I’ve spent the past few
days giggling a lot, most times with my dad, at my dad and also behind his
back. If you met him, you would know right away he’s a funny man, he doesn’t
try to be, he just naturally is.
My friend Bonnie loves to
tell the story of the time when she called my house looking for me. My dad
picked up the phone and for fun, crooned in a high-pitched girly tone, “moshi moshi?” (Japanese for hello on the phone). Bonnie
burst into a fitful of giggles and between breaths asked for me, my dad blushed
and handed over the phone to me. We proceeded laughing for a good five minutes and
ten years later, we still laugh about it.
The photo above was taken in Beijing during my summer vacation when I was visiting my parents, just in time to catch the Olympics. My dad still works in China and visits every year, though it's not easy to living on opposite sides of the world, we Skype everyday, sometimes with webcam (then again my mom and I can't help but poke fun at his baldness so he rarely turns it on). My mom hates it when we go out and people say we look nothing alike, they never guess that we’re mother and daughter. What do you think? I look a lot like my dad, the same eyes, the same round face, I talk like him too sometimes and I like to think I got his DNA for seeking adventurous foods.
Last week was his birthday and of course, I love birthdays because that means food. We shared a 5 lb lobster cooked in soy sauce plus lots of garlic and scallions, and soon enough, our plates were teetering with gnarly lobster shells and legs. There was a look of deep concentration hanging on my mom's face as she wrestled out succlent pieces of lobster meat, because even though we were there for my dad's birthday, my mom had long since planned to go to this restaurant for its lobster, it's definitely her favorite food.
When we got home, there
was a cake waiting. I’ve been meaning to make this cake since I cracked open
Alice Water’s The Art of Simple Food and nothing says it’s the holidays quite
like cranberries. In keeping with my experiment of whole grain flours, I
switched out the all-purpose flour with a mixture of oat, spelt and whole wheat
flours, dialled down the sugar in the cake just a tad and added orange zest to
the topping for a little kick.
We invited my parents’
friends over to share some cake and of course, they obligingly said yes. They wolfed down their first slice and asked for seconds, I don't blame them, I had it for breakfast everyday with a dollop of plain yogurt. It’s a nice cake to have when you don’t want something
too cloying, when you crave some fruit and something low-key
and rustic. The sour fruit is brought to life with orange juice and a caramel
topping and then paired with a moist cake batter that is just right, not too
sweet and not too dry. The flours give the cake a nutty, grainy texture that
crumbles to bite-sized pieces, perfect for your fork to stab at.
It might not be the prettiest cake, but when you make it for someone who you haven’t seen in a while and manages to cheer you up instantly when you had a bad day, it doesn’t matter.
Happy holidays folks!
