Cookin' up a book

The Deli Aprecio Club (DAC) will launch a campus cookbook this August, in line with the freshmen orientation for the next academic year.

Written by current DAC president Jeremy Cheok, 24, and final-year School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering student Wilfred Lim, Campus Cookin’ promotes healthy cooking on campus.

Most of the recipes were tested over a span of three months. The dishes were then photographed over three days in the December holidays last year.

Despite their lack of expertise, the club managed to pull off the feat. DAC business manager Wong Yun Tian credited this to teamwork.

“We had a really great team that was very co-operative and helped out in any way they could,” said the 19-year-old student from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information.

However, the process was not without challenges. What originally began as a collaboration between Hall 12 residents and the DAC became the club’s special project due to red tape issues.

“We also had a very hard time figuring out the recipes from the pictures as my co-author Wilfred left halfway to concentrate on his final year project,” said Cheok.

The second-year student from the School of Materials Science and Engineering said: “We had to constantly rewrite the recipes to make sure they were consistent.”

The 60-page cookbook, which promotes healthy cooking and eating on campus, makes use of ingredients that can be easily bought from stores near NTU, such as Sheng Shiong and NTUC FairPrice.

However, it shies away from local cuisine.

Explaining the rationale, Cheok said: “We felt that you can find local food at any canteen around NTU. But Western food like this, we want to show that it can be very simple to cook yet still taste very good.”