How I learnt to cook

When I was a student aged 12 in Class 7 back in 1979, we were sent for to a 'Technical school' the girls to learn cooking and house keeping and the boys to learn woodwork. The Class 8 Senior students also joined us for these classes and we all went to the 'Technical school' once a week in a bus. The school if I recall was located close to the Ocean in Laucala Bay, Suva, Fiji.

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I always enjoyed the cooking lessons, it was fun to watch the teacher demonstrate the recipe and for each of us to make it at our own desks. We all had to wear an apron to the class. My mother made me a calico apron with heart shaped pockets made out of a red gingham fabric and matching frilled eding on the bib. I thought the apron was so pretty and liked to wear it. We all wrote down the recipes in our exercise books.

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They also taught us how to clean up and do the washing. First, we had to fill a bowl with warm water and add detergent, then we soaked the dishes in the bowl and scrubbed them with a dishmop.After that we put the dishes on a dish rack and wiped them dry with a dishcloth.We were also taught how to scrub the table with a brush, soap and wipe it dry with a damp tea towel.

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Some of the foods we cooked were chocolate biscuits, cassava cake, rice/potato cakes and Yorkshire tea cake. The rice/potato cakes was made out of cooked potato and rice to which was added shredded carrots and onions and shaped into patties which were pan fried. The variety of Yorkshire tea cake we made was kind of a shortbread with strawberry jam and shredded coconut as a filling.

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This introduction into cooking at the 'Technical' whet my appetite for cooking and I soon began duplicating the recipes I had learnt at home and also trying out new recipes from cookbooks. My mother had bought a very nice British cookbook after arriving in Fiji with beautiful color pictures which I immeditately fell in love with. Some of my favorite foods that I tried out from it were Jam tarts, Asparagus Flan, Queen of puddings, Lemon Meringue pie and Custard Tarts.

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After I moved to Australia in 1985 at the age of 18, I bought some small recipe books from the Thrift shop and became interested in and made main course items such as: Fried Liver and onions,, Grilled Lamb chops, Roast Beef, Roast potato with Yorkshire puddings and Horseraddish Sauce and Southern Fried Chicken.

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In December 1985 I finished Year 12 and was awarded a T. E. (Tertiary Entrance ) score that enabled me to apply to Universities. I got many offers from out of State but I decided that Kedren Park Campus of the BCAE was best so I wouldn't have to relocate.

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I began my 3 year degree towards a Bachelor of Business (Accounting) in 1986 at Kedren Park. I was still living with my mom and brothers and I didn't have to worry about housekeeping or cooking. In 1987 my mother decided to take my youngest brother and go back and join my father who was working in the Marshall Islands. Before she left she gave me a tips on how to cook and do the banking and groceries. It was pretty easy to cook rice in the rice cooker and some curries on the stove. In fact I have always found that rice and curry is the easiest food for me to cook. I always needed to refer to recipe books whenever I cooked any other kinds of foods.

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I was nostalgic to try out some very traditional Sri Lankan recipes. My sources of recipes for Sri Lankan food that I had never cooked before were Charmaine Solomon's The Complete Asian Cook Book, Chandra Dissanayake's Ceylon Cookery and the Ceylon Daily News Cook book by Hilda Deutrom. All 3 books were owned by my mother, the Ceylon Daily News cook book being particularly ancient with a green cloth cover. I must mention here that Charmaine Solomon's cook book was a coffee table edition and had the most beautiful pictures that made you immediately want to try out the recipes.

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Luckily, there were a lot of Vietnamese shops close to where we lived at Hill End, Brisbane. It was a walk of about 20 minutes down to West End which was a small shopping area. I could also take the bus, but I preferred to walk there. Coming back my load would be so heavy.

