The Hazards of Salad

I know just about everyone will say this about their grandmothers but MY grandmother is, hands-down, THE BEST cook alive. There really wasn't much in Chinese cooking she didn't know how to cook, which was especially good for us when we moved back to California. It's not as if one could get a bowl of laksa or a plate of chicken rice by walking down to your neighborhood hawker centre so I was definitely at a loss when my grandmother moved back to Singapore (this was when I was in middle school).

Once my grandmother came to stay and had started cooking meals for us, I had come to realize that things just weren't what I had remembered from my childhood. I hadn't quite remembered the food tasting as oily or that there was always a dish with some kind of meat in it (chicken or pork, but no beef on account of my grandmother being a devout Buddhist). I quickly found out what made her food taste so good. It was lots of sugar, salt, oil, and good ol' MSG. In fact, my husband and I had just bought one of those big bottles of extra virgin olive oil from Whole Foods and while one bottle would definitely last us for a few months, that bottle was almost depleted in a little over a month! Needless to say, though grandma's cooking is still number one, my husband and I were repulsed by all the extra ingredients on a daily basis.

In an effort to start eating healthier, Joe and I stopped at Whole Foods and picked up a salad from their refrigerated shelves. We brought the salad home and ate alongside my grandmother, who was eating leftovers (being the old-school Chinese person that she is, she does not eat raw stuff).

"Salad for dinner?" She exclaimed. "There's no vitamins in that! How are you going to be full? You're going to starve your son!"

I quickly pointed out that salads had vegetables, and that the particular one I was eating had a hard-boiled egg, mushrooms, and an avocado. All very healthy ingredients which will definitely give my body enough fuel to do whatever it is I need it to do, including milk production. Of course, this all just fell on deaf ears attached to a stubborn mindset.

"You're starving your son. Eat some of this instead," she says, as she plops down a portion of one of her famous dishes into a bowl with some rice: stewed fatty pork.