Family Dinner

Ever since I could remember, my family had always had our family dinner on Sundays.

It meant a lot to me that the family sits down for a meal together. We are not the most talkative family nor are we good with sharing our feelings. Oftentimes, there was little in terms of conversation. We just ate together, what more could we ask for in a conservative Chinese-ethnic family?

When our grandparents were living with us, we would eat dinner out so that Mama could have a day's break from housework and cooking. Our usual haunt was the chicken rice at Queenstown food centre. I was still too young to appreciate the garlicky chili sauce or the piquant ginger sauce, but I loved drowning my chicken rice in the sweet dark soya sauce. It's still there, this stall.

The other place we frequented, which didn't stand the test of time, was steamboat at the Henderson market. In addition to the raw slices of fish, prawns and meat for the steamboat, they used to serve tempura prawns. They called it "yap pun har" Japanese prawns in Cantonese. I loved that! And when nobody was looking, I would feed the crunchy tail shell to the stray cats that hovered hopefully around the tables.

Then we moved on to the sliced fish soup in Chinatown food centre and the Hokkien restaurant in Amoy Street. And as my siblings and I started working, the places we went to became progressively upmarket as we took turns paying for dinner.

When I moved to Europe, I would time my calls around 9pm in Singapore, when the family is basking in their after-dinner contentment. They would pass the phone around with nothing much to say except to tell me what they just had: fish soup noodles, sashimi, fried noodles, Thai curry,... It varied every weekend and I didn't want to miss a single dish. Somehow, knowing what they had eaten for Sunday dinner made me feel closer to home.

And as my brothers and I got married or moved out, our Sunday dinners became the only time Mama can feed us nourishing home-cooked meals. The dishes became double-boiled soup, steamed fish, prawns and lots of vegetables. After dinner, we would be force-fed with a week's worth of fruits as my parents, like all Chinese-ethnic parents, fret needlessly over malnutrition.

Yesterday, my father texted me. Preparg chix curry and minestrone soup 4 2moro dner.

I'm counting down to dinner tonight - only 5 more hours to go. His minestrone soup is quite out of this world...
*drool*

Be well. Eat Well.

Love, Suzy