When I was younger, I remember seeing my mother getting busy and hectic in the kitchen. Growing up in a Taoist family that owns a temple, my mother was responsible for all the cakes and offerings during deities' birthdays and temple events. The number of cakes she has to come up with for such events were usually in tens and hundreds and as they were all usually steamed, little me would be sitting one corner in the kitchen watching all the commotion and feeling the house temperature going higher and higher. There are many kinds of cakes mother makes. 'Fa gao', which literally means raised cakes, pink peach cakes with glutinous rice fillings, plain steam cakes and one of my favorites, red turtle cakes with peanut or mug bean fillings.
Back then I don't really know how to appreciate all these food or the effort my mother put into. I just think of the whole saga as quite a hard chore as I also remember my parents screaming against each other and the house getting hotter and hotter. It was so stressful not just because there's a huge number of cakes to come up with in a 3 room flat kitchen (obviously not as well equipped as compared to commercial kitchens) but also nobody else is helping mother at all. Father would be busy to coordinate other temple stuff and work, my eldest sister would be working in her company and has no luck in the kitchen ever and my brother being a young teenager really can't give a hoot bout all these women kitchen stuff. To top it off, she has to make extra sometimes because the aunties and uncles from the temple loves her cakes and not only they bag away all the cakes up after the events, they sometimes even ask for more and mother would never turn them down.
Since I was the only one left I decided to help mother. As she makes all the flours and tapioca together I will be standing beside her holding a bowl of water or melted sugar, waiting for her cue for me to dribble in the liquid into the huge red plastic mixing bowl. As she shapes out the little red turtle cakes I'll be holding a cut out banana leaf in my little palms, making sure there is already oil on it and ready for her to place the cake on it. It was quite an operation kind of thing which I enjoy helping out and not to mention, father would proudly boast of me in front of friends and relatives telling them what a good helper I was to my mother. Little did I know that all these kitchen practices not only trains me up to cook and bake, but also understand the dynamics of teamwork.
However happy days didn't last long. My mother contracted breast cancer when I was 14 and her work in the kitchen came to a halt. All the cakes since then were ordered from confectioneries and obviously doesn't taste as good. It came as quite a blow for me because not only mom is sick, but also I won't be able to help her in all kitchen action anymore. Food then was horrible and we didn't eat that well but it's from there that sparkled my life in the kitchen and my attitude towards good food and happy cooking. I started handling daily family dinners, to the occasional weekend baking and Chinese new year baking, and right now, I own a little online bakery selling alcoholic and artisan flavored cheesecakes, cookies and designer cakes.
Business has been great so far, manageable for home bakers like me and as irony as it sounds, sometimes my mother end up helping me out. I can't help but to emphasize that if it weren't for my mother, I wouldn't have discovered my affection with the kitchen. As cliche as it sounds, but the kitchen is truly the heart of the home. It's where food was being fed to us from the most sincere and heartwarming soul and nurturing us into our daily lives secretly without most of us knowing. It can be a bad day at work, tiff with a beloved one or a rejected project, but a bowl of hot soup, a little red turtle cake or just that smell of something baking or cooking in the kitchen is all you need to tell you that the world is a better place.
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