Sunday morning in Singapore and the neighborhood markets are hopping.
In Bedok, a sprawling satellite town on the East Coast of Singapore, my mother’s ritual on the weekend is to rise early and head to the large wet market at Block 58. Sure, she’s there for visits with the pork uncle and the fish uncle, to snag lotus roots, tofu and more.
For me though, the trip is always driven by one thing: Bak chor mee, a dreamy bowl of noodles that occupies my breakfast fantasies in faraway New York City …
There are some people whose food instincts and advice I greatly respect. One of them is the voracious (and all-around awesome) Ed Lin, author of New York Chinatown thrillers “One Red Bastard,” “Snakes Can’t Run” and more.
So when Ed recently posted a photo of a bowl of noodles at his favorite Taiwanese place in New York, I immediately sat up. I trust Ed on all matters gastronomic — especially Taiwanese, a cuisine he knows inside and out.
Which is how a few days later, sous chef and I found ourselves wending down a narrow curvy lane in Chinatown, eyes peeled for one “Excellent Pork Chop House” …
Anyone who has eaten with me understands that I generally view vegetables the same way one would dentist appointments or exercise — they’re a necessary evil.
This has long held true, and is something that has exasperated my mother since I was a child. Back then, once it was clear that threats and bribery had absolutely no power in persuading me to eat any greens, my mother wisely appealed to a different side of me: The one that (perhaps not so) secretly enjoys the idea of a good conquest.
Think of broccoli as a little tree, she said.
And so, at the dinner table, I began to imagine myself as a giant, ripping out whole trees from the ground and snarfing down clumps of leaves, then branches, before finally devouring their trunks. Destruction, obliteration — all adrenaline-pumping stuff that finally got me to clean those plates of greens.
Perhaps this could have been seen as an early sign that I might grow up to be a serial killer but, no matter. I was eating vegetables. And that was good.
I was thinking of this story when my Let’s Lunch crew decided on doing “a dish that made me eat vegetables” for this month’s virtual lunch date toasting Joe Yonan’s new cookbook “Eat Your Vegetables: Bold Recipes for the Single Cook,” which hit bookstores this week. Congrats, Joe!
What should I cook up? Why, broccoli, of course …
A Singaporean auntie laughed when I once mentioned my late grandmother’s “gambling rice,” a one-dish meal she concocted that was easy to make — and for busy gamblers to eat — in the little gambling den she ran.
“Gambling rice?” my auntie said. “We called it ‘landuo fan!”
Lazy rice — a name that’s stuck with me ever since.
I’ve been all about lazy food in my kitchen recently — with a book deadline looming, food has become immaterial. (During a recent month of writing at The Studios of Key West in Florida, strong Cuban coffee was my main sustenance some days.)
So recently in Brooklyn, cooking has become all about looking in the fridge and throwing dishes together. Some of these winged-it meals, however, have turned out so much tastier than expected that I’ve started recording the haphazard madness that led to their being.
One of the favorites so far? Chinese roast pork with broccoli in an easy home-made char siu gravy. It’s so easy that dinner took a little over 10 minutes to make. Want the recipe? Just click on through …
Cancer has been on my mind a fair bit recently — not too many mornings ago, I awoke to the worst news. A dear friend and longtime mentor had passed away. Another victim of breast cancer.
The world knows Mary Corey as many things — the first female editor of the Baltimore Sun, an elegant writer and intrepid reporter who covered breaking national news and fashion’s frothy runway shows with equal aplomb, a graceful leader of a major regional newsroom at a time of great tumult in journalism.
But I simply know Mary as just about the best boss anyone could have asked for — and an intensely big-hearted friend.
Mary was my editor in my years as a young features reporter — she pushed me to think big and nudged the (then) very-reluctant me into covering fashion, sparking a career path that I’m on to this day. It would be an understatement to say that I would not be the writer I am today without Mary.
By all accounts, even as cancer overtook her life, Mary remained as sunny as ever, still thinking of others above herself. That was just the way she was — big sister to everyone, no matter the circumstance.
So when my Let’s Lunch international lunch club — inspired by cancer survivor Karen at GeoFooding — decided to post a dish today inspired by spring, life and daffodils to promote cancer awareness, I jumped right in.
Mary, this one’s for you …