This is a childhood snack of mine – the Teochew soft cake, or what one would call ‘neng go’ (soft cake) in Teochew. These ‘cakes’ can be commonly found in local bakeries and traditional Teochew pastry shops, available throughout the year as a snack.
The osthmanthus flower is a small, yellow (or white) flower that grows on small shrubs or trees and has a strong and sweet fragrance, which is why it is very popularly used as a flavour of tea as a dried flower. Many people also believe that the flower has medicinal uses, especially when it comes to the complexion and detoxification of the body.
The smell of fish maw in the kitchen was very strong as I was boiling this ingredient in preparation of making this soup the night before. It smells like Chinese New Year; smells like how the kitchen and the entire house always smells like when my mum prepares the dishes before the reunion dinner. It smells very familiar, and very good.
This is my first attempt at creating rice noodle rolls (or what we call ‘chee chiong fun’). The usual way to make it is to use rice flour with a little potato or corn starch, the latter of which is supposed to make the rice noodle springy and elastic. I adapted the recipe to use cake flour instead of rice flour so that I could use up all my cake flour in the cupboard before the year comes to an end. It worked perfectly. Just like the real deal.
I used to dislike eating silver needle noodles a lot when I was young. Whenever I fell sick, my mum would buy a packet of these for me to eat because that’s what sick people should eat when they have no appetite, or so she says. My mum definitely had good intentions, but these soup noodles tasted almost always very bland and plain and would make me feel worse and even more deprived. I therefore grew up associating this dish with sickness, fever, vomit, lack of appetite and all the emotions that one would feel when one falls sick. That’s how much I used to dislike this dish.
