Yes, I've definitely been bitten by the cooking bug - I made bacon and chili spaghetti for dinner last night. I know I "complained" about Lee's spaghetti in yesterday's entry, but it's only because he uses sauce right out from the bottle! =P I'm just used to my dad's homemade spaghetti sauce!

It's just strange how cooking food here feels so "instant" compared to what we get back home. Albeit topped up with MSG, being oily, fatty and terribly unbalanced nutrition-wise, Malaysian dishes tend to be cooked with mostly fresh ingredients and from scratch. That reinforces the fact why our Asian dishes are harder to cook. Other than having ingredients in hand and knowing when to put in what, you can never follow them to a tee. It's always about the taste. Did you also ever notice (if you've lived in Australia) how everything here is so health conscious? Lean beef burgers at Macca's, salads and sandwich menus at fast food restos, and a choice of low fat everything at supermarkets! I've tried some, and though I'm a big fan of salads, lean meats are just not my thing. They're so tasteless. Give me my fatty food any day! Heheh...

So yeah, for a nice quiet homemade Valentine's dinner, I improvised on the bacon and chili pasta sauce by adding chili oil for a bit more spice, and Parmesan cheese for a bit more bite. The cheese makes a good replacement for salt, plus I love how it's chewy when it melts. I swear I could've overdone it with the chili oil, if it weren't for my thinking if Lee could take this much sting. Heheh... I think the same sauce can be used with seafood like calamari and prawns because it has a lighter taste than if you made it with beef mince. Lee thinks it would work well with chicken bits too. Anything spicy works for me.

Dessert was a nice balance to the palate after. Lee had bought a delicious Belgian chocolate pudding pair, and it was popped into the microwave for reheating, then accompanied with Sara Lee's boysenberry ice-cream. Yums.

Now I'm just wondering what's for dinner tonite...