Rotten Apples

Eeek! The Ten Mistakes on HOLT Uncensored made me wince and blush in silent embarassment. I found myself in there, not in all ten, thankfully, but in more than two. That was enough to make me squirm in my seat.

‘Crutch’ words. I recently noticed one in Monsoon Diary, such that it prompted me to look up the meaning. Ok, I admit, I didn’t know what it meant, but I could tell from the context when reading the book. Somnolence. I found it being used repeatedly. Hey, if a lay reader like me notices it, it must be a ‘crutch’ word, right? Now, I’ll be on the lookout for my ‘crutch’ words. I can think of a few I tend to love repeating. Erk!

Rotten apples. I guess there are a lot of them in our writing. Dig them out, scan for them with merciless eyes, and then scan again, and again. Who said writing is easy?

Stuck in a Rut

Being stuck in a rut is one of the goals. To begin with, I need a rut, big enough to cause agony. Then,  I need a solution, a way to get out of that rut. However, in my case, that rut seems to be more than I can handle. I seem to be stuck in it for a frustratingly long time before I could see the light of day.  When I was taking the Writing for Children’s Magazine course with the Institute of Children’s Literature, I remember being very wary and nervous about attempting to write fiction. The course lets you do both, but did ask which one you would rather ’specialize’ in.

I told my instructor I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to focus in, so she told me to try both and see which one I was more inclined to. So I did. I enjoyed non fiction a lot, probably because I love researching and reading up on new things. My dabbling in fiction however, was a different experience. It wasn’t as ‘easy’ as non fiction, because in non fiction, I simply do the research, come up with an interesting angle, have the information laid out, and I’m ready to write. In fact, it was enjoyable’ enough, that I managed to get in two pieces in Fandangle’s October 2007 issue.

With fiction however, I have to be the ‘creator’, come up with a problem or more, figure out how to resolve that conflict, and then write while trying to make it as interesting as possible. I don’t consider myself a natural storyteller, but when I did come up with a few fiction pieces, one of which did end up getting published in Fandangle’s June 2007 issue, I was ecstatic. The work wasn’t easy (finishing a fiction piece), but when I did complete it, it was thoroughly gratifying, to say the least. I also have another fiction piece from that course that is still sitting in my pendrive waiting to be fiddled with. I also wrote up a piece that I entered in the Islamic Foundation Annual Competition (which is now, I believe, discontinued), and it was shortlisted. I was elated beyond belief when I received an email and a letter inviting me to the event, which of course I couldn’t attend. I didn’t win, but being shortlisted was more than enough for me, considering my struggle with writing fiction.

However, I have quite given up on writing fiction, since it does seem to drain me, and while other fiction writers seem to enjoy the process, I have to admit that I don’t have that kind of patience for it, though I really wish I do. Nevertheless, reading Jan Field’s article ‘Embrace the Conflict‘ perks me up. Throughout the course, I was imbued with the feeling, ‘I can do this!’. After reading Jan’s article, I suddenly find myself contemplating taking up fiction writing again. Do I dare get myself in a rut again?

The Pyramids of Koci

It had been a long day, a truly long one, as I bustled about the kitchen, hopping from one task to another in the flurried attempt to make more than one dessert and main dish just so I could use up as much as I could of the contents in my pantry. I had wilted the banana leaves the day before, and that in itself was a tedious task I temporarily vow never to undertake in the near future, though my mother’s discovery of a more convenient and unback-breaking method of wilting the banana leaves is somewhat giving me second thoughts. But thoughts I will not entertain for now, for the sake of my well being and temporary sanity.

As you can see from my attempts at crimping the edges of Karipap, my fingers are not bestowed with the skills needed to produce refined fingerwork. I have tried to make this banana leaf wrapped dessert years ago, when my craving for it pushed me to purchase frozen banana leaves, a cylindrical block of palm sugar, a packet of glutinous rice flour (also known as sweet rice flour), unsweetened grated coconut, and coconut milk, all ingredients I was not familiar with, well except for the cans of coconut milk.

With the abundance of street hawker stalls lining the streets of Kuala Lumpur, selling all kinds of Malaysian delicacies, one is naturally not inclined to produce the very same delicacies at home. Well, at least not if one was as deftly challenged as I am. It was in that condition that I was flown to the United States. A poor condition indeed. No culinary skills whatsoever. Though I have to say, the fact that I possessed no culinary skills whatsoever, coupled with the fact that I was on foreign soil with patriotic taste buds, pushed me to seek those culinary skills. And seek them I did. Experience in the kitchen is key to attaining higher level culinary skills, as I was to find out years later.

May I state that most recipes for Malaysian food items are unreliable? At least that was what I concluded after ravenous searches both online and offline, followed by excitement and active salivary glands. Rolling up my sleeves in anticipation of devouring familiar desserts and savories, I would dutifully follow the instructions in the recipes. And may I also add that sometimes, the measurements are just plain dumb? 2 mugs of this. What capacity mug? Is there a standard mug with which to measure by, that every household should have? Though, in all fairness I have to also admit that there were just some lingo (in Malay) that was alien to me, much like dredge or julienne might be alien to native English speakers who are not culinary experts. Those alien terms were sometimes the cause of the demise of my homesick kitchen experiments.

