Mô tả món quà có ý nghĩa — IELTS Speaking Part 2

The gift I'll talk about is a cookbook my sister gave me when I moved into my first flat. She gave it to me about six years ago, on the day I moved in — she turned up with it and a bag of basic ingredients, which in hindsight was the actual gift. It's not a famous cookbook. It's a fairly plain one with about eighty Vietnamese dishes, the kind you'd find in any bookshop. But she'd gone through it first and written notes in the margins — which steps you can skip, which ones you absolutely can't, where the recipe is wrong. On the pho page she'd crossed out the cooking time and written "double this, trust me". Why was it special? Because it wasn't really about cooking. I'd just moved out and I was, honestly, not coping very well. Living alone was much harder than I'd expected. A cookbook with her handwriting in it meant I had her in the flat, in a way — I could open it and there she was, telling me the recipe was wrong. I still use it, and the notes have become more useful over time rather than less, because now I understand why she was right. She'd probably be embarrassed to hear me describe it this way. It cost her about a hundred thousand dong.