Notes to her parents

Emily's Valentine's card to her father:

and a threat she left by the bedside of her mother:

Happy Valentine's Day!

43 degrees (6C) today! Unbelievable.

Everyone in good spirits, so we made some treats for Valentine's Day.

We wrapped some of these up and went on a walk (and a hop, skip and jump) to deliver them to our neighbors. 

Two Food Lists

Whenever he finds them, Dave will leave lying around for me, articles and news bits that are about Singapore. Last night it was a magazine picture of the Singapore skyline at night. Today it was this online article about a Singaporean expatriate's quest to rediscover her culinary heritage. One thing stood out - a reference to a quote in a book review by journalist Calvin Trillin: "culinarily, Singaporeans are among the most homesick people the author has ever met".


Interesting. It gave words to the sad disinterest I have towards ethnic food in Minnesota. It isn't the local cuisine - I love the greasy burgers, succulent steaks, Chipotle's burritos, the delightfully smoky wild rice soup, the ubiquitous green bean casserole and the ridiculously addictive desserts. It's the ethnic cuisine that leaves me quite, quite miserable - the awful Chinese stir fries, the unfamiliar Indian curries, the strange Thai noodle dishes. Even the Malaysian hybrid restaurants are inconsistent - the satays are odd and one particular mee rebus was made with spaghetti. I still ate it - because I was pregnant and craving it to the point of stupidity. I will eat pho at Vietnamese restaurants, because it gets quite authentic here. And I still occasionally do some Chinese takeout when I need a soy sauce fix. And - funnily enough - even though disappointment is almost a guarantee, I will still get excited about discovering a new Asian eatery, just in case some nyonya immigrant might be lurking in its kitchen. 


While analyzing Singapore food aloud to Dave this evening, I thought it would be fun to make two lists - because I like lists, and maybe to shed a little light on what makes Singapore food the way it is.

• Singapore cuisine is individually Chinese, Indian, Malay, Nyonya, Japanese, Eurasian etc and wholly fusion. This is why it doesn't exist anywhere else in the world, even in the countries from which the cuisines originated. 
• Everybody eats everybody else's cuisines.
• Vegetables that aren't green and leafy aren't really counted as vegetables. Carrots and capsicums (bell peppers) are garnish.
• A recipe that has very few ingredients/spices (like 10) isn't really going to be worth eating.
• Salt doesn't count as a seasoning.
• Food can be tasty without having flavor. This is not a good thing.
• We never use cheese in our cooking.
• We drink Cream of Mushroom soup as a soup. It is never an ingredient.
• Broccoli is always cooked.
• There are almost as many different kinds of chilli dipping sauces as there are dishes.
• Charcoal in Singapore is charred wood fragments.
• Seafood is often used to season main dishes - fried rice in Singapore (the best kind) is often made with tiny silverfish and dried fish. 
• If we can add chilli to anything, we will. Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut and McDonalds have wisely learned this.
• Stir fries are separate meat, vegetable and egg dishes. They are served in separate side dishes, never served "on a bed of rice"..
• There is no such thing as Singapore Fried Noodles.
• People have five meals a day; all are usually savory and may involve curry: breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner and supper (this is usually post-midnight).
• We love our tofu - all 500 ways of cooking it. It is never tasteless.
• We can make a meal of any number of dishes, none of which need  specifically be a starch, a meat or a vegetable. 
• Barbeques in Singapore do not involve buns - or hamburger patties. Typical barbeques involve fried noodles, sweet potatoes-in-their-jackets, several kinds of meat and seafood, and (oddly) shepherd's pie. Never is grilled meat encased in a bun - people will forgo the carbs so they can pig out on protein.
• Pies are almost always savory and filled with meat.
• Plant leaves are completely viable tableware, and hands are completely viable cutlery.
• Fish is served whole, with head, tail and bones. Fillets are not the norm. In a Chinese restaurant, only old fish is fried. Fresh fish is steamed.
• The entire crab (minus the exoskeleton) is eaten; not just the legs.
• Fish eyes, fish heads, chicken feet and other exciting animal parts are delicacies. I personally don't enjoy them, which makes me an outcast.
• In the old days, coffee-to-go was served in cleaned condensed-milk cans with a carrying loop of raffia string knotted through a hole in the lid.
• Most of our produce is still sold and bought in open-air markets, including meat and eggs.
• No one serves fortune cookies, or eats them.

These are some of the things I have in my kitchen for cooking Singapore food. It is just skimming the surface - there are many fresh ingredients that I buy only when I need to use them. 

• Light Soy Sauce
• Dark Soy Sauce
• Sesame Oil
• Rice Wine
• Oyster Sauce
• Fish Sauce
• Belaccan (shrimp paste)
• Fried Onions
• Tau Cheo (soy bean paste)
• Kaffir Lime Leaves
• Curry Leaves
• Coconut Milk (in cans and frozen pulp)
• Pandan Leaves (screwpine)
• Galangal
• Lemongrass
• Rock Sugar
• Gula Melaka/brown palm sugar
• Rock sugar
• Sesame Seeds
• Buah Keras (Candlenut)
• Chinese 5 Spice
• Jintan Puteh (Cummin)
• Jintan Manis (Fennel)
• Ketumbah powder (Coriander)
• Kunyit Powder (Tumeric)
• Curry Powder (for fish, chicken, beef and generic)
• Cinnamon (sticks, powder)
• Cardamom (pods, powder)
• Star Anise
• Various forms of chilli (fresh pods, dried, powder, flakes)
• Black and white pepper
• Ginger root
• Radish (daikon, preserved)
• Shallots
• Assam (tamarind pulp)
• Dried shrimp
• Peanuts (raw, as well as roasted, ground and frozen).

