Remembering Mum Part I

Sigh...been wanting to blog but the PC, the terrible PC was down. Then there was the whole long episode of my mum being very gravely ill and eventually she left. Sigh. Then there was the whole phase of everything reminded me of her, yes, even onions. Sigh.

Well, I was making English Onion Soup. I did a lot of chopping and slicing and cutting after my gastromic idol Jamie Oliver (Oh how he had aged!! and expanded much???). Well Jamie cried cutting onions on the DVD, Jamie at Home but not me. Afterall, I remembered preparing loads of onions, kilos of it, with my mum, for my dad's noodle stall business. My mum would tear much even putting on the auntie brown shades, for me, perhaps the contact lenses which i wear daily (I feel naked without them not to mention almost blind), well the faithful lenses protected my eyes from the sulphur compounds emitted that triggered the tears.

Then i remembered i was often asked to run emergency errands while mum was cooking. Unlike me, I am much more organised, she would realised while cooking that she had forgotten this crucial ingredient or that "must have" condiment and rushed me to grab them from the provision shops below our flats in Sims drive. So I literally drop everything to get them for her before the cooking was done. Its usually the corn starch, the dark soya sauce or the canned mushrooms.

I think i pretty much learnt cooking not from watching Jamie though I find his programmes and cookbooks an entertaining godsend. I had afterall, watched over many a pot and wok in action while I was asked to prepare the ingredients. My favourite was the motar and pestle thingy and i remembered crushing the Jacob's biscuits so mum could coat the chickens and prawns for deep frying. Her cooking idol was Fang Tai, Mrs Fang? Mrs Square (iliterally. HAHAHA) she learnt much especially the spring rolls and ngoh hiang ( miss it badly) and the "golden money bags" made from deep frying filled turned out Tau Poks.

As my father's business improved over the decades, we turned to food processors and ready made ingredients like fish meat to prepare the fish balls. When i was in primary school, each morning i would carefully trod through the whole kitchen floor full of stinky fish, yellow fins and another carp like one. My parents would remove the entails, gross, very gross, bloody and yucky stuff and descale the many kilos of fish. They would prepare the fish, to obtain the fish meat as early as 5 am while we get ready to go to school by walking of course, in the eerily dark with the super heavy school bags and thick and uncomfortable shirt and pinafore for the stupid assembly by 645am.