CNY memories

noodles
Originally uploaded by neonangel.

CNY 2004: was up in China with family. Parents thought it would be great to have reunion in the Mother Land where my brother could fly down from Evil Western Civilisation known as New York and meet us.

China trip can be summed up for me as : Harbin = borders of Siberia, me and parents' friends only. NO FUN AT ALL. Shanghai = milder weather, more shopping, siblings around, FUN.

that's me in one of the many noodle shops in Shanghai....when you holiday with parents, 90% of fun-time = eating.

CNY next week! ah the return of the evil pineapple tarts. my sole weakness at every tidbit tray. i can resist bak kwa and kueh lapis but i quake in fear at the sight of the little mounds of evil pineapple goodness.

when i was pre-schooling and my grandma was still healthy and nimble, i used to make pineapple tarts in her big open kitchen. She used to stay in a charmingly old house along Hooper Road.

The kind which still had an outdoor cement washing area, big wooden stairs, and a timber second floor which came with a peephole so one could spy on what people in the kitchen below were up to.

We made old-fashioned open pineapple tarts, with properly home-stewed pineapple jam. I remember the kitchen would smell of pineapple, cloves and caramelised sugar.

Me and my brother would be in charge of cutting the dough circles, putting a teaspoon of jam and best of all, making little faces on the tarts with teeny bits of dough. That's a trademark - any pineapple tart from my grandma's kitchen had personality.

Depending on how thick, thin or uniformly we rolled out the weeny little dough bits between childish fingers, our tarts could be slyly sneering, beaming beatifically or blandly stoning out.

These days, pineapple tarts are churned out by factories. If they are home-made, the jam is from convenient pre-made packs. My grandma has since stopped baking, since she became partially blind and lost some mobility. My grandma's two tiered tidbit cart that used to be filled with homemade CNY goodies has for many years been filled with store-bought goodies instead.

And every pineapple tart I meet now, delicious as they are, can never match the taste of my childhood tarts with their lopsided buttery smiles and mismatched nobbly eyes.

if i have kids, i will resurrect the tradition of having little inexpert hands make faces for proper home-made tarts. someday, pineapple tarts will smile again. :)

nostalgia. smells like cloves.