I attended a farewell gathering in honour of a friend who is returning to her home country. The theme of food was local delicacy. We had coconut rice, two types of jelly, a fresh cake, Cantonese style noodle, Siamese rice noodle, sambal prawns, Thai style fish curry, pork puffs, fried brinjals nyonya style, and six types of desserts made in the northern nyonya style.
(for most of my readers who are not conversant with the term "nyonya", it is a word that denotes Chinese who settled in my country for hundreds of years who no longer speak any Chinese dialects nor language. Their dressing is distinct from the Chinese and the local. The cuisine is a blend of southern Chinese and the local tropical spicy and coconut style close to Indonesian cooking. My paternal great grandma was a Nonya.)
While we were exclaiming over how fragrant the coconut rice was, everyone was asking every body else for different recipes. Most googled for theirs except for one or two who cooked according what was handed down from their grandmas. That was the first time I tried coconut rice cooked with ginger, lemon grass (root), onion and pandan leaves (screw pine leaves) on top of coconut milk. It was a meal to remember!
In the conversation, I mentioned how I was surprised by how much rice was given by a street side peddler selling her coconut rice 70 cents a pack a few days ago. She gave half a boiled egg per pack, which is unusual for this day and age. Then my friend said that our neighbours are not as mercenary as Chinese. She too was floored by how little her caterer charged her for some delicacy she booked for her daughter's birthday party. Perhaps the ingredients are cheap, but it involved hours of tedious preparation. Still, it is human relationship that our non-Chinese neighbours value above money.
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