Chinese Noodles for Lunch
0 Comments Published by Alexandria on Sunday, February 4, 2007 at 11:26 a.m..
My mom is a great cook. Like me, she likes to read magazines with different recipes and watch the Food Network and tries them out. Some are successful in our family, some are not. We are lucky to live in a very multicultural city so within reasonable driving distances, you can visit Indian, Chinese, Japanese, etc. grocery stores that carry ingredients native to their land that you wouldn't be able to find at your local grocery store, even in the ethnic aisle.
Because my mom has a staple of regular recipes that she rotates through for family meals, she sometimes forgets about the dishes she's made once or twice which were met with fanfare in our family, so she sometimes needs a reminder to make them again for us. Earlier in the week, while making my favourite tofu dish (strips of tofu simmered with tomatoes and basil) -- a recipe from my mom, of course -- I was reminded of a Chinese dish she made once. It was a Chinese noodle dish: Vermicelli noodles in a tomato broth with these little wrapped bundles. Inside the wrapped leaves was a meat mixture (ground chicken/pork/turkey/beef as per your own preference) mixed with diced shitake mushrooms and onions). The little bundles are meant to be (big) bites that flavour the noodles, which are rather plain otherwise. (Unlike pasta, you don't salt the noodles while you are cooking them.)
This morning, I went over to my parent's house and she taught me how to make them. They were a lot simpler than I thought they would be.
You just take two Chinese basil leaves, one big and one small, and sit the smaller one into the big one. Then you put a quarter-sized amount of the meat mixture in the middle of the smaller leaf. Then you fold the two leaves together like an envelope: You fold the bottom up then the two sides followed by the top (the pointy part) of the leaf. To hold it all together, you insert a toothpick in the middle. To keep each of the bundles from unraveling when they are put in the pot to cook, you put two bundles together on the same toothpick, with the flap side in the middle.
I read a piece of personal journalism once where the writer was a first generation Canadian. Her family immigrated to Canada from China before she was born. Growing up she distanced herself from her Chinese heritage but after she had kids she wanted to learn more about her Chinese heritage for their sake, so that they could know about their ancestry. So she started having weekly cooking sessions with her grandmother, her mom and her aunts. During those sessions she learned how to make the meals that she had grown up on (aside from pizza and McDonald's), but she also heard stories about her mom and her aunts' childhoods. When her mom died some years later, whenever she found herself missing her mom, she would prepare one of the dishes her mom had taught her. The recipes weren't written in her mom's handwriting on index cards, rather, they were culled from her memory and her heart, and along with them, the sound of her mother's voice and her laugh as she explained how to make broth for something or how to wrap a spring roll. They were recipes peppered with her mom's youth, the funny moments and the embarrassing ones, and they were recipes that reminded the writer of her own youth growing up as her mother's daughter.
By extension, this anecdote reminds me of the "slogan" from one of my favourite shows on the Food Network (the Canadian version), called "Fixing Dinner." The premise of the show is real families whose lives and schedules are so hectic that they end up eating a lot of take out or eating at different times of the day, and never sitting down at the table together. Sandy Richard, the host, visits with each family and devises a plan for them where everyone helps out with making dinner, whether it means one person chops the veggies the night before for a stir fry or one person makes extra mashed potatoes that are used another night for shepherd's pie, so that making dinner doesn't fall onto the shoulders of one person (usually mom), and so that more time is spent eating together than making dinner. The "slogan" then is: "Fixing dinner is about more than just food, it's about family."
This morning, while wrapping the bundles with my mom, it made me think of all these things. I was learning a special dish that our family loved as well as spending time with my mom. Plus at the end of it, we got a delicious meal!
Because my mom has a staple of regular recipes that she rotates through for family meals, she sometimes forgets about the dishes she's made once or twice which were met with fanfare in our family, so she sometimes needs a reminder to make them again for us. Earlier in the week, while making my favourite tofu dish (strips of tofu simmered with tomatoes and basil) -- a recipe from my mom, of course -- I was reminded of a Chinese dish she made once. It was a Chinese noodle dish: Vermicelli noodles in a tomato broth with these little wrapped bundles. Inside the wrapped leaves was a meat mixture (ground chicken/pork/turkey/beef as per your own preference) mixed with diced shitake mushrooms and onions). The little bundles are meant to be (big) bites that flavour the noodles, which are rather plain otherwise. (Unlike pasta, you don't salt the noodles while you are cooking them.)
This morning, I went over to my parent's house and she taught me how to make them. They were a lot simpler than I thought they would be.
You just take two Chinese basil leaves, one big and one small, and sit the smaller one into the big one. Then you put a quarter-sized amount of the meat mixture in the middle of the smaller leaf. Then you fold the two leaves together like an envelope: You fold the bottom up then the two sides followed by the top (the pointy part) of the leaf. To hold it all together, you insert a toothpick in the middle. To keep each of the bundles from unraveling when they are put in the pot to cook, you put two bundles together on the same toothpick, with the flap side in the middle.
I read a piece of personal journalism once where the writer was a first generation Canadian. Her family immigrated to Canada from China before she was born. Growing up she distanced herself from her Chinese heritage but after she had kids she wanted to learn more about her Chinese heritage for their sake, so that they could know about their ancestry. So she started having weekly cooking sessions with her grandmother, her mom and her aunts. During those sessions she learned how to make the meals that she had grown up on (aside from pizza and McDonald's), but she also heard stories about her mom and her aunts' childhoods. When her mom died some years later, whenever she found herself missing her mom, she would prepare one of the dishes her mom had taught her. The recipes weren't written in her mom's handwriting on index cards, rather, they were culled from her memory and her heart, and along with them, the sound of her mother's voice and her laugh as she explained how to make broth for something or how to wrap a spring roll. They were recipes peppered with her mom's youth, the funny moments and the embarrassing ones, and they were recipes that reminded the writer of her own youth growing up as her mother's daughter.
By extension, this anecdote reminds me of the "slogan" from one of my favourite shows on the Food Network (the Canadian version), called "Fixing Dinner." The premise of the show is real families whose lives and schedules are so hectic that they end up eating a lot of take out or eating at different times of the day, and never sitting down at the table together. Sandy Richard, the host, visits with each family and devises a plan for them where everyone helps out with making dinner, whether it means one person chops the veggies the night before for a stir fry or one person makes extra mashed potatoes that are used another night for shepherd's pie, so that making dinner doesn't fall onto the shoulders of one person (usually mom), and so that more time is spent eating together than making dinner. The "slogan" then is: "Fixing dinner is about more than just food, it's about family."
This morning, while wrapping the bundles with my mom, it made me think of all these things. I was learning a special dish that our family loved as well as spending time with my mom. Plus at the end of it, we got a delicious meal!
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