Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

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Lo Bak Go (Steamed Turnip Cake): A Lucky Dish For a Lucky Rabbit Year

February is always the time of “lucky foods” for me.

With the lunar new year typically beginning at around this time, my family — a rather superstitious lot of folks — tends to turn its attention to eating specific foods that have special significance. Noodles, for example, are a must as they represent longevity. Fish is a compulsory, too, as the Chinese word for it — yu — sounds like the word for abundance. Of all the lucky foods eaten at this time, yu sheng, a Singaporean tossed salad that combines fish with a melange of ingredients like plum sauce (added for sweetness) and chopped peanuts (which resemble bits of gold), is supreme. (Big kudos to Cathy over at Show Food Chef for putting this incredibly complex dish together!)

When my Let’s Lunch bunch decided to do lucky foods for our February virtual lunch date, several of the dishes I’ve celebrated past lunar new years with immediately came to mind. Of them all, though, I have a soft spot for one that I only rather recently learned: Lo Bak Go, a steamed turnip cake that I adore at dim sum — one that my Auntie Hon Tim took the time to teach me last Chinese new year.

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Hei Zho (Prawn Rolls) & A Tiger in The Kitchen Book Launch!

In the middle of a cold, gray New York City winter two years ago, I suddenly found myself thinking about my late grandmother.

This was a woman I had barely known as a child in Singapore. A slender, bird-like lady who spoke nothing but Teochew, the Chinese dialect of my ancestors, the woman I called Tanglin Ah-Ma found it hard to have meaningful conversations with this Westernized, English-speaking granddaughter. Still, we found a way to communicate: Each time I went to her home, food would be set out. Delicious braised duck, gently slow-cooked in a heady mixture of dark soy sauce, star anise and cinnamon and filled with plump cubes of tofu and hard-boiled eggs; umami-packed salted vegetable soup and, at Chinese new year, pineapple tarts, a tiny buttery wonder of a cookie that comprises a shortbread base topped with sweet pineapple jam.

I always thought I’d ask Tanglin Ah-Ma to teach me to make these dishes someday — but when I was 11, she passed away.

Decades later in New York, I realized with deep regret that I had no idea how to make any of these dishes I’d grown up loving. And so I went on a journey, traveling from faraway New York to the country of my birth. Over the next year, the women in my family welcomed me into their kitchens — over many sweltering afternoons, my aunties, my maternal grandmother and my mother gently and gracefully guided me through the foods of my youth, of our shared history. It is a year that is priceless to me because of the stories they told as well as the recipes they generously shared.

I would go into it more but, as you may have heard on this blog, I have a little news to share today. “A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family,” which chronicles my year of learning about my family — and myself — by cooking with them, hits bookstores today. Everything I learned and loved about that magical year is in there — and I do hope you enjoy it. (I’ve also invited several friends to share a treasured family recipe on their blogs today — be sure to scroll down to check out their offerings, ranging from author friend Camille’s grandmother’s zucchini souffle and Phyl’s Nanny Faye’s Hungarian goulash to Victor’s mom’s pad thai.)

Just because my year in Singapore is over, however, it doesn’t mean that the quest to collect my family’s recipes has ended. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, after all. And so during a recent visit to Singapore, when an auntie I only recently got to know mentioned that hei zho, a deep-fried prawn roll that’s Fukienese in origin, is one of her specialties, I found myself instinctively reaching for my notepad. The camera came out; a pen was located.

Auntie Alice beckoned me into the kitchen, and the journey continued …

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Watercress Soup: A Healthy Beginning

You could say my mother is a rather predictable person.

As soon as she hears a sniffle, a cough or simply looks you in the eye and surmises (usually correctly) that you’ve been up far too late the night before, mugs and bowls of liquids start appearing around the house. Like many Chinese, she’s a big believer in the healing powers of soup, that ingredients such as goji berries, preserved dates, lotus seeds and more have the ability to restore heaty (yang) or cooling (yin) energy to the body when tossed into a pot with pork or chicken and boiled together for hours.

Among her healing soups, my mother is particularly fond of making one for me: Watercress soup.

“You always cough and you have so many late nights — your body heat builds when you stay up late,” she’ll often say, pushing a steaming bowl of the stuff toward me. “This will cool you down.”

So, when my Let’s Lunch friends suggested sharing a recipe for a healthy dish for our first lunchdate of 2011, I immediately thought of watercress soup…
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Lan Fong Yuen (Hong Kong): The Perfect Breakfast

There are far too many mornings in New York when I wake up with a pressing question: Where is my pork chop bun?

Flaky croissants, fluffy pancakes and hearty breakfast casseroles are perfectly delightful but one of my absolute favorite breakfasts is something far more basic — a soft white roll filled with a hot pan-fried pork chop.

It’s a classic Hong Kong breakfast — one you’ll find in coffeeshops all over the country. There are variations on the dish — the pork chop is sometimes breaded, the bun is sometimes sweet.

During a recent trip to Hong Kong, however, one place called out to us above all others: Lan Fong Yuen, a little shop in Central that is so beloved you’ll have to elbow aside throngs of starving locals for a place to sit …

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Winter Melon Soup: Comfort, Simple & Clear


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Among the many Cantonese-style soups of my Singaporean girlhood, the one I find myself craving once temperatures start heading south in fall is a simple one: Winter melon soup.

This broth, dotted with cubes of soft winter melon and bits of mushroom and pork, isn't an elaborate or fussy soup — it's what the Chinese call "cheng," or clear. The flavor is subtle; the experience is all about warmth and comfort.

So, when my Let's Lunch friends suggested doing a fall soup for November, I immediately started badgering my mother for her recipe …

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