August 18, 2011

My dearest,

We’ve been eating out a lot lately. Blame it on our natural sloth and reluctance to dirty our pristine little kitchen. Blame it on the plethora of new and exciting eateries popping up all over town. We visit each one, ticking every successful encounter on our imaginary must-eat list, then proceed to revisit our favourites. Repeat.

Is it any wonder you soon get “heaty” and tell me you are not feeling too well? Possibly an ulcer, perhaps a sore throat in its infancy, and your uric acid levels? Don’t even get me started on that. Something “cooling” would be nice, you suggest, as traditional Chinese wisdom would also recommend. Right… I get the hint.

So the next morning, I get an early start. First the ingredients – barley, soft beancurd sheets, ginkgo nuts and pandan leaves for fragrance. Oh dear. No pandan leaves in sight. Google to the rescue. A couple of clicks later and a Singaporean food blog informs me red dates would do the trick. I’ve got red dates in the pantry. Hurrah.

Soak the beancurd sheets in water. Done. Add the barley and red dates to a pot of water, bring to a boil, then simmer. Done. I’m supposed to do this till the barley is soft. Easy, yes? Maybe not. The first sign of trouble is when the liquid starts to turn a golden yellow and not the clear colour the dessert usually has. Did I not soak the red dates in water long enough before adding them to the pot? Oh dear.

Marching on bravely, I add the beancurd sheets to the pot. They will soften and break apart into delicate bite-sized pieces. Except they don’t. Twenty minutes on and they still maintain their stiff and sombre appearance. Slight panic sets in (but only slight). I decide to get creative and use a sieve to retrieve all the beancurd sheets from the pot. (Not an easy task with all the annoying barley that’s floating around for some reason. Oh wait. They’re part of the dessert, like, one third of the stuff. Drats.)

Finally I complete my task and then I get the chopping board out. I begin to manually slice the beancurd, sheet by sheet, into the delicate bite-sized pieces they were supposed to have transformed into on their own. Oh well. Nothing like a helping hand. I do a pretty good job of it, if I may say so myself; they all look identical and probably only differ from each other by a single mililmetre. (This must be the most OCD version of the dessert in its history, bar none.)

I dump the entire batch of Mini-Me beancurd sheet pieces (sheet-lets?) back into the pot and increase the heat. It’s also round about now that I begin to pray. The heavens answer me with a vision – a rather brown one as the supposed dessert soup changes colour again (who knew it could be such a culinary chameleon?) from a pale yellow to a darker, far less palatable shade. It looks less like something that was meant to enter one’s body and more like something that has exited it. Shit.

A wiser man would have given up already but I’m proud to say I’m completely lacking in that particular and unnecessary attribute. Who needs reason when one has tenacity and sheer bloody-minded stubbornness? Simply keep the pot boiling and add more water every time the slowly-simmering soup looks more like swill and sludge. Repeat.

By the time evening rolls by and you are home, I happily announce that I’ve made you some cooling dessert – your favourite ginkgo barley beancurd! Wait. Ginkgo? I stir the sludge soup viciously. No signs of them yellow nuts. I check the fridge. Still inside. Damn. Remove from fridge, wash, clean, dump into pot. I tell you it needs a bit more time, for the flavour to settle. Yes.

Finally I tell you the dessert’s ready. Do you want some now? Later, you say. Oh and make sure it’s not too sweet, you say. Sweet? Sweet? Sweet. Fuck. The rock sugar. I grab the packet, tear it open, pour its contents into the pot. Hang on. Exactly how sweet is this stuff? Uhm…

Ten minutes later: I carry a big bowl of what-ought-to-have-been a simple dessert of ginkgo barley beancurd to your table. You give me the sweetest smile, one that rapidly disappears when you examine what I have placed before you. You look from the bowl at me, back to the bowl, back to me. “You might want to close your eyes,” I suggest, “it may taste better that way.”

And then. You actually eat the stuff.

“The beancurd’s a bit tough,” you say, “but it’s edible.”

So this is what love is. Not seven days of surprises to celebrate our anniversary. Not a last-minute, romantic and utterly impulsive decision to fly back home just to see you. No. Love is when your better half will eat the crap you cook for them, however disastrous the dish may be.

Hot damn.

You look at me funny like I’ve been staring into space for the past couple of minutes (probably true), then ask, “Aren’t you having some too?”

“This shit? Are you kidding?”

Cue one adult chasing the other around their apartment. Oh well. I guess we needed the exercise.

Yours, ever and always.