Who's calling the pot black...?

Besides taking photographs (a recent hobby of mine), I also enjoy
eating. I love eating Chinese food, Italian food, French food (when I
can afford it!), Western food, junk food, home-cooked food, fast food
and even slow food (those places where you wait 40min for a bowl of
bak-chor-mee).

Usually, people who love to eat will also be rather good cooks. Well,
I'm certainly not a good cook, but I've grown to enjoy cooking. When
did it start? I'm not sure, but I know that my first few attempts at
cooking were absolutely disastrous. There was once when I cooked an
egg, sunny side up. My friend took a look at it (burnt, oddly shaped,
all over the pan) and asked, " What's that?" There was another time
when my mother, the law-breaking stray-dog-feeder that she is, asked
me to boil some rice and bones for a stray that she's feeding. I did
as I was told: dumped everything into a pot, cover the contents with
water, and put to boil.

Since a watched pot never boils, I decided to <i>not</i> watch it and
go surf the net instead. There were lots of interesting web-games and
I played, and I surfed, and I... smelled chao-tar otar from my
neighbour's apartment. But oh well, our neighbours tend to cook
pungent food every now and then, so I suppose the otar smell will fade
before long. After a while, my brother came back and exclaimed "What's
that smell?!?" I complained that the otar smell has been coming from
the neighbour's since 10min ago without letting up. So we bitched a
bit about the smell and he went to the kitchen for a drink.

And lo, the kitchen was smoked.

The watched pot certainly never boils, but the <i>unwatched pot</i>
certainly runneth over!! I grabbed the (smokin') pot, poured water
into it and watched the charred contents sizzle and sputter.
EVERYTHING was charred--meat, bones, rice... (So that was the chao tar
otar!) It was blackened and burnt, not fit for consumption, and had to
be painstakingly scraped out with a metal spoon. Guess who had that
thankless task?

The lingering chao tar otar smell lingered for a few more days before
it decided to have mercy on me and leave our furniture. The pot
retained a yellowish tint at its base after that. My dad told me it's
because I dumped cold water on it while the metal was still sizzling
hot, and that affected the colouration of the metal. The smear on my
reputation was not so forgiving, and my parents never pressured me to
learn cooking after that.

And thus begins my little foray into the cooking world =) If I can
cook, most assuredly, so can you...