little bitty girl

Last night I decided to cook some mee goreng, a Malaysian style stir fried noodle dish. I had been feeling homesick for food. It's funny how I've lived in Canada for almost 15 years and after all this time, I still crave food from my hometown in Malacca. The last time I went home which was about four years ago, no one could understand why all I wanted to do was eat. Even though my mum makes a lot of food from home, it never tastes the same. I think it's because the food is missing the spicy, hot, sultry, sea tinged air of back home.

Sambal is essentially a chili paste used commonly in South East Asian cooking. It varies from ingredient to ingredient and you would use different sambals for different types of food. It is the base or foundation for many types of Malaysian food, from laksa lemak , a noodle soup dish with a spicy coconut broth to beef rendang, a spicy nutty curry.

During the hot summer season when farmers markets are everywhere, my mother will often buy bushels of chillies to make all the various type of sambals that she would use for dishes. For the past few years, she's even given me some every time she makes hers. I really appreciate them and use them very sparingly because I never really know when I am going to get some. One summer, the weather had been particularly bad and good, spicy chillies were scarce. My mum barely had enough to make two little containers. It was the saddest winter for me. I felt like the grasshopper who played all summer and was now starving in the winter.

I've asked my mum repeatedly to teach me how to make these sambals but we can never seem to put aside a long weekend to work it out. It's funny, Mama Kang is very pragmatic about life and death and is always asking us what we children want in the event of her death (be still my aching heart. I can't even slightly think of my loved ones dying without tearing up and my heart feeling like it might explode within itself). She said she didn't want us to fight over anything after and if there was anything in particular that we wanted, we should speak up now. It just so happens that the only thing we all really want is her tattered, hand written recipe book.

The funny thing is, I don't think there are "real recipes" in there. By real recipes, I mean "1 tsp of this, 1 spoon of that" because my mum and I are cut from the same cloth and don't really cook using a recipe. My mum has always said, it's about the "feel" of cooking. Mostly, the recipe book consists of her scribblings of foods we all love to eat and the general gist on how to cook them. My mum, also like myself likes to make her own curry powders, paste and sauces from scratch. Sure, she'll occasionally use some Lee Kum Kee sauce from time to time when she's in a real pinch but generally, she will only use homemade stuff.

I personally think I should get the book. As stated before, my oldest brother Kenny is a good cook, but a lazier one I've never met. He will go out of his way to bake home made dinner rolls but when it comes to cooking, he always says there is a ready made sauce for it. He doesn't like the fussiness of making home made prep stuff like sauces and things. Kelvin, who is the middle child (and therefore sensitive), is not really a good cook. (I am so going to get a phone call or email from someone in my family saying I've hurt his feelings). I mean, he is learning and is getting so much better at it. Gone are the days where he's burnt down a kitchen. That being said, he cooks the way he lives his life. The man is brilliant at his work but such a flibbertigibbet at normal things. He gets distracted and exasperated easily. I just can't see him having the patience to painstackingly go through the processes of making homemade sauces. Then there is me, I am my mother's daughter and will sit by a stove and slowly watch sauces boil. I will bother to make sure everything is done just so. And I would most likely make sure that I make enough so that I can share with my brothers.

Anyway, I think the compromise that my mother and I have come up with is that we will work on the cookbook together. We will go through her book and try to make "real" recipes out of her scribblings, test the food and take pictures. Then we'll eventually have the book bound for the boys and any other friends (I have twelve girlfriends who have been asking for a Mama Kang cookbook for years) who want them. The best part is, I know that the time spent hanging with my mum to do this project will far outweigh any gastromic delight.

Meanwhile, I gotta figure out how to get the Mama to relinquish some of her precious stores for this particular sambal. I use this one the most, to make nasi goreng (Malaysian Fried Rice) and hay mee (Prawn Noodle Soup). After all, Mama still kind of has to make up with me. Especially after the disgraceful cake incident.