I happen to be writing this whilst the Chef is away, and even though The Hedgehog has just texted me only about an hour ago, please do excuse me if whatever I write here suddenly seems to sound jumbled, scrambled or even unhinged.
That's because I'm trying not to cry.
I miss these meals very much.
It isn't just the food that I miss, it's the anticipation of it, the preparation of it, the cooking of it, the eating of it.
In the freezer right now are bags of minced beef, minced chicken, salmon, chicken skin, chicken breast, mushrooms and potatoes, kept for whenever we want to cook, and whenever we want to eat.
Thing is, however, I don't plan the diet.
I just eat whatever's made for the day, and so all these meals here are just resplendent, and representative of the Chef and what it is that he makes.
What makes it hard to write about them is that one actually begins to miss the things you used to do once you pause doing them.
I didn't think I would miss helping to prepare and cook these foods until the season came where we took more bye bye lunch and had to eat outside.
But I think I'm being too melancholic, aren't I?
(After all it's just only going to be a couple of days before we meet, I'm right now able to chat with the Chef and I've just seen a video of all the stuff he's brought over- which reminds me of him even more)
We started cooking quite intensely in the latter part of last year.
Earlier this year, for the first two months at least, it intensified even more.
And whilst there're some foods which are harder to cook, and harder to prepare, there're some which are easier, nicer, and which I now miss and love.
Amongst some of my most memorable meals are these.
Some of them may look simple, but in actual fact all of them are do take quite a bit of effort to prepare.
Like the rosti.
Sure, it's really just a potato pancake frying away happily in the pan on the stove, but oy, it takes effort to wash the potatoes, peel the potatoes, strain the potatoes, throw them into the food processor, then scoop them all out and into the pan.
Not just that, one has to know when to leave it there, and when to flip it over.
I wouldn't know.
There's a plate of rice fried with what I think is minced chicken, but I don't quite know either- it's been a while since we've had that- and I will have to ask.
What I do remember very well, however, are the next couple of dishes.
Like the pair of popiah-looking things which are actually rice rolls made with Vietnamese rice roll paper. We'd attempted to stuff minced (something) inside. Either it were minced chicken or it were minced beef, I can't recall. Looks like chicken, in any case, and which tasted really good when stuffed with all the other ingredients together. The Chef was a bit bleah because the skin got stuck to the pan and tore a little but it held all the ingredients together and even though aesthetically it looked a wee bit odd, I didn't mind.
In fact I wouldn't even have minded had it come apart.
Because that's how cooking is like.
You never know what it takes.
Other dishes that meant something to the Chef (and I) included this plate of duck meat, this plate of potatoes, and these few strips of hard crust focaccia bread with a thick slice of foie gras on top.
Because they were CNY ones.
Not the focaccia bread- that loaf we bought at random from Cold Storage because it was on offer- and we have had that foie gras lying frozen in the freezer for the longest time.
What the CNY ones were those that we'd made with ingredients from our meals on the Eve and the Eve of the Eve.
Am thankful to say that we'd enjoyed a couple of great meals this CNY past, and having been able to bring home whatever food we couldn't finish, we decided to use them for lunches and dinners over the next few days.
Duck meat carved out from the Peking Duck which we'd ate from a place in MBS, we fried over the pan and added a tad of soy sauce to make it tastier.
It was a relief to find the meat extraordinarily tender.
Most places that serve duck meat from the Peking Duck (especially overnight ones) tend to have meats that are tough and dry.
This one, from Motts, wasn't.
Then of course there were the potatoes, which I'm going to say, were a resounding hit for both of us where the sauce- taken from the braised duck and sea cucumber dish at Beng Hiang- brought to the Chef (and me) memories of homecooked food.