My first try at making Kuih Koci resulted in misshapen blobs of steamed glutinous rice dough, encasing, or should I say, leaking, fillings of grated coconut sweetened in palm sugar wrapped in stiff banana leaves with exposed cracks along the leaf fibers. I don’t even remember the sheer joy of biting into an ugly Kuih Koci, for there were times when the saying ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ holds true for ugly culinary concoctions. But this was no such ugly culinary concoction. So disappointing it was that I gave up ever trying to make this dessert for years.

In fact, I pretty much gave up trying to reproduce any other Malaysian culinary delights for years to come because the ugly and floppy results just increased my misery, homesickness, and abhorrence for Malaysian recipes. I plunged fully into trying my hands at western desserts.

Ahh…in these I found my calling. My fingers, which had failed me before, were not called upon for duty as much, but my wrist and brain power were. After years of attaining amateurish mastery of cake decorating, I felt compelled to give the Malaysian desserts and savories another try. Alas, my taste buds are purely and loyally Malaysian. No amount of distance from my home country would make me switch over to foreign food for long. I still need my Malaysian food.

So try again I did. By then, I had gained more culinary knowledge as well, and I was better able to pinpoint the cause of my failures (aside from blaming the recipes themselves). I realized that my failure lies in the banana leaves. I didn’t soften them enough. So when I tried to wrap those white balls of dough, they cracked and resisted my folding and tucking.

What actually stirred me to action were photos of this dessert on Facebook. A friend had made it at home (she’s on foreign soil too). I asked her how she managed to wrap the stubborn and stiff banana leaves around those balls of dough. She said she wilted them over a steady flame. I remember reading the instructions on wilting banana leaves before. I vaguely remember the mention of holding the leaves over a steady flame, and I remember dismissing it as being too tedious and illogical. I also remember reading somewhere that you could also blanch them in boiling water, which seemed more convenient to me. So that was what I did, which obviously resulted in banana leaves that were still stiff and ‘fresh’. Now, older and wiser, I decided to give the flaming a try, as tedious as it sounds, because, truth be told, I have been craving Kuih Koci for years ever since that first floppy disappointment.

I sat on my four legged kitchen stool at the table, on which there was a lighter, a candle, and a scattered pile of banana leaves cut to size, both circles and squares. I thought to myself,

If I fail this time, that’s it…Kuih Koci will just have to be a forever forgotten dessert.

And maybe, because of that line of thinking, I really made sure I did my best. There’s nothing like the threat of forgoing a loved food item forever to make you go all out to reproduce it. With determination, I remained seated on the stool that seemed to grow uncomfortably harder by the minute, and held the cut banana leaves one by one over the flame. Cautiously, I moved the leaves such that every inch of it was devoured by the heat of the flame. At times, the flame would leap, as if trying to lick the leaf, held at right angle to it. But for most of the process, I watched, with the fascination of an entranced child, the slight darkening and softening of the leaf fibers, beginning with a prominent spot that expanded outwards, much like the spreading of an inkblot. Unfortunately, even that fascination wasn’t able to quell my growing irritation and impatience at having to repeat the process assembly-line style until all the cut banana leaves were wilted. My thoughts at the time jogged along jagged line,

I’m never doing this again! I don’t want to see a banana leaf ever!

By the time I was done, I had had enough of banana leaves, candles, and crazy, tedious Malaysian desserts. I stacked the wilted leaves in a stainless steel bowl, covered it, and called it a day. I couldn’t bring myself to continue on to the next step.

The next day, I had more dishes to cook in that continued pursuit to empty my pantry, and by the time I was done, my energy level and enthusiasm in finishing what I started was dangerously low. But as I eyed the stack of banana leaves I had so painstakingly wilted, I knew I had to try it. Plus, there was my darned patriotic taste buds, telling my brain to convince my limbs to carry it all the way through.

With careless abandon, I dumped the glutinous rice flour in my 4 quart Kitchen Aid stainless steel bowl, thinking I would just pour enough coconut milk to make a workable dough. No measurements, though I did holler,

“Google Kuih Koci for me please!”

to whoever was propped up in front of the computer, which happened to be hubby. Google he did, and just as tediously, he read the ingredients and method one by one, at such an irritating pace that once I got what I wanted to know, I cut him off.

Thankfully, the dough was pretty easy to make, and I did come up with a workable one. I had already made the sweet filling earlier. It was easy enough. Melt some chunks of palm sugar in water, dump in the unsweetened grated coconut, and stir till the grated coconut has absorbed all the sweet brown liquid. Then came the step that intimidated me a little, for it required the use of my clumsy fingers, that have always failed me whenever there comes a need to completely enclose some kind of filling in some kind of dough. I always managed to put too much filling such that complete sealing becomes impossible, or, messy.