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Most of the shops in West End were owned by the Greek community with a new influx of Vietnamese shop owners just coming in. The Greek owned vegetable shop had thampala (amaranth) leaves, which I used to buy. I loved my mallung (greens). At the Vietnemese shops I found kankung, brinjals, thampala (amaranth) and yams and I was able to cook those just like back in Sri Lanka. There was a travelling Sri Lankan salesman who used to come about once in 3mths in his van with Sri Lankan groceries. I always bought from him Sri Lankan spices, karawala ( dried fish), hal masso (sprats), canned foods such as kos ata (jack fruit seeds), breadfruit and delicacies like muscat.

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For my main supermarket groceries I had to walk all the way to the end of West End to Jack the Slasher supermarket, I made the trip every two weeks. Amongst other things I would buy things like frozen meals of turkey and roast beef and apple pie. My day to day cooking was Sri Lankan food which I was good at doing. Now and then I would get a craving for Aussie food and when the craving hit I would get out the frozen dinners and savor them while watching tv.

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I also used to buy frozen stewing hens at the supermarket. I liked to make chicken curry with the tough birds. Since the meat was so lean and muscular the meat was chewy but I preferred my chicken chewy rather than soft. However, my brother always complained about the meat being chewy.

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I bought a whole box of groceries at Jack the Slasher and also a box of fruits and vegetables at the green grocer next door. Both places would deliver the groceries to my door, which made it very convenient.

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SBS TV was a special TV channel in Australia that showed programmes from all over the world and in many languages with subtitles when needed. I was able to see a Sri Lankan Cookery programme conducted by Felicia Wakwella Sorenson brodcast from Hongkong. She made some of the staples of Sri Lankan cookery such as Chicken curry, prawn curry and Cabbage mallung. I was so happy to see Sri Lankan cooking on TV and wrote down all her recipes and tried them out with delicious results.

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In addition to Sri Lankan cooking I also ventured into Indian cooking and my main source for my recipes was the cooking programme by Madhur Jaffrey running on SBS TV at the time. I used to record her programs on the VCR and then write down all the recipes I liked. But soon I bought her cookbook which was part of the TV series and it had the most delectable pictures to accompany her recipes. In no time at all I was making samosas with peas and potato, parathas, and lamb with turnips. I also bought Doris Ady's Asian cookery book. She was a lady of Sri Lankan origin who had immigrated to Australia.From her book I was able to make gulab jamun which was one of my favorite Indian sweets.

Living away from Sri Lanka since I was a young girl of ten, I was always nostalgic for things Sri Lankan and eating our familiar native foods was a nice way to constantly reconnect with the motherland.

The Passing of my Father

(I wrote most of this blog posting in June 2009 after my father died. It is now October 2011, over two years since he passed away. The feelings of hopelessness have now gone away and I have now come to accept the fact that he is now gone.However, whenever I see something that reminds me of my father, like his books, his glasses or his belt, I feel a renowned feeling of sadness about his passing.I used to dream about him a lot in the first few months after he died, he was very much alive in those dreams.Then  I used to wake up and I would realize that it was only a dream and that he was really gone. I still see him in my dreams sometimes and it's as if he was still alive.)

I have  not thought about death so much in my whole life until during the past month we lost our father. Up until now I had never experienced the consequences of death so closely since nobody in my immediate family had passed on before.

My father's passing has had a profound impact on me. It has made me realize how final death is. How my father can never come back to us in this lifetime and we can never turn the clock back or do things a different way. Even in our next births even if we do meet we will be different people and this present life is gone forever. Somehow I can't seem to accept the fact that my father can no longer see us from where he is at now and that he will have no memory of us in his next birth. No matter how much we think of him he will not know how much we miss him and wish that we could turn back the clock. In a way it's good that he is free from the burden of worrying about how we are doing. It's only us that are left behind that are left to cope with the loss of losing a loved one.

Now with the loss of my father, I have come to realize how fragile human life is , it's like a candle flame that maybe extinguished at any moment. I have been searching for articles on how to cope with the loss of a parent and how to cope with death. In my search I found that the Buddha had asked his disciples how often one needs to contemplate dying. They had given various answers, the correct answer being that one needs to think about death on every inhalation and expiration. Only if the in breath comes in do we live, that's how close to death we all are. That is such a remarkable fact that we never think about. It makes sense now why the Anapanasati meditation (concentration on in and out breath) is the most basic meditation used by Buddhists.

