Heartcracks and egg magic

I read once that tiny fissures can appear on a human heart; the cracks driven by stress hormones. It turns out that a broken heart isn’t just a way of describing an emotional sojourn.

When life throws you a curveball or three, how do you react? People deal with challenges in different ways and with me, my cooking routine can go one of two ways. I either try to lose myself in detailed, painstaking cooking that requires hours of attention or I shut down and stop cooking. With a mountain of baking ahead for a tea party this weekend, I figured I could give myself a little break until then. Lately, it’s all I can do to boil an egg for dinner.

Sometimes, a boiled egg can be more than just sustenance. You know how things are crowdsourced? In my Chinese family, I was crowdraised by my grandparents, uncle, parents and family friends. The house was never empty and it’ll sound peculiar but I must have been about 10 years old before I found myself at home without an adult. On that occasion, I ended up trailing behind my brother who was seriously annoyed to find he had acquired a new shadow. A shadow that whimpered and clutched at his sleeve, no less.

I was eight years old when a boiled egg was the centre of one of the strangest experiences of my childhood. I’d stayed home sick from school for several days. I remember lying prone on the couch, as my throat felt like a barbed wire fence, strewn with harsh spikes. My grandmother’s hands feathered my brow to gauge my fever and then quickly retreated. My eyes stayed closed as I tried to sleep to escape reality for a while. Nudged awake by my grandmother, I was told to sit up and hold still. I yelped as my back was suddenly scalded. Turning around, I found my grandmother holding a single egg in her hand. She asked me to lie on my stomach instead if I was going to fidget.

Wincing, it felt as if my grandmother was repeatedly stabbing a hot poker onto my innocent, bare back. Meanwhile, my only thoughts were:

1. What was my grandmother doing?
2. How could she hold that freshly boiled egg without burning herself?
3. When will this ritual skin burning end so I could sleep?

I’d forgotten that my grandma had asbestos hands that could withstand very hot temperatures. Come to think of it, I’ve developed asbestos hands myself over time. After about five minutes, she relented and let me rest. Huffing, my grandmother said that she was only trying to help me get better. By this point, I was feeling hard done by and sulkily asked if at the very least I could eat the egg now if she was quite finished with the treatment.

Good ol’ granny reacted as if I’d asked for a shot of hard liquor! Insisting that the egg had absorbed some of my fever and illness, she carefully peeled away the shell from the still hot egg. Now this is where the story gets interesting. From memory, the hard boiled egg emerged with tiny bubbles captured within the white, not dissimilar to a Aero chocolate bar, except not quite as bubbly. I mentioned this to my mother recently who says that my mind is playing tricks as it would have been the yolk that had the holes. Who knows where the truth lies?

I honestly can’t recall if I recovered any quicker after the boiled egg treatment but I was always cocooned in the intense concern of my grandmother and for that, I’m grateful. I was spoiled rotten by my grandparents when I was young and not with material things. This is how I always remember my grandparents and not how they are/were in their later years when time had taken some of its revenge.

Papery skin, cranky tantrums, halting steps and eyes that light up when I enter a room. All of these, I find bittersweet. Of late, it wearies my heart in a way that makes the small, petty machinations of others seem very insignificant.

I’ve got more important people on my mind and in my life.

Duck and pickle soup

Duck and pickle soup

My grandmother would sometimes cook this soup when I was growing up. We had the traditional set up of parents and grandparents living together in the same household. Returning home from school in the afternoon, inevitably my grandmother would have magicked up another pot of soup which would be simmering on the stove, gurgling away with promise for four hours. Every night of my childhood, I had soup in some form or another. As a result, Chinese soup endures in my life as a symbol of family and home.

Chinese families often aren’t very physically demonstrative and I’ve read that physical touch helps overall health and longevity, particularly for the young and elderly. Losing my beloved grandfather when I was 11 years old, I resolved to hug my grandmother often to make her stay forever. It’s poignant now, looking back on my 11 year old self; I believed so fervently that I could make the impossible, possible. If only I had held onto that confidence, I could have conquered the world by now! When I hug my tiny grandmother these days, she breathes in deeply and I feel her whole body relax, with her head sometimes slowly dropping to rest on my shoulder. She’s turning 103 in August this year, so who’s to say my hug treatment hasn’t worked after all? The fact she eats a lot of fish, never drank or smoked and avoids sweet and fatty foods may have contributed a little too.

A kind of ‘tea fruit’ – banana leaf dumplings

It’s been a little quiet on the posting front lately. There have been some health dramas in my family and they’ve taken up a sizable chunk of my mindspace.

This post is for a kind of tea fruit – a literal translation from Cantonese of a collective phrase which covers steamed dumplings. They’re considered snacks rather than meals and suitable for eating at any time of the day.

I grew up calling this particular tea fruit something different – using the name from the village dialect of my maternal grandparents. It utilises the exact same filling as the savoury Chinese donuts that I’ve previously posted about. On the weekend, I visited my parents as it had been a few weeks since I’d seen them in person.

'Tea fruit'.

Touching your heart with har gow

The best thing about yum cha is that you get to eat many different things and unless you don’t eat seafood or pork, there’s a huge variety to choose from.

Yum cha literally means to ‘drink tea’, while dim sum is a collective term that encompasses the whole range of things you eat at yum cha. Dim sum translates to ‘touch the heart’.

Pork and coriander wontons

Wontons are one of the few things I’d make with my grandmother when I was young. I’d be watching her wrap them and she’d motion me over to join her. I loved sitting there companionably with my grandmother as we silently created dozens of dumplings for lunch.

A classic wonton recipe is really easy to find online and in cookbooks. They usually contain minced pork, prawns, shitake mushrooms and spring onions or slight variations on this. These pork and coriander wontons were inspired by a Northern Chinese style dumpling I had in a restaurant. They taste very fresh and lighter than the classic wonton due to a lower proportion of meat. Plus as a bonus for us lazy people, it’s less prep work!

Since I was taught to wrap wontons a certain way, I consider it the ‘correct’ method. So I’ve also included instructions on how to do this below. Enjoy!

Wonton filling should be half coriander (cilantro)

Align the wonton pastry so it’s a diamond

Place a small amount of filling towards the base of the diamond

Roll pastry over filling until a small triangle remains at the top, then twist the right and left sides across each other.

Ta-da!