I suppose, experience and skills stayed close to me that day, not to mention Allah’s help, for I pretty much breezed through that stage, happily pinching off balls of white dough, rolling them into balls, flattening them into small disks, and filling them with just enough filling before pulling up the edges and ending up with filled balls that didn’t threaten to sputter their fillings out. And those wilted banana leaves. Ahh…it was worth it! They were a pleasure to work with, bending and folding subserviently to my every tuck, making me feel like the most dexterous person ever! Despite the arduous day of working non stop in the kitchen from morning, I found myself smiling and even humming while my hands churned out little tiny green pyramids that grew in numbers.

Next came the steaming, which was the last step, the step that stood between me and my fate with Kuih Koci. All that work, and if it still didn’t turn out okay, I would have bawled my eyes out, and leave my family in the wake of my journey to insanity. As it turned out, Allah had decreed that part of my provision for that day, was to eat Kuih Koci, for when I clicked open my rice cooker, which was steaming furiously, my sight was filled of  little pyramids that seemed to have lost the dark fresh green shade and turned a wilted moss green. Gingerly, knowing full well that steam is hotter than fire, I took one of those pyramids out with a tong. Like a birthday child surrounded by multitudes of birthday presents, I clumsily unwrapped my pyramid to reveal a glistening white pyramid, which I immediately bit into.

Glutinously hot and chewy, with richness from the coconut milk, it filled my mouth with a desire to munch and chew like one does with an expanding bubble gum. And as my taste buds were teased with the chewy texture and richness of coconut milk from the steamed dough, the sweet and moist filling made its grand entrance, introducing a different kind of texture and taste. The finely grated coconut, having absorbed the melted palm sugar, still possessed a crunchiness, a moist one, if you will, that complements the chewiness and full blandness of the steamed encasing dough. After a delightful gulp, I was enamored by the whole experience of Kuih Koci and fished out another steamed green pyramid from my rice cooker.

Bliss. Pure bliss. It was late afternoon. The golden rays of the descending sun was streaming through my kitchen window, perfect for a food photo shoot. My work table was still littered with scattered banana leaves and unwashed kitchen utensils, yet there I was sitting on my stool, popping one Kuih Koci after another into my mouth, savoring every chew and gulp. The banana leaves, my nemesis. With the will of Allah, I have conquered thee.

Monsoon Diary

Memoirs with Asian flavors seem to appeal to me the most, and understandably so, since I am a full bred Asian, and will be forever Asian at heart. I recently finished my reading of Monsoon Diary, by Shoba Narayan. Let me just say that I can see how she is a recipient of the M.F.K. Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing. I really dig her writing style.

Being Asian though, I felt myself yearning for her times in India as she transported me with her to the United States where she ran into a fellow South Indian who gave her a much missed South Indian meal. The difference in the two environments was starkly apparent. I was the one who missed the scent of freshly bloomed night jasmine in Narayan’s yard, the clinking of cow bells, belching buses, the rainbow of sari-donning Indian women, the “Kuppa!” calls of Natesan, the garbage man, the breathtaking performance of Chinnapan, the din and bustle at the train station, not to mention the happenings in the journey itself, the aromatic smells coming from tiffin carriers, and the sharp tongued Nalla-Ma.

There was one glaring mistake I came across in her book though; Allahu Akbar translated as God is Good. Allahu Akbar is usually translated as God is Great, and I have to say that this should have been double checked. I wonder how many Muslims have read this book.

Other than that, I really love her narrative. In my previous post, I mentioned Teh tarik, which is as much performance as it is a hot beverage, usually attributed to the Indians in Malaysia. In Narayan’s recounting of her childhood, she writes about her father’s morning indulgence in coffee, in which she describes her father’s skilled act of pouring the coffee from one cup to another by raising one cup high above his head and keeping the other by his hip, done several times to produce a frothy cup of ‘processed’ coffee. The metaphoric stretching and pulling of the coffee from cup to cup is very much like the performance of Teh Tarik sellers in Malaysia. In my recent googling on Youtube, I even came across Malay youths taking these performances a step further by adding music and dance steps to the pouring act, which I personally deem quite distasteful.

In the course of reading the book, my mind kept wandering away to dwell on issues such as religion and culture. I have always been aware that we, the Malays have inherited a lot of the Hindu culture, one of which is the act of feeding one’s new spouse during the wedding. Before Islam arrived in the Malay Peninsula, Hindu was the reigning empire, and thus it’s really not surprising that some remnants of the culture is still present in the Malay culture. In her book, Narayan tells of the pressing dilemma she faced at her wedding reception when she was expected to feed her new husband. Not wanting to have rasam rice dripping all over his face, she ingeniously tipped a tumbler containing panagam to his lips instead. In the Malay culture, both the husband and wife would feed each other a fingerful of rice. No dripping rasam, but the same act nonetheless.

