Home Cooking

Home Cooking

A guide to cooking with (un)helpful tips by my mother

Helena Wu

Foreword A lot of moms are great cooks. A lot of Asian moms use that great cooking to show affection. A lot of moms carefully and non-verbally pass down their cooking skills along with their affection.

My mom is a fantastic cook. Strong in ginger, clean in taste, she excels in stir fry, soup stews, and well, anything if she puts her mind to it. Food must be eaten piping hot, so vegetables are cooked first and devoured upon placement at the table.

A soup that has been stewing all day must be brought to its final boil before serving. Certain dishes must be cooked in specific pots for a perfect outcome.

My mom cooks to say I love you, but she’s not so great at teaching me to cook. Wheedling a recipe from her can be a delicate extraction process, taken over the course of many house visits or frantic phone calls at the grocery store. She says to watch her cook it, but doesn’t tell me a step-by-step process. “Add enough soy sauce until the color looks right” didn’t make sense to me until I had to try it out for myself.

I’ve been compiling her recipes over the course of several years. I have even adopted her method of freeform cooking, and so the recipes here mostly have measurements. Mostly.

I made an effort, and I hope that it helps and inspires people to try creating some of these recipes as well!

LOTUS ROOT SOUP This is a very traditional soup that I’ve eaten pretty much my entire life. The base involves a pork bone broth, sliced lotus root, more ginger than you think, and steroid-sized carrots that are definitely not organic. I saw it most often in the morning, a sign that my mom had been cooking at 2 am again, but we would always eat it for dinner instead (‘cause letting it sit infuses more flavour and stuff). For a dish with only a few ingredients, it was a lot harder than expected to snag this recipe, because she would always cook it when I wasn’t looking. I usually substitute short ribs for the neck bone, since I find neck bone to be grittier than preferred. You can make this in an Instant Pot (electric pressure cooker), but I think it tastes best if you cook it the slow way.

You know if you’ve made this correctly if you refridgerate it and the soup is a jello-like consistency the next day. Yum.

Ingredients: • 2 lbs pork femur bones • 2-3 strips of spare ribs • 6” worth of ginger • 3 segments of lotus root, peeled and slice 1/4” thick • 2 large carrots, cut into thick chunks • salt to taste • 3 pieces of rock sugar • white pepper to taste

Recipe: Blanch the pork bones and meat in a pot of boiling water for a few minutes. Toss the water and wash the bones and meat in warm water.

This initial process gets rid of impurities and allows the creation of a clear, milky broth. Fill up the pot with water again, add the meat, bones, ginger, and bring it to a rolling boil. Slap the lid on and simmer for 2 hours.

30 minutes before you plan to eat, add your sliced lotus root, carrot, and rock sugar to the pot and continue to simmer. Season with salt and white pepper to taste. Serve with rice!

NOTE: If you overcook this, the lotus root will turn soggy and you will be sad.

Not sure how to cook something? Anything will taste good if you use any variation of these ingredients.

Growing up, I didn’t question what my mom had cooked up for the day. It all tasted good. What was there to ask?

Once I started cooking for myself however, I basically had to rediscover the vegetables of my childhood. There were some obvious ones out there, like napa cabbage, chinese broccoli, and bok choy, but there were a lot of more obscure leafy greens that had faded from memory until I had a taste of them again, whether it was from a visit home, or from an experimental pick at the Asian market.

I made a point of asking my mom what vegetables she bought whenever I visited home, though she usually only knew the chinese terms for them, and never bothered to write it out for me to look up on my own.

I compiled this list of some of my favourite vegetables to cook with. (Yes, I sent a draft to my mother and had her confirm the chinese characters.) This is a reminder to me, and hopefully an introduction to someone else.