When I was young, my mother made a lot of things in her kitchen. We had homemade pau, soy bean milk, pizza, cake and an assortment of dishes. Back then, it was easy to assume that she was able to do that because she was a mother. A mother can do anything! Of course, now that I am a mother myself, I understand things better. Mothering is a lifelong learning process and rewarding if you choose to see the good in it. Similar to any role and life experience one may endure. My mom went to cooking classes and wrote down recipes in her book. She would copy from magazines and also TV shows. She was a mom who tried to make it work with the little that she had.

Eventhough money was tight, she still wanted us to eat nice things. Fast food was not affordable on my dad’s wages. During those early years of my childhood, my mother was very focused on feeding, nurturing, and caring for the family. It was before she wanted to earn her own income. It was those early years when she was still naive, away from her family in a foreign state and depended heavily on my dad’s monthly allowances. God knows how much she was given during that time. All I know is that I had food on the table and a roof over my head. She certainly had to be frugal and resourceful in her spending.

I suddenly find myself reminiscing about my mom making fresh soybean milk from scratch, a labour-intensive process that involved squeezing beans through cloth for hours. After seeing a video of an easy soy-making machine, I can imagine her excitement and desire to order it online, yet I still cherish the memory of her traditional method. Today’s world is a good time to live in as a housewife. My mother would have had it easier. On the condition that my dad would give her a considerable amount of money for house expenditures.

Lately, I have been trying to put out more homemade dishes. Simply because I want my daughter to remember that her mother once made cinnamon rolls eventhough they were not that fluffy. Ha ha ha.