Our Daily Fare

We did not always eat elaborate meals. While my mother cooked all these special occasion meals, threw parties and made cookies and kueh chang to sell, she left the daily meals in the care of the maid.

Ah Seng the delivery grocer came daily and recommended his fresh picks from the market. Without fail each morning, my mother would sigh “Ini hari masak apa?” (“What should I cook today?”), somewhat at a loss about how best to feed her brood with a variety of dishes. Yet, she never truly veered far off from a repertoire that we grew up on, recipes she knew by heart but which upon later research, I realised had been adapted from the cookbooks of Ellice Handy, Tham Yui Kai or Huang Su Huei.