Tiffin carriers. Ahh…now I know what my mother was talking about. I’ve had my fair share of tiffin carriers. When  I was in boarding school, my father and stepmother would pay me a visit on some weekends. On most visits, they would bring with them home-cooked food for lunch, that we usually ate in the school canteen, where other parents were seated with their sons or daughters, also enjoying their food. My stepmother’s cooking were deliciously packed in stainless steel tiffins. And together, we would have our  lunch, freshly made at home, served in the tiffin carriers. How can I not remember those stainless containers stacked atop each other, clicked and held shut by the the U-shaped handle, when it was my source of weekend good eats throughout my five years in boarding school? I now know what a tiffin carrier is. I have known it all along. I just didn’t know what it was called. I just knew it provided me with good home-cooked food. And that was more than enough information for me back then.

My parallel reading of Curry, shed some light on the Hindu concept of purity. Narayan writes about how her mother designated special cups or plates from which their many ‘visitors’ such as the flower woman and Ayah would eat from. I now recall a custom some Malays still practice, or used to practice, of not allowing a woman in her menses to eat together with the rest of the family. This is, for the record, an unIslamic practice, lest people think it’s Islamic, but it may very well be again, the remnants of the Hindu culture that we have adopted into our culture.

Indian women and gold. Narayan mentions the love and weakness for gold in Indian women. I can say the same for Malay women. Especially the more traditional ones. Malays are quite fond of gold. Even infant girls are adorned with light gold bangles, and sometimes tinkling anklets. In fact, I have in my room, my daughter’s gold bangles, and I believe, mine too. I remember being summoned to my father’s room just a few nights before Eid every year. In boarding school, we were not allowed to sport jewelry, and I doubt very much that my parents would have allowed me to sport jewelry on a daily basis anyway. But on special occasions such as Eid, even at the age of seventeen, my father made the tradition of adorning me with gold jewelry each time. Out came the gold bracelets, necklaces with fat heart-shaped pendant, rings, and earrings. I would dutifully put them on, or rather, stand still as my stepmother clasped them on my person. And a tinkling I would go back to my room, bejeweled from head to toe, ready for Eid.

Nevertheless, despite the annual tradition of being ‘gilded’ for Eid, I fail to have a love or weakness for jewelry, with the exception of earrings, which I still don’t sport to this day because of logistics. For some reason, I think of jewelry as gaudy and glaring, though I remember loving how the anklets would tinkle merrily everytime I took a step. However such is my indifference to jewelry that I inadvertently lost my grandmother’s ring that she had passed down to me. That, and a necklace and bracelets, which I had left in my room, unlocked when we went away for vacation. The naive me didn’t think or expect our live-in maid to scoop those valuables and run away, never to return. Ahh…the drama of maids in Malaysia. We’ve had a lot of those too.

One thing I realized from all this reading of Indian cuisine and history, is that, Indian cuisine seems to have gone through a lot of evolution in and outside of India. We were recently invited to an Indian home-cooked dinner, consisting of raita, white rice, keema, and puri, which I was completely in awe of as I watched them puff up in the hot oil. Like I said, I was completely overtaken by the ‘magic’ of puri making, and I found myself looking on with the fascination of a child. Over a recent conversation with a fellow Malaysian, I found out that I have not been privy to the presence of Puri in Malaysia in all my years of growing up there. I have never heard of Puri before in my life, but apparently, some Malaysians even make Puri in their homes!

The cuisine of India has undergone worldwide evolution and adaptations along with Indian migrations. Roti canai, I now believe, is a Malaysian creation, for I can’t find it in any of Indian bread recipes. My mother, in a comment in a previous post, said that Nasi Kandar, is also a Malaysian creation, usually sold by Muslim Indians in the northern state, particularly Penang. I feel like I have come full circle in understanding Indian food. When I first encountered Indian food in the United States, I felt compelled to tell the Indians of the Indian food we have back home, but even in my ignorance, I had a feeling that some food such as roti canai sounded unfamiliar to them. The most similar food item we could find to roti canai here is Paratha, but the method of making roti canai is still uniquely Malaysian. In Lizzie Collingham’s book, Curry, she also writes of how the Indian cuisine have been undergoing globalization, such that what people claim to be Indian food in other parts of the world, is completely unrecognizable as Indian food to Indians in the subcontinent. I remember now the curry made by a sister from Jamaica. It is nothing like the curry we make back home in Malaysia, but then again, the curry we make in Malaysia is probably also quite different from the authentic Indian curries made in India. As Indians migrate away from India yet continue to cook their food in different countries and environments, the limiting factors such as availability of ingredients and pleasing foreign palates, have forced them to make some improvisations to the original recipes, thus producing ‘outside India’ versions of Indian food.

When Stiff Fingers Fail to Crimp

My pathetic attempt at making Karipap in 2004. Note the poor crimping.