While we are alive we never think about death, the mention of death instills fear in us so we avoid thinking about it as much as we can. But since death is an inevitable fact of life we need to contemplate our own impending demise and those of our loved ones and friends.

I see my self going back over the last time I saw my father and even back to the last month of his life. I have this nagging feeling of sadness and guilt within me, for not seeing that he was not well and under a lot of stress. I keep thinking what if I had paid more attention to his health would he still be alive today? I feel like I didn't do enough to help him during his last year in life. He worked so tirelessly this past year and that was because he wanted to pay back some loans that he had taken out from banks in Sri Lanka. If I had known that his health was at such a low state I would have tried to help him more..But for sure none of us had any clue including my father himself. I feel looking back that he was under a lot of stress but I was too tied up in my own problems to tell him to slow down and take things easier.He had just come back to Sri Lanka to take care of some family property matters there . And once he was back in the States his plan was to take it easier job wise. He did complain that he was having some body ailments in the past month but none of us in the family took it to be anything serious and neither did he. We suggested to him that he should see the doctor about it but he didn't think it was important enough to see the doctor about. My father was very independent and therefore he always saw the doctor on his own.So it never occurred to us to take him to the doctor.

When I think back upon how hard he had been working and the fact that we didn't realize it I feel very sad. If I was in a better place myself mentally perhaps I would have seen it, but I was far more worried about my self that I had no time to think about how my father was. I think that is our bad karma that we lost him so soon he was not yet seventy. I see his own brothers and sisters who are a lot older who are still alive and that makes me sad too, I feel he died too young. I feel somehow that he sacrificed his own life because he was so unselfish. He put his family welfare first and never gave much thought to checking up on his own health. I also feel like he didn't want to face the fact that those ailments he was experiencing in the last month were anything serious,

My father was such a devoted family man and he put the needs and wants of his family first before his own. Now that I am an adult myself and when I reflect on the last year of his life I can truly see this to be true. I feel that he must be born into a better life on those merits alone.

My father in Fiji- around 1980  (double click to enlarge photo)

 

 

My father (holding my brother)  and me sitting at a fountain at UCLA, CA, USA- around 1969

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My father  while staying at a friend's house in Los Angeles, CA in 1974 when he was  finishing his PhD at UCLA.  (double click to enlarge photo)

What's been happening in my life while I've been away from my blog...

It's good to be back at my blog. I have been caught up with life that I haven't had the time to sit down and pen my thoughts in my blog. But I don't want to give up on my blog. It is part of me, it is an outlet of expression and a source of satisfaction for me.

In the past few months, I had a work assignment of a few months duration. It has been good to get out of the house like normal people every day. I was back to the early morning rises, rushing to catch the Commuter Express which would take me to the bustling financial district of Downtown Los Angeles. I was always a few minutes late which meant that I had to run/walk/run in order to make sure to catch the Commuter Express bus which only came every half hour. Somehow I always managed to get to the bus stop before the bus arrived. It was partly thanks to my trusty old walking shoes and partly due to my determination to catch that bus.

The office was an exciting place mainly due to the people who worked there. The work in itself was not too difficult once I became familiar with my daily tasks. The duties of my job brought me in contact with every member of the department on a daily basis. There were certain people that I liked to see more than others. I looked forward for an excuse to talk to some people. Actually there was one person in particular that I liked to talk to. Incidentally he was a man, you could say he was my secret crush. I actually didn't notice him so much at first.

Then all of a sudden it hit me. It happened because one day he came over to my cubicle to ask me a question about work and then and he asked me where I was from. I said I'm from Sri Lanka and then we had a long chat about Sri Lanka, about it's languages, races and religion. He is East Asian and he said he was raised as a Christian but his ancestors had been Buddhist. As we talked I began to like him more and more and I hoped he liked me the same way.

