Mom always said that dad was very easy going with food. It was true that dad never complained. . . until later. When I visited him at the hospital toward the end of his life, he would say, “Your mom can’t cook.”
With her knowledge in nutrition, mom paid great attention to balanced meals. She was into low- salt before it was a “thing.” Everyone else had soft white rice. We had chewy brown rice. She didn’t like the store-bought sugary soy milk. So, she made it at home, starting from soaking the beans overnight. After juicing the beans, she would mix the pulps with flour to make pancakes. Despite the lumpy texture and slightly acidy taste, we ate the pancakes obligingly because mom said they were good for us.
She didn’t like deep frying. She had little patience for slow cooking. Instead, mom had a system with which she could stack up various dishes in the pressure cooker and make a whole meal all at once.
Most people started their days with porridge, pickled vegetables and other small dishes. . . similar to Korean banchan. Mom said the traditional breakfast was nothing but carbohydrates, and it wouldn’t give us enough energy. We had toasts with jam, eggs and milk.
To save time, she always made noodle soup for lunch, most often with leftover from the night before mixed in the broth. If she wasn’t pushed for time, she would let us make wontons—no fancy shape, just bundles with ground meat in the middle. We loved watching the bundles float up in the boiling water.
Mom tried hard to keep us happy. We never had allowance to buy candies or junk food. However, there were always snacks when we get home from school. She took cooking classes with a few friends. Since she didn’t really follow the recipes carefully, her successful rate at reproducing the dishes was not very high. To her credit, she did learn a few techniques that she passed on to me.
When we were old enough, she let us help rinsing rice and peeling vegetables. She taught us how to fry eggs. Little Cop was good at making perfectly shaped over-easy, not too runny and not too hard.
One of our cousins lived with us during his high school years. One day he came back to visit. Mom made three dishes for dinner. They all had daikon radishes, carrots and peas. One with radishes and carrots in small cubes; one with them in thin slices and one in triangles. All three of us looked at her—speechless.
Still, I miss a few things from mom’s kitchen. Growing up, my favorite dish was tonkatsu, Japanese style breaded pork cutlet. I would eat so many pieces so fast that, every time mom made tonkatsu, she had to ration them.
I also liked steam cucumbers stuffed with ground pork. Taiwanese cucumbers are large and juicy. Peel; cut each one into large sections; remove the seeds; stuff the center with seasoned ground pork; and steam them. Make sure to not over cook them so the cucumbers are still firm, and the meat melts in the mouth.
Every year as the weather turns cold, I would crave mom’s duck and taro root stew. With ginger slices, soy sauce and a little bit of sugar, it is heart-warming. And, it will not require much preparations. (Oh, make sure your hands are dry when cleaning and peeling taro. Otherwise, they get itchy.) Dad was helpless in the kitchen, but he was good at peeling taro using a broken piece of glass. He loved them as much as I did.
Mom rarely make anything that required long and detailed preparations. But she would make a soup with pickled cabbages, fresh bamboo and pork intestines bound together with ribbons of dried gourds. The intestines need to be cleaned inside and out multiple times and blanched in seasoned (rice wine and herbs) broth first. The pickled cabbages need to be rinsed; and the gourds, rehydrated. Then all the ingredients needed to be sliced into thin 2-3-inch strips and tied into bundles before being simmered for a long time. The soup is wonderfully refreshing.
I started cooking early. It took me a few tries to be comfortable with all the tools. Soon I was able to mix different flavors and create my own dishes. I did, however, follow mom’s system, stacking things up in the pressure cooker.