When I was flipping through pages of various cookbooks in my hey days of recipe hunting, I came across a dish called Pasty; a snack item of Cornwall, United Kingdom, which has a rich history of its own, related to fishermen and miners. Upon first reading of the ingredients and method, I remember thinking,

This sounds a lot like Karipap.

The dough, made of flour and water, with a little fat, encloses a hearty filling of potatoes and meat, and forms a half circle with a crimped curvy edge. It is said that the pasties were created for miners because they were able to eat it with dirty hands by chomping on the meaty filling and chucking away the part of the dough that was marred by the dirt.

I had often wondered about the origins of Karipap, a Malaysian version of pasty, if you will. Also called curry puff in English, it is like a mini savory calzone filled with a variety of fillings ranging from the typical potatoes and carrots to shredded meat and chicken, usually cooked with curry spice. Of course now, the karipap has gone through its own evolution and today we even have Karipap Pusing (Swirled Curry Puff), where the creation of dough creates a finished product that boasts swirled patterns on the doughy crusts, of different golden  shades. A bite of Karipap gives you a mouthful of crispy deep fried crust, dry and flaky on the outside, and as the outer enclosure crumbles away in your mouth,  the filling reveals itself. Via the slightly chewy and moist part of the crust that touches the filling, your tastes buds are now exposed to a spicy medley cubed potatoes and carrots that are cooked in curry spice. Best eaten warm, Karipap can serve as a filling snack, or even a light lunch.

Despite indulging in a hobby of cake decorating for a number of years now, I’m a pathetic failure when it comes to crimping the edges of Karipap by hand. I have never seen it done manually, but I have seen perfect crimping, manual crimping that is, not the automatic ones that are created by the Karipap mold. In my attempts of making homemade Karipap, I have butchered the crimping stage such that the filling broke loose in the sea of hot oil as the edges split open due to my poor crimping. So I turned to the plastic Karipap mold. Nonetheless, I haven’t made as many Karipaps as I want to, because of my poor crimping skills.

And here, I am awed to see how the crimping is actually done, with a lot of sound effects to match:

Maybe I should give this crimping business another try, eh?

Exploring the Delectables of the Subcontinent

Curry: a Tale of Cooks and Conquerors by Lizzie Collingham imparts a lot of delectable information about the cuisine of India. I am only up to chapter 2, ‘Biryani’, and I’m already basking in the new found knowledge that the former foreign secretary of Great Britain, Robin Cooke, declared Chicken Tikka as Great Britain’s national dish, albeit not without protests from disgruntled food critics. My parallel reading of Curried Favors by Maya Kaimal Macmillan, (done while eating, cooking and I don’t remember what else) also enlightened me to the difference between the cuisine of northern India and southern India.

I found it interesting that I relate so much to the cuisine of Southern India, which is only natural, because Malaysian cuisine is somewhat largely influenced by it. Banana leaves as plates. That’s a south Indian tradition, which I believe is still practiced today in a predominantly Indian district in Kuala Lumpur; Brickfields. It is also interesting to note that a lot of our Malay words are actually Tamil words, such as rasa (taste), negara (country), and asam (sour). One of the languages spoken in Malaysia is Tamil; a language I was heavily exposed to growing up, since I went to school in Brickfields. I never picked it up though.

I now understand my puzzlement over Indian food when I was first exposed to it here in the States. The Indian food I knew growing up was more down to earth than the ones I was exposed to here. After reading the books, I found out why. The Indians I have gotten to know here are mostly from the north, and not so much from the south. In the north, the dish is more dairy based, and somewhat more ‘royal’ in nature. Instead of rice, bread is more common as the grain group. In the south, rice is more common than bread.

I think I now appreciate the Indian cuisine available in Malaysia after reading about South Indian cuisine in Curried Favors. One of my favorite Indian dishes (and I have a lot of favorite Indian dishes!) is a snack called Putu Mayam (string hoppers), a snack usually sold by street hawkers. To be honest, it has been at least 11 years since I last had one, and even though I remember biting into soft white fine strings of vermicelli flavored by broken pieces ofpalm sugar, the memory is quite faint. If I was asked to make and serve it, I wouldn’t know how to serve it. What I do remember is the taste of plain and airy rice vermicelli well complimented by the sweetness of palm sugar. In your mouth, the vermicelli seems to swell up all the way to the roof of your mouth in airyness, but the palm sugar brings it back down as if dissolving the airiness in the depth of its sweetness. After swallowing a bite, you can’t seem to get enough and you go for more. That’s how I would describe the experience of eating Putu Mayam, but other than that, I don’t really remember.

Teh tarik is a beverage usually associated with the Indian community in Malaysia. When you say Teh tarik, most Malaysians would conjure an image of an Indian hawker, clad in a flimsy white shirt and casually wrapped sarong holding two tin cups in each hand and pouring tea sweetened with sweetened condensed milk from one cup to the other. What makes this beverage unique is how the seller makes it. He not only pours the tea from one cup to the other, but it looks as if he is stretching the tea as one cup is raised well above his head while the other is lowered as low as his hand can manage, all while the pouringis going on. This is done with skill, so the tea is not wasted on the ground. The result: a frothy cup of Teh tarik. Malaysian style Frappucino.