Anyway to cut a long story short I used to see him now and then at various places at work i.e. in the lunch room, break room or at his desk for work related matters. Each time I saw him we used to talk, it was easy to talk to him as he was so outgoing. I am a shy person but with an outgoing person I find it easy to talk. Everytime we talked I kept wondering 'does he like me?'

There was no doubt that I liked him and I wanted him to like me as more than a friend. However, with him the reason that he talked to me was I think, due to his personality, he was a naturally friendly person and liked to talk. When I went to his desk to give him a document he used to greet me smilingly and ask how I was, how my work was , how my day was. Each time, I was very happy to talk to him, be in his company and share some conversation. I wanted to go upto his desk just to say hi but refrained from doing so as I didn't want people to think that I was just going there to talk to him.

Then finally I knew my time there was ending and in the final two weeks I used to go upto talk to him just for the sake of talking. I no longer cared what people thought as I would not be there much longer. I told him that I would be leaving and he began to discuss with me what my plans were next in my career path and give me some advise. I did invite him out for lunch just before I left and he took me to a nice restaurant, but he didn't try to learn more about me all he did was give me more advise on my next career move. During our prior conversations, he had asked me if I was single or married and I had told him I was single. He had also told me that he was single. I really wanted to ask him what type of woman he was looking for. But I felt awkward and afraid of what he might think if I asked him that question. Our lunch was so nice, it felt so special to share his company but the time was too short.

I have his contact number and email and he has mine. In fact we spoke once after I left as he wanted to see how I was doing. But, I feel he only likes me as a friend and he enjoyed our conversations but that was that. In anycase I am glad to have met him, I enjoyed our moments together as friends although I wished for more. I feel like I met a good person. When you meet good people that you like, it inspires you also to emulate them and try to improve your own life. He is a member of a strict Christian denomination whose Church he recommended that I attend not only for the religon but also for fellowship with good people. Although I am interested in learning about other faiths, at this stage in my life I have come to a point in my beliefs where I feel like I cannot abandon Buddhism for another faith.

I want to go and meet him again for a lunch in the future and I will try my best to ask him what he wants in his mate, so at least I have an idea whether or not I meet his ideal.

I'm sorry I have been away from my blog

Hello, how is everyone out there? I am sorry I still haven't had the time to do a proper blog posting. I really hope to do a post during August. Hope everyone is well and happy!

I'm still here :) sorry, been to busy to blog

I'm so sorry to have been away from posting anything to my blog in a while. I did have something almost ready, to find that I had forgotten to save the revised draft! So I need to go back and do it from scratch again!

I have been too busy to have had the time I needed to actually finish a draft for posting. As some of you may have noticed I don't post often. But when I do posting something , the posting tends to be quite long and involved and I do try to include pictures.

I hope to be back soon with something interesting, and hope my fellow bloggers are well and happy.

Dollhouse vignettes-1978 -1979

As you know from my previous postings, dolls and dollhouses were part of my childhood interests.

I wanted to share some scenes that I created as a twelve year old, centered around my dolls and 'cupboard dollhouse'. My father helped me by capturing the following scenes in photos:




Christmas 1978 at Ken and Daisy's house.


This picture features the living room in my 'cupboard dollhouse'.


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Christmas Dinner 1978 at Ken and Daisy's house.


This picture features the kitchen in my 'cupboard dollhouse'.


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Ken & Daisy having a Picnic at Deuba Beach, Fiji-1979



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Ken & Daisy at Deuba Beach, Fiji-1979



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Ken enjoying the sun at Deuba Beach, Fiji-1979


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Daisy, Ken, Skipper & baby Alice with Snowy the dog-having a picnic-1979


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Daisy with baby Alice and Snowy the Dog- 1979




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My senior year at High School in Australia

I moved to Brisbane, Australia, not long before my 18th birthday in 1995. My mother and my two younger brothers accompanied me there.

The night we arrived in Brisbane there was a mighty hail storm, which meant that our flight couldn't land in Brisbane. Instead the flight was diverted to Coolangatta.We were ferried by coach from Coolangatta to Brisbane Airport. A Sri Lankan family friend was at the airport to pick us up.My mom and brothers all had diarrhea at the airport on account of the lamb that they had eaten on the plane. Miraculously the lamb had no such ill effects on me. I don't recall whether I actually ate the lamb or not.

We stayed the next month at the home of another Sri Lankan family that we had previously met in Fiji, where they were working at the time. They were very hospitable and put us up at their place until my Mother enrolled my brother and I at the Brisbane State High school. We also found a flat/apartment about a mile from the school, in which to live.

This whole move to Australia had filled me with trepidation. I was worried whether I would have difficulty fitting into a Western culture. Fiji, where we had spent the last seven years was different from Sri Lanka, but it was a colonial, third world country that shared many similarities and all the people were brown skinned.I felt so self conscious about being a brown skinned girl in a white world.

Finally, school opened in February 1985 and I had enrolled in all my classes which were to be mainly Science and Maths subjects as well as English language and literature.The first day of school I felt very lonely. I met my classmates, the school was co-ed so there were boys as well. I felt even more self conscious having to face boys, my previous High School in Fiji had been all girls. Most of the students in my class were white Australian. There were a handful of minority students such as two Chinese, two Greek and one Turkish student. Our class teacher was Ms. Jenny Cranston. She was an attractive petite, young woman with shoulder length black hair and brown eyes. She had a strong Australian accent and the 2 subjects she taught us were English Language and Literature. I thought some of the boys in our class were cute but I was too shy to interact with them during the school year.

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My class picture-Year 12 taken at the school library.

I am seated 1st from the left in the front row. My cute Turkish classmate who liked me, is in the front row seated 3rd from the left.

On the first day, we were given our time table, we had to move each period to different labs or classrooms and take all our books with us. I met other students during my Maths 1 and Maths 2 classes. The other students were nice, I used to have lunch sometimes or spend the morning breaks with some of the girls in my classes. Being very shy I sometimes used to prefer to have lunch on my own. They had nice salad sandwiches and pikelets at the canteen which was run by the Mothers but I was too shy to ever go there. So my Mother used to pack me a sandwich and some fruit sitting on the grounds or steps somewhere.

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This picture was taken inside our flat/apartment. I am in the Brisbane State High School (BSHS )Summer uniform. My bag heavy with books is on the floor. Our neighbor's Siamese cat is asleep on the chair.

My best subjects turned out to be Biology and English language and Literature. I did not do too well in Chemistry, Physics or Maths 1 and Maths 11. I found that curriculum in Australia at Year 12 was more advanced than what I had experienced in the final year of High School-Form 6 back in Fiji. Even English was at a much higher standard, although I did do quite well in that subject in Brisbane. I felt that my English teacher was a little prejudiced in her assessment of me, maybe since I was not a native speaker of English she assessed me on a lower scale.

I was fortunate to have good teachers who knew their subject matter well. They were all interesting people, all quite different from each other. My Chemistry teacher was Mr. Hansen, he also knew my brother (who was in Year 11) and played softball during sports half. Mr Hansen was quite impressed with my brother's sprinting abilities. Mr Hansen always wore Bermuda shorts and kneee length socks which is an Aussie tradition.

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My brother and I in the BSHS Winter uniform.

My Physics teacher was a wiry, thirtish man with an Italian sounding name which I can't recall at the moment. He always wore jeans and a t-shirt with cap sleeves which gave him a casual air.His brown hair was longish and he also wore a beard to match. He was quite an attractive and outgoing and likeable man. However, in the 2nd Semester he left for Italy to pursue higher studies. During the 2nd Semester he was replaced by another teacher, Mr. Stevenson who was about the same age.

My Maths 1 teacher was a tall blonde lady with brown eyes, but her name elludes me. She was very good at the subject, but I didn't have much personal interaction with her to say anything about her personality.

For Maths 2 we studied BASIC the computer language in Semester 1. Our teacher was Mr. Brennan, a bespectacled man with dark hair. He was very outspoken and used to make comments about many things. He often used to talk about golfing in his spare time. There was a boy in the Math 11 class who always walked his girlfriend to class and they were always inseparable. Mr. Brennan noticed it and made a comment about "'John always being with his bird" or something to that effect. I found his outspokeness to be quite refreshing and amusing, unless it was directed at me. I remember I used to have Math 2 during the first period of the day in Semester 1 and very often I used to come late to class. Mr. Brennan used to give me a lecture saying something like "when you start working your boss won't like it if you go to work late like this". I always listened meekly whenever he said this and I remember one of the boys sitting nearby smiling in amusement.

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This picture is a paper cutting taken from the Brisbane Sunday Mail newspaper. It shows John, my Maths 2 classmate and his girlfriend at the annual School Formal Dance.

I did enjoy the two English subjects: Language as well as Literature. I still remember what we studied for Literature: Poetry such as the poets who wrote about the casualties of the First World War and also Robert Frost. We read plays in the form of Death of a Salesman and Mcbeth. We read novels including The Day of the Triffids, Grapes of Wrath, The Chosen and Pride and Prejudice. We also watched classic movies during English period such as 'Pride and Prejudice' and the movie 'Tess'. The school year had been split into two Semesters. Each semester we were assessed. We had to write a journal one semester as well as do Oral presentations per semester. I absolutely dreaded the Orals. The second semester I was invited by a group of 3 boys to join them in 3 short sketches. I was flattered that they asked me and gladly joined them. One skit involved us being on a spaceship, the other skit was Sherlock Holmes and I played Holmes' housekeeper. We wore costumes of sorts, and rehersed in the mornings before school. I thought I did a good job, but my teacher didn't think I did too well, I was disappointed in her assessment of my performance.

I found Biology to be an interesting subject as well. Our Biology teacher was Mr. Redhead and he had a regional British accent which I couldn't quite place. He went on long leave to UK during the middle of the year and we had a Chinese lady who took our classes while he was on vacation. I think she was Malaysian Chinese, she was a pretty nice lady. For Biology we had to conduct an experiment on our own during the first Semester. I had no idea what I was going to do for my experiment. Everyone else in the class seemed to have bright ideas, while I had none. So I was a bit worried and didn't start my experiment until about 2 months before the Semester ended. Finally, I decided to grow green beans in 3 types of soil in pots. My conclusion was to see which type of soil suited green beans the best. The beans grew quite well and I wrote up my conclusion and was really happy when I got good marks from Mr Redhead for my experiment.

They had various social events during the school year such as weekend 'Dances' and school night outings to see plays such as 'The Mikado'. Some of my friends in my classes asked me if I was coming to the Dances and I said no. I remember she said "Why don't you come, don't worry people will dance with you." Unfortunately my shyness prevented me from attending dances, although I did wish I had the courage to go. I didn't go to the ' Mikado' or the school ' Formal' which was the graduation dinner held at the end of the school year. The formal was a grand affair where you had to wear evening gowns and they had a formal meal. The menu was approved early in the school year. At that time I opted out from participating in choosing the menu. The Turkish guy in my class also opted out, because of me as he was definitely interested in me. He was always smiling at me and trying to catch my attention, whenever I happened to run into him between classes. I felt very embarrased and shy at this special attention.

One day I saw Ms. Cranston , our English teacher say to him "She's beautiful isn't she?" and he nodded assent. Towards the middle of the year both my Turkish classmate, and I were called to the Admin office during the Biology class. So we both went there and we had to answer some questions and after that we were free to return to our class. My classmate accompanied me back to our class and as we passed the courtyard, he asked me if I was going to go back to the class or not go back. I replied that I was going back, and he accompanied me back to class. Looking back I know that he wanted me to say I wasn't going back so he could sit and talk to me. I did wonder years later what would have happened if I did stay and sit out the class with him that day. As a matter of fact I did track him down about seven years later in 1992, I managed to find his address through Australia Post and I wrote to him. He wrote back, apparently he had married a girl he met in 1988 at the World Expo in Brisbane and they had a son and another baby was on the way.