This year, I must cook. I must not be afraid of how the sofa cushions will reek of stale curry for days after. I will attempt to cook belaccan in my closed garage, so as not to lead (ignorant) neighbors to believe there is a putrid corpse in the vicinity. I will make sambal belaccan. I will plant those lime seeds mum sent me in the post several years ago. If there is to be the inevitable middle-age midsection spread, it will be the result of food worth eating. 

Orchid

:)

Jennaism

Jenna, trying to deflect a hug from Emily: "Nooooooooo, Emily! I'm not cute at all!"

My Reorganizing Mania

I've been in a very weird mood of late - I want to reorganize everything. This must be something pent up over the 5 years since we've moved here and had children too small to accomplish anything house-related. I've organized my sewing room for the first time, for instance. And then I decluttered both blogs. This one wasn't as bad as the other one, which looked like someone barfed links and craft-related nonsense all over it. Bupbilla, which is by far my favorite of the two blogs, just needed to be widened so I could put bigger photos on it. I'm not sure I like all these new fonts I've put on Bupbilla - they look a bit manic - so I might change them all back to Normal soon. 


Anyway, I took away that long list of books the kids are reading, and compressed it into a one-word link in the sidebar - "books". See it? Same list, just hidden. Incidentally, we've started the Five Find-Outers and Dog series. 15 books, so it will be fun. Myself, I've decided I'd like to read a little this year, after ignoring books last year. So I've got several going at the same time, which is how I like to read. I'm rereading the entire Three Investigators series, which is comfort reading over tea and macarons (or between stirs of the frying pan while cooking dinner). Also, Adrian Plass (everything)- because he is such a wonderful writer, and funny even when he's being deeply serious. Two nights ago I started on his novel Silver Birches, intending to read Chapter One, and finished the whole thing before realizing it was almost 2 am. And I bought myself two devotionals to enjoy this year, after finally giving up the idea that I might do the Bible Reading Plan for the second year running (what was I thinking??). 


Also I added a page of whatever music is stuck in my head at the moment - there it is in the sidebar, under "music". Not much on there now, because with that entire album "The Heat" resonating between my ears, there isn't much room for anything else. It managed to oust Bebo Norman, which had moved in and taken residence in my head the whole of 2010 and part of 2009. And Coldplay's Viva La Vida. No mean feat. There is also that beautiful Spanish worship song "Yahweh", though. I must locate and dust off my old Spanish-Learning resources so I can slowly figure out the lyrics and sing along. Wait, I think Dad has our Spanish CDs and dictionaries back in Singapore. Eeeeek! 


Speaking of foreign languages, I said one Chinese (cantonese) word in Emily's and Jenna's class last week during our Chinese New Year presentation; "kum". Felt very clever and multilingual. I only hope I got the intonation right and wasn't actually saying something unwittingly vulgar.


Start of a new week - we're supposed to be bitterly cold before warming up to 30 F (minus 1 C) by Saturday. Whoo - tropical! Have a nice February, all!


P.S. Orchid still alive. !!!!!!!!!!!

Gong Hee etc. and miscellaneous Chinese New Year updates

Happy New Year, everyone!

Check out my fancy CNY display photo! So maccam-nyonya*.

We spent yesterday and today visiting Emily's and Jenna's classrooms, doing presentations on CNY. We dressed up in our Chinese costumes, showed the kids all the lanterns we could find in our house, and gave out clementines and angpows-with-chocolate-coins in them. We do this every year, if the teachers will let us, because it makes us feel festive. Otherwise, CNY is a non-event here. I always laugh at myself for trying to do Chinese things here for the new year because I am so terribly unChinese in practice all other days of the year. Even when I was living in Singapore, actually - hopeless at the language, couldn't figure out the traditions, rolled my eyes at superstition, never knew the right way to behave in Chinese situations, wore black to people's houses etc. And yet here, every CNY, I feel a sort of primal urge to act Chinese for the sake of the kids. How funny - it's almost as if I am their last link to the other half of their culture, and fate couldn't have picked a less knowledgeable broker. 

But let's digress a bit - hey, mum, remember this blouse? I made it when I was teaching and our choir needed a costume. You and I went shopping at Yu Hwa (or whatever that giant emporium was called) and lugged bales of this peacock blue silk brocade back to the tailor's house. And then went to People's Park to ferret out the old aunties who still custom-made these frog buttons. Good old days. You had to be my interpreter because the tailor could only speak Chinese (was she Teochew? I seemed to remember she was).

Back to CNY now. We made pineapple tarts on New Year's Eve. After bedtime. Late, as usual. I aged the leftover egg whites and made macarons (pink, in honor of the occasion) with them today. They are in the oven as I type this. Not especially Chinese, but I'm feeling the effects of low blood-cocoa, and typical CNY goodies are sorely deficient in this important vitamin.

And look at my orchid plant- not only has it not died, it's also opened its first second-generation bud! So kind. Does this count as auspicious? Especially as it's pink, not black?

And here are photos of the kids in their Chinese finery (all bought). Note that I took the photos, not Dave, which explains the... well, everything.

Emily, incidentally, is wearing a Western-hemisphere style Tshirt, specifically Barbie, which is neither Chinese nor new. She has outgrown all her Chinese outfits and hasn't expressed interest in any new ones that might fit her. It is just as well, since I am not motivated to sew Chinese outfits that the kids will wear only once a year. I'd sooner sew them Princess costumes, which they will wear every day if we let them. 

Eat fish maw, everyone! (I am sure there is a Chinese idiom that translates to this, isn't there?)

*nyonya: the Peranakan culture.