From My Mum's Recipe

Yesterday I tried out one recipe from the old lady's book. A very simple one called Ayam Masak Ros.

It is a chicken soup.  With not so much spices.

It makes a mildly fragrant, woodsy, comforting and wholesome kind of soup, with uncomplicated taste.  Little oil.

Ayam Masak Ros

Recipe

1/2 chicken pieces
2 tsp of coriander seeds.
1 tsp of pepper corns
4 shallots
4 garlic
1/2 inch ginger
6 cloves. 3 pounded.
Salt

Pound coriander seeds, pepper corns and 3 cloves with ginger

Boil chicken in water in a pot. Water just above the chicken, not so much

Pound the shallots and garlic.  Fry with remaining cloves in a little oil.  Add the other spices and fry till fragrant.  Add all this to the boiling chicken. Salt to taste.  You can omit oil all together. Just pound and add to the pot.

Apple cake recipe

As you know, my cakes have been modified to cut sugar and fat. So it is not the best cake in the world but a substitute to not eating cake at all and to me, it is good. I put alot of fruits or veg in my cakes.

5 apples, diced.
3 cups of floor.
1 cup of brown sugar
3/4 cups of veg oil
3 eggs
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp cinnamon powder


Sieve the floor and other dry ingredients.

Mix egg with oil. Add sugar and vanilla. Add dry ingredients.  This is a thick batter.

Add diced apples.

Bake in 180 oven for 45 mins or so

It will come out a bit hard at first but leave it for a few hours and it will become moist and delicious.

Rewriting the old lady's recipe book.

Eventhough my mum did not cook much, but she did went for cooking classes.  ( I  think she went more to make friends...)

The 45 year old book is tattered and torn.

The legacies she left to us. I could write pages on that.  And this recipe book is one of them.

Apart from the book, she showed me that we should write down every important matter, because that's what she did.  In the address book are  listed down dates we got married,  move houses, gave birth, got divorced, dates when someone dies,  when she employed a new teacher, or when a teacher left, what date she payed for what, all is jotted down doggedly,  for the records.

So I am rewriting this recipe book and will try insyaAllah each of them out.  I have to move on from my stir-fries and 'campak-campak' dishes, enough of my egg soup and tumeric fried beef and chicken soup.  Let's see what the old lady had compiled during her hay days and would we stumble upon a killer recipe that can  make me rich and famous. Hey....who knows...as soon as I can comprehend and  make out  her Jawi transcriptions which I read at a snail pace. A slower snail.

This is one of her few tangible legacies that I manage to keep. I hope I can do the honour of passing it down to the girls and their children. InsyaAllah.

Noriah's chocolate cupcake

                        Noriah, a fellow single parent made this for me to send to the mosque.

Apple cake

Cooking is....

Cooking is many things to many people.  From what I see in Jamie Oliver, cooking is not only his passion, but his life and soul, that when we watch him cook, we know he is having a hell of a good time.  From Anna Olson, she is a magician baker because she can poof  beautiful cakes with her magic hands.  To Chef Lyn in Pitching In, she is the ambassador of great cooking,  and Anthony Bordain, food is his ticket to discover the world.  Yes, I watch a lot of AFC on channel 703.

To most of us, cooking is an act of nurturing.  The basic primal task of feeding our lot, a part of our natural makeup as a mother to nurture our family. The picture of a nest, a mother bird with a worm in her mouth and a few nestlings with agape beaks epitomize this task. There is this idiom, 'air tangan' which means that when a mother cooks, their hand exudes a chemical that bonds her to her family or whoever that eats it.

To some of us, cooking is an act of love. We can buy food outside but we want to cook ourselves because of many reasons. For working mothers,  they would cook during the weekends or whenever we can. To bring the family together.

To many it is a talent that can make money and be a source of livelihood.

It is also a hobby, to try out the recipes when you have the time.

To me,  it is more, because you cannot go wrong with it.  Cook up something to visit the elders, to give the sick,  to cheer up someone, to share, to say sorry, to give as charity.  I am a woman Jamie Oliver in a closet.

In every meal there is a story

It was said, in a meal there is a story and every story there is a journey.

This is one loaded statement that can bring a foodie back to many happy places in the past because when there is food, there usually is love and family and friends. It makes you feel all fuzzy inside.

When we cook, it is not just love that gets into our dish, but like I wrote, a story and a journey.

The first dish I  actually cooked seriously was when I was around 16 years old, for my great-grandmother, Mok.

It was always the both of us in the house and she was so old that the house was permeated with ancient air and old stuff.  Old values, old teachings, antiques items like the 'gobek' and tepak sireh or betel leaves set, her worn out  'selendangs'  or scarves that smells like betel leaves that she would cover her head, even in the house. In the kitchen, brass pots with handles like ears  and brass ladles that would fetch a high price at the flea market today.

That day she was not feeling well, so I thought I'd do the cooking and had my heart on a crab dish.I guess I always did things that was beyond me, even now. I took a bus to the wet market, something I have not done before and felt quite lost when I arrived there, among the older folks that were coming and going with purpose and familiarity

I practically traipsed slowly on the wet smelly flour to find what I wanted.

It was a long way to the market and back but it was a new day for me with the crabs in my hand.

Mok taught me how to cook it and when we both sat and ate lunch, she did not comment much.  But Mok did not believe in complementing people because she said it would make them cocky.  So I never really knew how my crab dish fared that day.