Over the past few weeks, we have been on a strict lockdown in Malaysia. We have been trying to stay busy and one of the activities we have spent more time on is cooking!

I love cooking. I love everything about it, from chopping up vegetables to trying new recipes and, of course, eating it all!

To begin with, we borrowed an astounding cookbook called ‘Red Dot Melting Pot’ from our neighbors. It has recipes from all over the world including South American food, Asian food, Middle Eastern food, and many others. We have made a couple of things using this cookbook, such as Kung Pao Chicken, Gnocchi, and Mango-Pomelo Sago. They were all delicious! The recipes and the ingredients are well explained and easy follow. I recommend looking into it.

We also have cooked a multitude of different noodles and pasta dishes. From the local Langhman noodles from scratch to the delicious Italian Nhoque. We have also made ravioli from scratch (making the dough and the filling), it was fun wrapping the meat in different ways and making different shapes. It was a fun family activity and delicious!!!

My dad made a sourdough starter, which we named Wilson (after the volley ball from the movie Cast Away). It has been fun experimenting with it and had a lot of success. We made pizza (thin crust and deep dish), sourdough bread, banana bread, focaccia, bagels, english muffins and even a carrot cake. The sourdough starter takes a week to make, then you feed it every day and you can use it anytime you want to bake something. If you do not wish to use it for a while you can put it in a fridge and you can keep it in there for a long time. The sourdough starter certainly makes very good bread and we found The Perfect Loaf is an amazing resource for sourdough, with excellent recipes and detailed descriptions of the process.

Since we are in Southeast Asia, our favorite food to cook is Asian food. We can find pretty much all Asian ingredients at the grocery store. One meal that we have almost every day is fried rice. It is really easy to make and you can be creative and try out many different ingredients in the fried rice. From simply using the vegetables available to mixing in shrimp, tofu, peanuts or chicken. We use sesame oil, oyster sauce and soy sauce. It’s easy, delicious and nutritious!

Thanks to the lockdown here in Malaysia, I have cooked a lot of different things and I hope you will too.

I hope this article gives you some ideas to cook and have fun.