I have been tagged by FooDcrazEE to continue with this Meme about childhood memory, together with Lily. And boy! How quick Lily was with her meme and tagging people. I am not so enthusiastic about writing this up since I am not a very descriptive person, and I don't have pictures to dress up this post. But if I don't get on with it, I would sure run out of bloggers to tag! So here goes....I tend to agree with other bloggers who said that
FIVE is a very small number to choose from a wide variety of favourite food. How to choose, and what to choose? So I would just start with my earliest memory and see what I can come up with
Food in General
I was born in my parents' first home the day after they moved in. Probably it was the stress of the move caused my mum to deliver me two months too early. The house was something you may call a shop house. It was one of a row of about seven (?) houses with shop front, which people later on renovated to make them more homely. It was situated in the favourite part of the town food-wise. There were just so many things you can choose to eat. You can start your day eating from as early as 7.30 or 8 o'clock and continue until mid night. Some of the hawkers would set up their stall outside a house, and pack everything away when they finished serving their last customers. People didn't seem to mind having food stalls outside their home. It was a convenient way to get food, and also, as the landlord you get special discount! When I was about two or three, there was a tambi kueh (aka min jiang kueh) stall outside our house. And since forever there was this char kway teow stall next door.
Before I submitted myself to the life of a student, as a little child and later as ahigh school student who attended afternoon class, we used to have Lek Tau Suan for breakfast.
It is a kind of sweet, rather sticky gruel made from skinless mung bean. The soup is thickened with starch, and usually served hot topped with deep fried chinese doughnuts (cruelers) called Yu Char Kueh. Later on in my life, when I lived in Singapore brieftly before furthering my studies in Australia, I used to like the Lek Tau Suan at Tangling Shopping Centre and occasionally I ate Tau Suan at the basement of Yaohan. Either one of them, can't remember which alredy, has a very nice caramelly smell. Probably it was butter?
Another breakfast favourite that we hardly had as children was Tauhu Hue or in Singapore speak it is Tauhwee. It was so soft, white and served hot with sugar syrup and optionally a sprinkle of ground peanut. The seller's family lived behind our later home. Either because of the benefit of the soya bean or simply genetic (they were hakka), the children of that family all had beautiful clear and pinkish complexion. I said we hardly had Tauhu Hue - because my dad forbade us from eating it. Later on, after we moved to the second home, we could see what went on at the front yard of that family where they spread the beans out to sun dry. They were exposed to the elements, including the family dogs who walk about and around and probably on the beans. LOL...
From around 10 am to noon there were more things to eat. My mum would usually have come back from grocery shopping and would have brought back some kueh for snacking. Sometimes she would bring back Kue Lumpang, a brownish round cake in the shape of a saucer with a little dent on top, with shredded shaved coconut sprinkling. Other time it would be Getuk, a square shape kueh made from steamed tapioca which then passed through a meat mincer to produce thredded square of naturally yellow snack topped with shredded shaved coconut. There are just too many kueh to reminiscent about...And if we didn't feel like having kueh, there were always Kway Kia Teng, Kway Chap, Lontong Sayur etc that were peddled on pushed cart. A little bit later, there were Bakso (Beef Ball soup), Curry Rice and Yam Mieto choose from for lunch.
Night time was even busier. We usually had home-cooked dinner, but supper was another story. The Char Kway Teow next door was the usual supper choice, if we were willing to wait quite long to be served. We called it Geng Chee Kway Teow (economy class kway teow) because the ingredients were just rice noodles, green vegie, and beansprout. You could ask for an egg to be added, and you could even bring your own egg to be added. It was sold by a husband and wife team, with the husband cooking the kway teow and the wife wiping clean the huge leaves used to wrap the food. Later on they abandoned the leaves and used waxed paper instead. But it was always fun watching the precision exercise in distributing the content of the wok (if 5 portions was order, he would produce exactly 5 portions!), and the skillfull hands of the wife wrapping up and tying up the food into little parcels. Later on in my life, no matter how I tried, I cannot replicate the smell of this kway teow cooked by the husband and wife team. I think every cook produces different smells and taste. But still this kind of kway teow is what I like. I missed it very much when I lived in Singapore. The only thing that comes closed to it is the Penang Char Kway Teow. The sweetly flavoured Singapore style is just too different. And I didn't like to have yellow noodle mixed to my CKT either. When I grew older, my palette changed a bit, and I started liking other thing in my CKT apart from green vegie and beansprout. That was the time I upgraded to Gu Bak Kway Teow (Beef Kway Teow). This kway teow story reminds me of a Beo (a kind of parrot) we later had. The Beo was very good at saying "Char kway teow, lok hiam cio", imitating people ordering fried kway teow with chilly. Probably the previous owner was a char kway teow seller.
Bovril
Picture from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovril
Probably the first food additive I know as a child. Being Teochew, rice porridge was the usual breakfast food in my family. My parents used to buy Bovril in bulk for us the children to mix into our porridge. Apart from the nutrition value, it taste darn good! The cap used to be made of metal and it was white, not red and plastic as it is now. And each bottle comes in a cardboard box with picture of a little girl and little boy. Everytime we took out a new bottle, I would ask our ah-yi (helper) to cut out the pictures for me to play with. The habit of eating brown-coloured porridge continue on until we were pretty big. Graduating from Bovril, we moved on to put Maggie Aroma or soya sauce into our porridge. Only when I was in high school I started to take my porridge plain.
China Apple JuiceWhen I think of my childhoon little luxury, I would remember the China-made fizzy apple juice. It comes in a glass bottle with a picture of two red apples on the label. We were hardly allowed to drink fizzy drinks as children, so the few times we had them were memorable. I don't know if you still can get them nowaday, but about 7 or 8 years ago I found them at an eatery at South Buona Vista.
SugusA search on the net reveals that the packaging of this sweet has changed. It used to come as indivually wrapped square pieces that were put together in a tube. It was a very popular sweets among the children .. and I still can recall the jingle... Kembang gula sugus, enak rasanya. Digemari oleh tua dan muda...
My favourite was the avocado-coffee one. I wonder if I still can get it.
Preserved FruitAnybody remember this? These products of China usually comes in a small cardboard box with a plastic pick, usually in the shape of a panda climbing on top of a bamboo stick. There were many varieties of fruit available, but I never cared to look at the picture and would be just pleased to surprise myself when I opened the box. My grand mother used to bring us boxes of these when she came to visit.
Fruity JellyI don't remember the last time I ate this. It is a kind of jelly, not so chewy, rather hard in fact if you compared to Konnyaku. It is very sugary and comes in 3 varieties: pineapple (yellow), mandarin (red) and orange (obviously orange colour!). The jelly is shaped like the original fruit, with each segment individual wrapped in cellophane paper and then all bound together to form a fruit and tied with a red ribbon on top. Hm.. nice!
Hm... enough alredy of my rambling. Sorry for the fragmented stories and lack of pictures. I would update with pictures if I am lucky enough to come across them in the future.
Now I must quickly pass on the baton before someone else beat me to it.
So, here you go:
Everything That Is Or Was Began In A Dream.Play-play in the KitchenLynn's KitchenAfter reading
LavaMama's meme, in which she explained how this chain posting is supposed to be, I decided to "retrace" the route.
1.
Boo_licious2.
Funky Cookies3.
Eternity3.
FoodCrazEE5. Yours truly