And who could forget Roti Canai, one of my favorite breakfast item, that was also my childhood snack and lunch while I spent my after school hours in my father’s clinic for most of my elementary school years. One order of Roti Telur would provide me with a plate of a thick, square fried dough, consisting of fine crisp layers, not unlike filo dough, encasing cooked scrambled eggs, and a bowl of accompanying curry as the dipping sauce. Eagerly, I would tear one piece of the square dough, my fingers digging into the depths of the eggs, filled with air as the heat both cooks it and fries the dough to crispy layers. Soft strips of cooked shallots amidst the eggs add a sweetness to a mouthful of Roti Telur dripping with spicy curry.

So, as I continue to read both books that explore the depths of the cuisine of the subcontinent, memories of Indian dishes also continue to flood my memory banks, giving me a new appreciation for Indian cuisine in Malaysia.

Will Write For Food

I finally finished hop reading the book, and I have to say, it gave me a plateful of food for thought! (Pun intended). Jacob stated in the introduction that she would be a friendly guide throughout the book, and that she has been. The book begins with a chapter titled ‘What Exactly is Food Writing?’, which I have to say is a very apt first chapter, especially for someone like me who is quite new to the scene.

The information presented in each chapter includes interviews of experts in the field of food writing, which I think, adds interactiveness to the reading experience. The list of resources; books, magazines, newspapers, etc is very valuable, and I intend to scour those titles in the online library catalog once I’m done with this post.

I hop read the book, thus not reading the chapters in consecutive order, and I completely skipped the chapter on restaurant reviewing, because of all the areas in food writing, that is the one I would be least likely to plunge in, though I do keep an  open mind about this, as you never know. Nevertheless, as she mentioned in the beginning, it could be read in that manner, though it would make more sense to read it consecutively.

Writing exercises are provided at the end of each chapter, which is one aspect I love about writing books. Nevertheless, I have yet to utilize them. For someone new to the world of food writing, I have really gleaned a lot about it, and the many sub-areas in it. A book I’d recommend to anyone interested in reading up about food writing.

Much Attention Over Food Blogging

Dianne Jacob’s article titled The New Wave of Food Blogs got me thinking as to why I went about participating in Joy Luck Kitchen. It started out in the comments section of one of my Facebook photo between myself and a couple of other sisters. I have been obsessed with taking pictures of my food ever since I plunged into the world of baking and cake decorating, and once I owned a digital camera, it became even more of an obsession. Alongside with uploading photos of my children, I would also upload photos of food.

My digital camera has a ‘food’ feature, which I used to use, but after looking at a friend’s food photos (Shida of Healthy Kitchen Smells Fresh), over which I exclaimed in amazement at the professionalim, I have kicked up my food photography skills up a few notches. Stumbling upon an article on Food Photography on Digital Photography School helped too, though this happened a lot later after I had kicked it up a few notches. The tip that Shida shared with me was; lighting, natural light. And I devoured that advice like a kid devours candy, and it has been sending me on food photoshoot rushes every time I prop up my food in the kitchen, much to the kids’ groans and rolled eyes.

“Oh no…can’t we just eat a little of it?” they would beg, as I shoo them off my ’set’, while I shift position to try and get the perfect lighting, angle, and level.

Last night, I made sweet sour chicken, and it was picture perfect. However, the camera’s battery was low, much to the kids’ relief, for they had been eyeing the dish ever since it started sizzling and simmering in its glossy sauce on the stove.

I’ll just to make it again next time, I thought to myself. I was hungry too. It had been a long day.

The idea of starting a joint food blog was spawned in the back and forth discussion on Facebook, and because the participants of that conversations are all fairly passionate cooks, we agreed to it immediately. Blogspot was our first choice because it allows more options in terms of widgets. The only thing I regret about it is that it doesn’t have a static page, though I did find a tutorial on making one with blogger. Then came the template, and almost immediately, we all agreed with the food blog template from Leelou Blogs. The name, ahhh…the name for the blog sparked a brainstorming of sorts, and tedious ‘checking for availability’ sessions, late into the night. After brainstorming a long list of names, one of us came up with the perfect name that perfectly represents the core theme of our joint venture. Joy Luck Kitchen. We refer to is lovingly as JLK.

It began as a fun venture, but the more I dabbled into it, the more pulled I am into the prospect of venturing into food writing. I would never have read about recipe writing, as that is one part I detest the most about food blogging. I even told the members of JLK that I would only post food photos for a while because I was too lazy to write up the recipes, but the perfectionist in me ended up providing recipes too. Before I knew it, I was hooked. Before I knew it, I was busy clicking away and filling the memory chip on my camera with duplicates of the same food item taken from different angles, level, and lighting. Before I knew it, it made sense to create a folder labeled Food 2008 in which I could store my uploaded food photos for easy retrieval and search. Before I knew it, I had downloaded Photoscape so I could ‘mark’ my food photos. Before I knew it, I have become one of the many food bloggers in the blogosphere. And being me, I then thought about creating my own personal food blog, in which I can write posts that do not necessarily have recipes, but like I mentioned in a previous post, it might not be a wise thing to do, considering I am already juggling several blogs, not to mention four children and a husband.

