I had a cookout at home today! Made 3 out of 4 dishes served at dinner, with the winning dish being my creamy carrot soup. Discovered a great recipe on good old Allrecipes.com -- the very reliable site for all my baking recipes some 4 years ago. Yes -- I haven't been cooking for that long, hard to believe eh? And so my cutting/slicing skills were criticised by the more seasoned cooks in the same kitchen bleah. As for my last baking stint (if anyone remembers) -- it was slightly more than a year ago when I made some chimney-like looking banana muffins :P

I tried an improvised nicoise salad, but it turned out pretty mediocre cos I used mayonnaise instead of say, balsamic vinaigrette. Dessert was also not ideal -- I tried making the black sesame cream jelly from my Jap bakebook, but added way too little gelatine... so it turned out to be a sesame puree of sorts. Though the texture was a bit off, it was still pretty yummy; if not mum wouldn't be stealing my recipes after dinner.

Yay -- feel inspired to cook more in the days to come! Lots of room for improvement heh. Maybe I shld finally go get an oven and start baking all over again :) Boo, it's work day tmr....