Home on a plate

Seconds, anyone?

Shopkeepers setting up at the neighborhood market.

Garlic, shallots, chili, and tomatoes go whirling against the walls of my food processor. Moving the mix to a warming pan, I then pour coconut milk over my concoction. The blend, now turning a bright orange, wafts fragrances throughout my tiny flat among the concrete shores of Hong Kong.

My friends are sitting around an expandable white IKEA table, taking turns betting on wooden camels in a board game aptly called Camel Cup. One friend ejects a dice out of a cardboard pyramid (on theme) and the group lets out a mix of groans and cheers. Around them are clear cups filled with soju, drunk to varying levels. My girlfriend’s hosting skills shine on nights like these, entertaining our guests with games and music while vigilantly ensuring their cups are never empty.

I did not grow up around a dining table. My birth family instead ate separately in front of the TV, the broadcast schedule dictating our dinner times. My brother and I ate around 6PM to coincide with our favorite Disney Channel shows, That’s So Raven and Totally Spies. We’d then scurry off to my room to complete our homework. My parents ate later in the evening when my father came home from work. They preferred NCIS and other true crime shows, the TV blaring late into the night.

I learned how to cook in my university dorm room, hunching over a portable electric stove on my study desk. Hong Kong food was great, but it didn’t hit the same spots as the spicy Indonesian food I grew up with. Indonesian food requires a lot of spices (think candlenuts and galangal) and long hours of stewing. Since I was just beginning to learn, I opted for the simpler one-pan Western recipes such as pesto pasta from YouTube while getting to know the most basic foundations of flavor: onion and garlic.

Nine years later, here I am, stripping the citrus leaves off the veins holding them together (they are inedible). As soon as the leaves fall into the pan, green contrasting against the bright orange, I take my wooden spatula and mix the contents into each other.

Dinner is almost ready. On the menu tonight: ayam pop, a signature dish from Padang, West Sumatra.

Counter-clockwise from top right: ayam pop, sambal, cassava leaves, and rice.

The main component - the chicken - is first stewed in coconut water, lemongrass, ginger, and garlic before being placed in the fridge overnight so the flavors really get to know each other. An hour before my friends arrived, I reheated the pot and took the chicken out on a plate before pouring hot coconut oil from a pan for a very brief “fry”. Accompanying this dish is the coconut milk chili paste or sambal that is currently cooking in the pan. For the vegetables, I chose cassava leaves, which are rough and thick greens full of fiber that needs to be blanched before it’s soft enough to eat.

When travel was shut down in 2020, I developed an intense craving for Indonesian food. Some dishes are not available in the generic Indonesian restaurants around here, so I once again turned to YouTube for some tutorials. There was only so much pesto pasta a girl could take. The curiosity for flavors soon expanded my breadth to Chinese, Korean, Thai, and heck - even Western.

Little did I know that my cooking would be so popular among friends. They would come for dinner and stay for drinks, Mario Kart, or board games.

My Instagram highlights serve as a menu so friends could pick the dishes they want to eat when they come over.

My girlfriend scoops rice out of the cooker and into bowls for our friends. I place the chicken on a wide plate and bring it over to the table before coming back with the sambal and cassava leaves. My chatty friends dig in.

Silence.

Their spoons clink against the ceramic bowls as they continue to scoop more food into their mouths, eyes widening at the burst of flavors that came from a very unsuspecting dish (the chicken was white, which may look like it tastes bland). One friend immediately reaches for a glass of cold coconut water to soothe the spice, though I could already see her adding more sambal to her rice.

It does not take long for the bowls to be empty, all scraped clean without a grain of rice to waste. I stack the dishes and bring them over to the kitchen sink while swatting away friends insisting on washing.

I understand now why cozy family dinner scenes look warm in the movies. Sitting around friends that become family just feels so natural, like it was a culture that I instinctively understood the moment it happens. An unexpected sense of home. Stories and bites shared around this beaten up IKEA table bring a certain intimacy to my rented flat, with my meals as the table centerpiece. Cooking is my way of sharing a bit of myself to my closest friends. I may not be the most outspoken person, but I will rustle up a meal whenever you are hungry. Food is a love language, after all.

And with that… anyone up for seconds?

Thanks for making this meal better,

Steven Foster

,

Eric Ho

,

Vincent Tam

,

Malavika Mudit

, and

Perzen Patel

!