Kang Kang!

Yesterday evening I cooked in the restaurant where I have lunch everyday as promised to the waitresses. I had been told to cook a boeuf bourguignon to properly represent France but it takes a minimum of 2 hours to cook this dish and I have a lot of work right now. I needed something simple and convenient so I chose something that was not too complex to cook and has an ingredient that everyone on the island eats in big quantities rice; I cooked a risotto.


Family Format: 3 dishes in one

I went to the restaurant at 6 PM to start cooking, at that time there are only a handful of customers so my activities wouldn’t disturb the restaurant business. I am not a good cook, my wife does 99% of the cooking not because I am a macho but because to be able to travel with me she doesn’t work. Whenever I cook, I use a great software on my Nintendo DS called cook lessons that guides me step by step. Thanks to this software I have cooked my first risotto, my first boeuf bourguignon, my first lasagnes… This time I didn’t need the DS as it would be my second time to cook that dish. I listed the ingredients we would need:
- 1 onion: OK
- 1l of water: rain water OK
- Butter: OK
- Parmesan cheese: NOK there is no cheese on the island
- Mushrooms: NOK there is no mushroom this week
You would normally need some white wine but you can’t find any wine on the island but it is more of a problem not to have any mushrooms because they should give the flavour to the water in which the rice will cook. Thankfully there was some mushroom soy sauce to replace them otherwise the risotto would have tasted like rice.



As we were preparing the dish, the girls were following all my recommendations, they would sometime even fight to be the one who would stir or cut something. The kitchen was very hot, in such places the only way to get some cold air is through the door or through the window. I learned a few local words that I will try not to forget because the pronunciation is quite different from ours around here. They don’t pronounce the R the way we do and you almost never here the L even if it is there. I explained to them that I would have liked to show them a typical French dish but it would take too long to cook, they seemed motivated to cook for hours. With the work days I have, I don’t have the strength to cook something complex.



It was time to taste the dish. The risotto was not perfect because of the lack of parmesan and mushrooms but the result was tasty enough. If they ask me to cook again I will have to find a dish that has ingredients easy to find on the island. Anyway it was good (Kang Kang).