Life Lessons Marked By Food Milestones
Five foods shaped my early memories and formed the foundation of my cooking journey, little did I know they taught me important life lessons along the way too.
I love food, and luckily I love to cook too. So instead of spending a fortune dining out, I spend much of my spare time watching cooking videos, hoping to get inspirations on what to cook next.
I have picked out five most significant foods that marked the different milestones in my childhood through to my twenties, and the lessons each one taught me.
#1 Ovaltine — what simpler times are made of
The first thing I remember having with my Mum at a local cafe. OK this is a drink rather than a food, but hear me out. It is the one thing above everything else that I associate with spending time with my Mum as a young kid.
As a kid, my Mum was hardly ever home during the day, she would be out to work by the time I woke up, and quite often didn’t return home until after my bed time. So it was a real treat for me when she had a day off, and we could spend some quality time together.
One of our favourite thing to do was to go to the local cafe for lunch. We would try out different foods from the small menu, but she would always order a mug of hot Ovaltine for me. It’s been years since I last had a mug of the stuff, but that chocolatey drink was a constant companion on the best days of my early childhood.
Funny though that I don’t really remember ever craving for Ovaltine, it was just something warm and sweet to drink. Compared to a mug of well made hot chocolate, it’s actually quite boring.
There was one Ovaltine experiment I remember doing: from somewhere I heard that some people added raw egg to theirs. So I tried it at home, and that was the earliest food experiment I can remember. I don’t think I liked the result, but well, I tried.
Ovaltine marks the beginning of my experiments with food, which is probably one of the most important aspect of learning anything in life. By trial and error, you learn far more than any book can teach you. You learn what works and what doesn’t.
#2 Plain white rice — first thing I figured out how to cook
Rice marked the start of my cooking journey. I must have been maybe 7–8 years old at the time. I remember seeing a diagram on a pack of rice, which showed 1 cup of rice and 1 cup of water.
That must have been the first ever light bulb moment in my life. Coming from a Chinese family, rice was served twice a day, once at lunch, and once in the evening. So cooking rice was a regular task, and every household had a rice cooker to make it a simple task. So this discovery isn’t as impressive or unlikely as you may think.
Anyway, up till then, I would only help wash the rice, and someone else would check the water level before putting the rice in the rice cooker. This one discovery meant I was now able to put the rice on all by myself. I was so proud of myself, and I guess that little discovery gave me the confidence to try my hands on cooking other things.
Confidence in cooking, as it is in life, will dictate whether you try something new or you give up before trying. Next time you want to try something new, remind yourself how well you did something else and there’s no reason why you can’t do this as well. If you try, you may lose; if you don’t try, you have already lost.
After learning to cook rice, I just wanted to try everything, including things I had no idea how to make… which brings me to the next item.
#3 Home cooked chips / fries — first thing I burned
One day, my older brother had made some fries for himself, from scratch. Needless to say, I wanted some too! Like a typical brother, he didn’t make enough for two, nor was he going to make me some. Fine, I will just have to make my own.
I would be maybe 9 or 10 years old, and had no idea of the principles involved in cooking edible fries. How hard can it be right? Peel the potatoes, cut them into long strips, and fry them in some hot oil — easy.
Preparing the potato was the easy part, I helped my gran prepare ingredients all the time, and was comfortable with the knife. Before long, I had the potatoes ready for cooking.
Into a wok went some oil, I turned the gas up high, waited a bit and put the potatoes in. That’s when it went down hill fairly quickly. I could not fathom why smoke was starting to come out of the wok, lots of smoke. Why were the fries turning black?!
Not one to admit defeat easily, I gave it another try, not realising the obvious problem that anyone who could actually cook would know, that the oil was far too hot. Of course, the same thing happened, the fries got completely burned, and I gave up sulking that I was defeated by some stupid potatoes. I never tried to make fries again for a very long time.
This episode marked my first major cooking failure. At the time, I couldn’t figure out the problem, I was frustrated by it. I didn’t let that failure stop me from trying other things though. It’s ok to fail sometimes.
#4 fish cakes — something I made dozens of each week
I immigrated to the UK when I was 11, so most of the cooking that I know now was picked up in the UK. At the time, my family had a Fish & Chip shop that also served Chinese food. This was the first training ground for me, it is where I picked up all my basic cooking skills.
At the shop, I was exposed to foods that I had never had before. Ironically, it had lots and lots of chips (thicker version of French fries), and that’s when I learned that you can’t just blast them with heat and expect them to cook. But I’m not here to talk about more chips or fries or whatever you like to call them. I want to talk about fish cakes.
Our shop sold dozens of fish cakes a week, and they were all made in house from scratch. Growing up in the shop, one of my weekly job was to take the ingredients that my Mum had prepared and form little cakes out of the fish and mashed potatoes.
Whilst the fish cakes by themselves aren’t anything spectacular, they opened my eyes to the creativity that is cooking, of what you can make out of simple ingredients, all you need is a bit of imagination, and hard work. Lots of hard work, as I found out how long it takes to make all those damn fish cakes by hand.
As with my fish cakes, life can be hard going, repetitive and thankless at times. Stick with it, and years from now, you may just look back with fondness and proud of what you have achieved.
#5 Ready Meals — my staple diet during the first month at university
As I got older, I went to university, which was the first time I had to cook for myself everyday. By this time, thanks to my exposure to the shop’s kitchen, I was able to cook a few simple stir fry dishes by this time. I wasn’t going to starve any time soon, unless I managed to mess up my finances of course.
For the first month at university, I decided to copy what everyone else were doing, which was to eat lots of ready meals, simply because it was the easiest option. At first it was a novelty, I thought they tasted great too. I wasn’t totally lazy though, and did cook some meals from scratch. After a month of them however, I got a very bored of them. I also realised they cost a lot more to buy than it would cost to cook from scratch, probably around twice as much!
That prompted me to start cooking more frequently, most days in fact. I also met two other guys whom I started to cook together three times a week (hey John and Michael). This allowed us to cook more substantial meals and to explore new recipes.
Having tried to live on ready meals made me all the more determined to learn to cook properly. They taught me that cooking, and life for that matter, is a life long learning process, we may get lost or feel like taking a break along the journey. What’s important is you get back on track once you realise what you want from your cooking, or your life.
So those were the five foods that I have picked as the most representative of my journey with food so far. Each one teaching me an important life lesson. I hope this venture still has a very long way to go, with the advent of YouTube, learning anything new has become much easier. The hardest thing remains at trying to decide the next thing to challenge yourself is.