So here I am, a happy clicking member of Joy Luck Kitchen, delving into the art of food writing, and what do I realize? I realize, for sure, that my blogged recipes so far, do not really abide by the do’s and don’ts of recipe writing. That puts me to shame. On the other hand, the fact that recipes should have serving sizes, makes me think of my mother’s food blog, Cherry on a Cake, in which she writes wonderful headnotes, well thought out recipes, and tips that I really love and look forward to reading each time she posts a recipe.

Just a few days ago, I was on Bakerella, and browses and clicks brought me to her TV appearance on the Martha Stewart Show. I guess food blogging, and for that matter maybe, blogging in general, is changing and evolving our ever changing world of public media. From TV shows to books,  blogging is really making deep visible footprints, alright.

May I have the recipe, please?

In my quest of food writing, I managed to wrangle ‘Will Write for Food‘ by Dianne Jacob (who also has an interesting article on food blogging titled The New Wave of Food Blogs on her website), from the local library. I say wrangle because I had to reserve it, wait for days, and go pick it up, which requires me to get out of my humble abode; a challenge for someone as homebound as I am . Thus, my definition of wrangling for a book.

I have to admit that this book is not the only book on my ‘To Read’ stack, thus rendering it as one of the many books vying for my attention right now. However, in my usual gluttony for anything bound in the form of a book, I ended up scanning the library shelves for books I wasn’t particularly looking for and returned to the children’s area (where my two boys were) with an armload of books ranging from travel writing to speech difficulties. Of course, Will Write for Food was included as well. My two girls were having their sewing class in the building next door, so we stayed in the library until it was time to pick them up, which gave me time to sit and read, well, along with reading to my sleepy tot, and giving in to his gestured requests to stroke the huge stuffed lion and bear displayed on the book shelves. Somehow, I managed to speed read a few pages of the book, not to mention the speech difficulties one. When you are always needed in more than one occasion, at often the same time, by many different people, you very quickly master the art of speed reading.

Today, I managed to pick up the book again, and continue reading, though I have to say also, that when you are always needed on more than one occasion, at often the same time, by many different people, you develop the habit of hop reading, which basically means reading a book from the back, the middle, and hopping in between, mostly because you don’t have time to insert a bookmark when you have to put the book down because you have to cook or yell at the kids to clean their room, or when you do manage to find (a feat in an of itself) and  insert a bookmark (which can be anything from grocery lists to a pencil), the moment you return to the book to find your place, the bookmark would have been displaced by busy little hands. So I never bother using a bookmark anymore, not a physical tangible one anyway.

My hop reading today landed me in the chapter titled ‘The Art of Recipe Writing’. Oh boy, did I get a load of information that makes me cringe and wince in shame, nodding in agreement, and determined not to ever write a recipe ever again, that is until I started googling and found Nupur’s two part article on Recipe Writing on One Hot Stove, catered for food bloggers in particular.

My search on resources for food writing didn’t give me much, and I only came up with a list of food writing classes that are way too expensive for the likes of people like me. Nevertheless, a search for recipe writing lands me with so many tabs on my browser, that I practically have to scroll rightward and back to link to the websites in this post.

I am blown away by the depth and breadth in the art of recipe writing as explained that that chapter. Over the years, I have been fortunate enough to amass a good collection of cookbooks that are now neatly packed in boxes, reading for the imminent relocation. I can say that I am quite familiar with well written recipes, and can detect badly written ones, purely from constant exposure to quality cookbooks over the years. Nevertheless, I never thought much about the art of recipe writing, even as I eagerly scribbled down recipes onto my recipe cards almost every night after the children went to bed, years ago in the flatland of Iowa.

But after reading this chapter, recipe writing revealed itself as something to be in awe of, and something to also be reckoned with, on top of having an interesting history, as explained by Daniel Rogov on Rogov’s Ramblings in his article The Art of Writing Workable Recipes. Being a person who loves details, organization (though this doesn’t always shine through in the state of my house), and perfection (which often lands me in trouble and drives my stress level way too high), I am attracted to the rigors and rules of recipe writing. Only one thing gives me the dampers; testing the recipes. This for me, will translate to more time in the kitchen (which I used to love, but now abhor because I have to cook two separate meals for allergic tot and the rest of the family).

I have always loved reading headnotes in recipes, and I am simply overjoyed to discover why this is. They have been written for such a purpose; to entice readers to try out the recipes! In Joy Luck Kitchen, I wrote my headnotes, not out of knowledge, but out of an inner instinct that tells me,

You always loved reading this in cookbooks, why not provide it with your recipes?

