The soul afraid of dying that never learns to live

The afternoon was heavy, and remembering that particular afternoon i overheard was equally bad but unloading it made it feel like it was archived, and i can do without it. Maybe im not brave enough, not rude enough. Walls don't have ears, but people do. And yujun's right, i should be doing what i like and not be wavered by anyone else.

Reading Tender at the Bone made me think about the food i've grown up around. My mother is the complete opposite of Ruth's, i never really noticed the painstakingly meticulous way she will sift through every spinach leaf and peel the hardened part of the stems off until I ate those hard, occassionally brown ones from the stalls out of home. My mother would never have anything but fresh food in the house, which means that she goes to the market once every two days to pick fresh cod, tofu and broccoli that is always present in the freezer. We are prohibited from consuming anything that comes even close to the expiry date, and i have never seen mold on bread, ever.

Some people cook for the sake of cooking out of necessity, but my mother cooks with a generous dose of love. She never cooks when she is angry, moody, or senseless, because she knows that even herself wouldn't be able to down the most extragavant dishes cooked in that frame of mind. We have no microwave oven in the house, my mother wouldn't see anything of them. To her, food that is cooked is meant to be eaten while hot, heated food would defeat the whole purpose of having 3 meals a day. "You might as well have all your meals at one go," she would say very curtly.

I didn't grow up around my mother's kitchen. I grew up peering over her mother-in-law's stove. Before my mother stopped working, I lived with my grandmother, whose cooking my mother never did really approve of. My grandmother cooks on a whim, based on instinct, which is ultimately the least stressful method to cook for the ten children she raised. My mother, on the other hand, would plan every ingredient she used for the next meal.

My grandmother, depending on her mood, would buy different things. Most part of my memories elude me, but she once carried home a whole duck, complete with petrified eyes and a beak by the neck and put it into a large pot to brew. She put it on the tiny dinner table and showed me how exactly to cut up the duck before giving me a chunk of breast meat, which is actually the tastiest part and not the commonly thought drumsticks, while she herself sucked on the neck.

So I grew up tasting braised pig's trotters, tender cheek flesh of fish, thick-smelling mutton soup and potatoes stuffed with sardine cubes. The way my grandmother cooked was almost careless, pouring water and throwing bits of sliced pork, cabbage and shrimps into fried fish, but it would taste fabulous. The only thing I never experienced when young was spicy food, which is something I am still trying to grapple with, because sambal overwhelms the original salty taste of fish from the sea.

I lived with my aunt during the holidays, and the only meal she would make would be spaghetti out of a box, and button mushrooms from a can. I feel relieved that her maids are somewhat experienced. My mother makes spaghetti too - from scratch. The gravy would be pumped out of fresh market tomatoes and the oregano sprinkled on, the abalone mushrooms from Cold Storage.

Oh i could go on and on, i hope i haven't bored you till death if you read all that, but i have work to do and i'll probably continue writing privately another day (: