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Robyn M
Speed |
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Christmas is the one day of the year when you think back on all the family Christmas’s you have enjoyed. But when you live overseas, a long way away from your family, it can be a sad time. We live in Singapore, and have done since the end of 2000. And each December I wish we could all jump on a plane and fly home. Since we can’t, I look for ways to make Christmas in Singapore special. The focus isn’t on turkey, ham, Christmas pudding and minted potatoes, because there is no point trying to replicate a New Zealand Christmas when the key ingredients will still be missing: family. So I have changed Christmas around. Christmas in Singapore is now all about New Zealand. We can’t celebrate the day with our family in New Zealand so we celebrate New Zealand instead, we bring a piece of home here. There is a small expat company in Singapore called ‘Pacificly Kiwi’, who I get in touch with every Christmas to buy a special hoard of L&P (a drink that is 'world famous in New Zealand'), vogel bread, mint sauce, Griffin’s Gingernuts, licorice allsorts, Roses chocolates, Cadbury chocolate fish, and Earnest Adams fruit mince pies. It’s not your traditional Christmas fare, but that’s not what I want. I want a day where we spoil ourselves rotten and have fun. Of course there will still be some ham, minted potatoes and salads followed by Christmas pudding, but those are just the accompaniments to go with the ‘goodies’. When you can’t spend Christmas with the people you love, change Christmas completely. Invent a whole new way of celebrating the day. Trying to replicate the Christmas’s of old will just highlight the fact that the family you love aren’t with you. When we move back to New Zealand we will, or course, go back to celebrating Christmas the way we used to, and I look forward to that. But, going home to New Zealand will remind me of something else, of my mother, who passed away eight years ago. She was 57 years old, a vivacious, passionate, wonderful person. I still miss her. My Mum liked to go to cooking classes, be it healthy cooking, Chinese cooking, microwave cooking, or ‘continental’ cooking classes, and Christmas was always a wonderful opportunity for her to show off some of her new culinary skills. Sadly, for Mum, her two daughters were ‘meat and potatoes’ kind of gals. We liked Christmas to be traditional: ham, roast chicken, roast lamb, minted potatoes, peas, and salad, followed by Christmas pudding, whipped cream, jelly and trifle. Even when we got married we still clung to that old tradition, the only difference was that now our husbands joined us in frowning at her strange cuisine, e.g. shrimp and banana salad; raw mushroom and strawberry salad. Bless her heart she meant well, and she insisted that they were delicious, but we were too chicken to even try. Nine years ago I decided to become a vegetarian, for many reasons, and that led me to look at food in a new way—to look a few miles further than meat and potatoes. My fascination with salads and pulses grew as I experimented with different food combinations and my diet grew to include the previously frightening olives, capers, sun-dried tomatoes, feta cheese, pickled chilies, and mushrooms. It was the year after my mother passed away that I found a fabulous recipe for a chick pea and feta salad. It combined chopped tomatoes, cucumber, chick peas and feta cheese with a delightful curry and sesame seed dressing. I thought it was delicious, an astounding burst of flavors in my mouth. However, instead of being greeted with enthusiasm at the Christmas table, my family frowned at my salad and refused to eat it. I realized, in that moment, that I had become my mother, now I was the one making weird dishes for the Christmas meal. I was the queen of bizarre cuisine! Ever since then I have taken it upon myself to ensure that either my sister or I make some utterly weird—but completely edible—dish for the Christmas meal as a tribute to our Mum. We make it for her. The only problem is, I really like these weird dishes…shock horror but I love pickled chilies in the potato salad, and capers in the pasta salad, but the tofu-chocolate cheesecake was definitely a bad idea. Mum may no longer be with us in physicality, but in spirit she will always be with us, and at the Christmas dinner table, I think she probably sits there and chuckles at our latest cuisine creation! Meanwhile, in Singapore, I order the L&P and the Earnest Adams fruit mince pies, tastes that bring home just a little bit closer on Christmas day.
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© Robyn M Speed |