I didn’t know there was such a thing, or that there is even a name for it.

I have read somewhere before, pertaining to copyright, that the ingredient list cannot be copyrighted, because you logically cannot copyright ‘1 cup all purpose flour’. But one thing I learned is that the method section of a recipe should convey the writer’s persona and style and make the reader feel like the author is right next to her, guiding her every move. I was also not aware that it is a matter of preference to write the methods as numbered or as paragraphs, though I personally prefer numbered, for easy tracking when following a recipe.

The parts of a recipe are (and this reminds me the parts of letter writing that I kept rehashing with my ten year old when we were working on writing letters during one of our homeschooling sessions) namely Recipe Titles, Headnotes, Ingredient list, Method, and Sidebars/Notes. A very important aspect of recipe writing however is testing, especially for recipes to be published in cookbooks and magazines.

One thing I was taken aback at was the discouragement of using ’sophisticated’ cooking terms such as blanch, dredge, par boil, julienne and the likes. I understand the whys of it, but I guess I was just taken aback that most people nowadays are not familiar with those terms, unless of course they are fans of Food Network. Not that I know those terms well myself, but years of burying my hungry nose in cookbooks havd well equipped me with those terms that I now find ‘common’.  Some of my favorite cookbooks that I own are Joy of Cooking, along with Rose Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible. I especially love cookbooks written by authors who take the trouble to lay out the do’s, the don’ts, the whys, and the troubleshootings. It’s very irritating to be told not to do something with no explanation. After scouring recipes for years, I no longer am satisfied with bare recipes. I want, I need the explanations, especially the whys of a method, especially when it comes to baking.

I am not going to bother listing the how tos of writing a recipe, just because there is so much information about this on the net. What I am reflecting over, and still basking in is, the newfound knowledge that recipe writing is an art that deserves just as much attention to details and organization as other forms of writing. And that alone, just blows me away with awe and respect.

Here is a list of recipe writing resources I found on the net:

Recipe Writing on Food Resource

How to Write a Cookbook: Recipe on Suite101

How to Write Recipes for Magazines on eHow

How to Write Recipes for Food Network

How to Write Recipes Like a Professional on the kitchn

How to Write a Recipe on wikiHow

How to Write a Recipe from the American Association of Food Journalists

Reference Books related to Recipe Writing:

The Recipe Writer’s Handbook by Barbara Ostmann and Jane Baker

Recipes Into Type: A Handbook for Cookbook Writers and Editors by Joan Whitman and Dolores Simon

Other books on food, recipes, history of food, and culinary terms:

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, by Harold McGee

Cookwise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Cooking by Shirley O. Corriher

Food Lover’s Companion by Sharon Herbst

The New Kitchen Science by Howard Hillman

What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained by Robert E. Wolke

Understanding Baking by Joseph Amendola, Nicole Rees, and Robert E. Lundberg

Ahh…more scrumptious books to wrangle out of the library.

Let’s Talk Food!

That is the name of my new ‘food blog’ which is still under wraps as of now. When I plan to unveil it? Well, seeing how I’m jumping from one interest to another with utter gluttony, maybe it’s wise to say, “Never.”

Nevertheless, I present my current writing interest: Food Writing. Joy Luck Kitchen spurred this interest, and I realized that a lot of my memories (memoir writing is also another one of my writing interest) are immersed in food I grew up eating, and different ethnic food I continue to be exposed to, thanks to living among a rich Muslim community of varied cultural backgrounds.

So, like I do for all my cropping interests, I looked into it. Google is my tool. I noticed that everytime I google Food Writing, Pamela White comes up. I looked for books too at the local library, and I have one book being held for me right now. I also looked for online courses, and while I can feel my salivary glands oozing with excitement as my eyes rapidly scan the course title and description, my brain sends a STOP signal when my eyes land upon the course cost. Too expensive. I’m dreaming of winning $500 – $1000 from one of the annual contests, and some classes would completely gobble up (no pun intended) that prize money if I ever am to win (which continues to be my dream for now).

Here is a list of online food writing classes for 2009 I stumbled upon, in order of affordability:

Eat, Drink and Make Money – 10 week course for $135 begins January 5

Food Writing: The Secret Recipe to Success – 10 weeks for $310 begins February 9

Recipe Writing – 4 weeks for $350 begins February 4

Food Writing Boot Camp – 8 weeks for $499 begins January 12

Introduction to Food Writing – 6 weeks for $500 begins January 12

Realistically, I am nowhere close to being financially able to take any of these classes, except that Pamela White’s Eat, Drink and Make Money seems to appeal to me the most, for its period and cost. I wonder if I can learn more about food writing the cheap way for now – reading up on it. Meanwhile, I guess it doesn’t hurt to continue rambling on Joy Luck Kitchen while I’m at it. Maybe, if I’m lucky, an editor might come across my food blog posts and hire me. Don’t laugh.