Notwithstanding Easy Bake Oven recipes and pre-made cookie dough, the first thing I ever baked was my mom’s orange drizzle cake, or orange dragon cake, as I remember calling it. Turning through the stained pages of my mom’s handwritten recipe book, I stopped once I got to the familiar page. Sugar, butter, eggs, baking powder, flour, sour cream, orange zest, and raisins (which I’d happily omit). No directions followed the ingredient list, only brackets and short notes like “mix together,” “add to dry,” “bake at 350” written to the side in her curly script.
Every month, Ba Noi hosted a Rosary night. She’d gather her elderly friends together to pray and then finish the night with a meal. My mom and aunt helped prepare the dinner and so I was tasked with baking the dessert. Knowing precious little about baking at the time, I stuck with what I knew: the orange dragon cake.
I became familiar with the routine of leveling off flour, zesting the orange, and beating the mixture until it was thick and luscious. Little did I know, that monthly baking stint would become one of my favorite pastimes and hobbies.
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There was always something about food that piqued my interest. Perhaps it was the Food Network always in the background that left me thinking in the mind of a food judge.
One birthday, I sat on the stairsteps of my cousin Tory’s house, eating cheesecake from the big Sam’s Club chilled cases. With excruciatingly small bites, closed eyes, and our best chef voice, we judged the slice bite by bite. We tried to describe the rich, smooth, sweet flavor with our most eloquent words, spending more than twenty minutes on our single slices of cheesecake.
I’d do the same whenever I ate coffee ice cream, my favorite flavor as a child. Halfway through my bowl, I’d vigorously stir the scoop to milkshake consistency. Daintily sipping it, I’d muster up my sharpest taste buds to savor every flavor note of the ice cream. To uninterested brothers, I’d babble off some sophisticated remark.
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On a summer trip to Oregon, we celebrated my Ba Ngoai’s birthday with an Oreo ice cream cake from Dairy Queen. As my mom cut the cake, she recounted her teenage days as a Dairy Queen employee, manning ice cream machines and icing cakes just like ours that day.
With small, blissful bites, I savored each layer of the cake. Those flavors are woven into my memories of my mother’s family, of little celebrations at the tall, four person table which we’d crowd around to sing happy birthday and shuffle through stacks of childhood photos together.
When we weren’t visiting family in Oregon during the summer, we would get lunch with my dad during his lunch break every Friday, each time at the same Korean restaurant. Walking into the small, crowded restaurant, we were greeted by the restaurant owner, a curt Korean man. We knew his face and his family story, but not his name. He and my dad exchanged the typical remarks: looks busy today, how’s your son, the kids are getting bigger.
We never looked at the menu when we came here. Immediately upon sitting down, we ordered our usual: the lunch special, three beef bulgogi and three chicken bulgogi combos.
When our waitress came by with her cart of banchan, we grew excited. Once the banchan was on the table, our food would arrive any second later. With anticipation, we’d look over our table spread with small plates of scallion pancakes, kimchi, gamja jorim, anchovies, and pickled vegetables.
When the steaming hot plates of bulgogi, japchae, and rice arrived, we ate quietly and voraciously, pairing each bite with a different side dish. Using the slick, metal chopsticks, we cleaned off the small banchan plates with little grabs. We didn’t talk too much while we ate. We looked around at each other as we chewed, nodding in agreement at the meal.
After finishing our meal, ever so quickly, we walked towards the door, waving goodbye to the owner and our waitress. As we passed the pay counter, I grabbed a small handful of candy from the little glass bowl balancing on the edge as my dad signed his receipt. In the car, my brothers and I compared our handfuls, seeing who grabbed the most and traded pieces around.
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On other summer days, we stayed at Ba Noi’s house with my cousins. With our parents busy at work, my brothers, cousins, and I (seven of us total) squeezed into my grandparents’ extra bedroom, splaying across the bed and floor. We watched TV, recounted stories, and laughed at all the pictures of us showcased on the walls of the house.
After some time, Ba Noi called us out for a snack. Piling out of the room, we gathered around her kitchen table as she pulled homemade Jello cups out of the fridge. She had prepared them the night before, filling plastic cups with cut fruit and red Jello. These wobbly, red cylinders always lined her refrigerator shelves whenever she knew we were coming over, on long summer days and short after-school visits.
We snacked on the Jello cups, excavating fruit pieces with our thin silver spoons as my grandmother smiled over to us from the kitchen, already preparing our lunch for the day. After finishing, we stacked out cups in the sink because Ba Noi, never one to throw away single-use plastic, wanted to wash them out for the next time.
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A few years later, it came time for me to learn how to whip up a meal for myself. I was fourteen years old, and besides sandwiches and ramen noodles, I had little cooking expertise. My first self-made meal was fried rice.
Each person in my family has their own kind of fried rice. My dad’s has big scrambled eggs dispersed throughout with dark flecks of soy-sauced rice. My mom’s is an even brown color with crunchy grains of rice and some leftover chicken mixed in at the end. My aunt’s fried rice is golden with glossy grains as she has a heavy hand for olive oil.
I watched my mom make her fried rice a few times: heat the oil, add the day-old rice, season the rice with garlic powder, salt, and pepper, crack a few eggs in it, add any extra fillings, and finish off with a little soy sauce. The first time I made fried rice, everything was going smoothly until I added too much soy sauce. The nicely golden rice grains became saturated in the sauce, becoming a too-deep shade of brown, far too salty and moist.
I’m still working on my own perfect version of fried rice. Some days, it tastes mediocre; other days, it’s fantastic. We’ll get there.
Besides the occasional fried rice and grilling, my dad isn’t much of a cook. He likes to remind us that he was a big cook during his college days. My mom will just roll her eyes and tell him to fire up the grill.
He’s always the first at the table, though. He sits eagerly at the head of the table, already having set the table to speed up the dinner process as he calls us to the table because he’s ready to eat.
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There are so many moments gathered around tables and around meals that I hold close: rolling gỏi cuốn at our kitchen table on long weekend nights. Unwrapping our xôi rounds on a hiking break, munching on the sweet, sticky rice while perched on flat, waterworn rocks. Eating bánh mì at our usual table at Lee’s. Standing at the counter around Ba Noi’s boxes of chả giò, one vegetarian, one regular.
Maybe the next bite will carry the weight of a new memory, a person, a place. Or maybe, it’ll bring me back to moments like these.
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