My favourite niece, Ah Hong, is here for a short holiday. She has asked me to cook some of her favourite food before she returns to her parents in Johor Bharu.
Using WhatsApp, she sent me a list of her favourite food weeks before she came here.
After enjoying lunch at a new eatery in Kuching City with some friends recently, I sent her pictures of the food we enjoyed.
She immediately replied, “The food looks nice.”
Her next line was, “When I come back, cook beef tripe, pig liver and ‘keladi’ (yam stems) for me, Aunty.”
My reply was, “No problem. Why doesn’t your mum cook them for you?”
She replied, “She doesn’t know how to cook them.”
“Cannot be,” I answered.
“I asked her to cook, but she said she didn’t know how.”
That ended our conversation on WhatsApp. It left me wondering if Hong’s mother, my younger sister, really didn’t know how to cook the food or she was just making excuses to avoid cooking them.
The next day, she told me on WhatsApp, “Auntie, I want the seaweed soup you cooked before.”
Ah Hong is my favourite niece because she keeps in touch with me almost every day on WhatsApp when she is away from Kuching.
To me, one of the most useful technological inventions is definitely the WhatsApp. It has kept families and friends close to each other’s hearts even though they may be thousands of miles apart physically. Thank you to Brian Acton and Jan Koum, former employees of Yahoo! for inventing WhatsApp.
Ah Hong will be going back to Johor Bharu this Wednesday. Ever since she came back last Wednesday, she has been busy keeping in touch with her former classmates and schoolmates, going out for breakfast or having drinks with them.
She has also been busy window shopping and visiting the supermarkets with me. So far, I have managed to cook beef tripe soup for her. She enjoyed it tremendously and, in the process, made me very happy.
The biggest compliment to a cook is for someone to really appreciate the food he or she has painstakingly prepared.
I cooked the beef tripe soup according to my late father’s recipes. My late father was a better cook than my mother. Every year, on Chinese New Year’s Eve, he would come home from work just to cook the reunion dinner for the family.
Because I helped him in the kitchen, I was able to learn a few family recipes from him. Besides beef tripe soup, I also learnt to cook braised duck, the famous Hainanese salted fish and pork soup as well as my father’s style of cooking fried mee. All these recipes remind me of my late jovial father and make me realise how much I miss him.
Yesterday, I bought some pork liver for Ah Hong and showed her how to fry them. She likes to eat but until this trip, did not show any interest in learning how to cook some of her favourite food.
At age 24, I am glad she has finally realised that it is time for her to learn. After I taught her how to fry the pork liver yesterday, she remarked, “It is not difficult to cook this dish.” “Yes, it’s not difficult,” I replied. Indeed, when there is a will, there is a way.
My maternal grandmother died decades ago, not long after I left high school and began working in Kuching. She was a good cook and made good snacks. She lived in Kanowit (now about an hour’s car drive from Sibu) while I lived in Sibu as a schoolgirl.
My siblings and I would spend the long year-end holidays with our grandparents in Kanowit. Like my niece, Ah Hong, I had my list of favourite food but I never told my grandmother about them.
But the old lady was intuitive. She would do her best to cook some of my favourite food like boiled yellow tapioca and fried tapioca leaves during the long school holidays. Even though she taught me how to fry the tapioca leaves, somehow, they do not taste as good as when she fried them for me. Until today, I still think my grandmother cooked the most delicious tapioca leaves in the world.
Every time I eat fried tapioca leaves, I think of my grandmother and my time with her. My grandmother had long passed away and as I write this column, I realise how much I miss her.
There are two more dishes I have to cook for Ah Hong before she leaves Kuching – seaweed and pork soup and ‘sambal ikan bilis’.
Yes, I will cook the seaweed and pork soup and ‘sambal ikan bilis’ with pleasure. But this time, I will make sure I share with her the recipes too. As her aunty, it is my responsibility to pass on the family recipes to her.
Ah Hong has decided to forgo the yam stems.
“The last time I ate some, I had to go to the doctor because my throat was itchy. I don’t want yam stems this time,” she told me yesterday.
One of the lessons I have learnt in life is that there is nothing more comforting than home-cooked food when you miss home.
In the case of Ah Hong, although she now lives in Johor Bharu with her parents, home to her, I guess, is my house in Kuching. That was where she lived for more than 20 years while she went to school.
Whenever she misses me, her grandmother and Kuching, she can cook some of her favourite food. Maybe then, she would not feel so homesick.
