough to serve out a good serving of food for a regular home cooked meal for the two of us. The meal consisted of steamed baby beans, carrots, scrambled eggs and a main of pan fried pork.

The overall rating of the dish was pulled down due to the taste and texture of the dish, which was understandable due to the lack of cooking experience prior to this assignment. Fortunately, the steamed French beans and carrots turned out well. They were steamed well, that the vegetables turned out to be soft, however not overly soft. The vegetables retained their slight sweetness which was a plus on the subject’s overall score on the dish.

The eggs were also nicely done, added with milk so that the scrambled eggs were soft and light. However, I felt that the egg was a little bit too salty for my liking

Finally, down to the pork. Due to the lack of cooking experience, the subject bought the wrong cut of pork, which when pan fried, resulted in the pork’s texture to be rather tough. Additionally, the subject did not marinate the pork properly, and only marinated the meat roughly 30 minutes within my arrival. This resulted in only the pork’s surface having taste while the rest of the inside of the pork remained rather dry and bland.

Overall, I would say that though this dish was not exceedingly well done, it was still edible, though I do not recommend others to partake in it. However, I believe that it was mostly because of the lack of experience that these errors were made which resulted in the dish turning up to be sub-par. Had Gabriel have more experience, I am sure that the dish would have turned out to be much better."

4) Final thoughts

I will be honest that I was a little bit shock to even get a 7/10 for my meal and personally I feel that my friend's points were all valid. Personally enjoyed preparing this meal right from the very start during the planning phase. Knowing that cooking can be this interesting and fun, as well as knowing how affordable it can be, I have actually started to take a liking and appreciation of home cooked food and would very much like to start cooking different meals in my own time!

Through this process I have also become more conscious about the food that I am eating outside. Now I have the habit of trying to learn the different kinds of dishes that in the hawker canters/ food courts. Even within Singapore Polytechnic itself, there many different types of ways to prepare the same dish depending on the type of store you buy them from, i.e. Chicken rice/ Ayam penyat.

I think why it is important to have a mix of variety of foods in Singapore is because in a multi-culture society, where locals mostly love to eat, it can be a easy way for people from different backgrounds to try to understand know other cultures better. From the simplest things like knowing how certain dish is prepared or if there is a significant ingredient in certain dish can help create social cohesiveness and appreciation for people of different cultures.