"You see? You have to use butter! Not vegetable oil..." the husband said as he rolled his eyes. 

Let me tell you about my husband's eyes. When relaxed, he has some of the kindest eyes I have ever seen. (Not that I have seen many because I rarely look at people in the eyes - deep within I've always suspected myself a case of mild autism, and not just because of the eye contact part.) 

Sometimes JL looks stoic in photos as a consequence of keeping his eyes opened far too long that his smile is lost. But he makes me laugh when he rolls his eyes, for they can nearly pop out of the sockets. Especially so when I know he has proven me wrong, like on this particular evening. 

This is one of the things that remind me of growing up in Malaysia. With any heavy-going coconut-milk laden meal, a pickled salad is what you will want to have as accompaniment to cut the fat. It takes no time to prepare and is highly variable thus a no-brainer side dish.

The free and easy preparation for the pickling liquid is but a 4 : 3 : 3 ratio of rice vinegar, sugar, water, along with a generous pinch of salt. The salad can be made well in advance and if left uncontaminated, can keep up to two days in the refrigerator before colours from the vegetables start to bleed. 

Among the food places I miss the most in Kuala Lumpur, Chawan has a special spot in my heart. Tucked in a corner in the Bangsar Village neighborhood, the semi-al fresco eatery was a favourite pit-stop on days when I was in no hurry between French lesson at the Alliance Française and grocery shopping at the Village Grocer. 

Speaking of the latter, just last week, I had trouble recalling the name of the store even though I could still picture the sections and aisles clearly. Especially the pork store-within-a-store. This random bout of amnesia reinforces the good habit of snapping candid photos of one's mundane routine, because what is mundane today may become sweet reminiscence in future. Friends with kids would agree. Likewise friends who are nomads.

One late Saturday afternoon, I had my best meal at Chawan, perhaps because I starved myself earlier on knowing what I would order from their menu of Malaysian comfort foods. But what really got me in excited anticipation was that I was finally meeting two dear friends from secondary school - after twenty lost years. E and A were schoolmates a year my senior, with whom I would loiter around the open hall in the afternoon after lessons. Being Convent girls, we certainly were not the giggly sort. No. We were the cackle and guffaw type. The ones teachers would find a menace to classroom orderliness.

I met an incredible shoes salesperson today. 

In my entire life, I have only lived through a couple of winters. (Yes we spend Christmas in France but these holidays don't really count due to their brevity.) My very first winter in Cambridge (Massachusetts, not England) was harsh with blizzards and over four-feet high snow. At that time, I had a sturdy pair of boots, suede and leather mix, with cute stitches on the sides. 

Then there were days when the temperature was below freezing point but without snow. JL got me a pair of classic Ugg's with soft furry interior to keep my perpetually cold feet lukewarm. I'm still wearing them now - my third winter. Also I added to the collection a pair of ankle-high leather ones last winter.

A couple of weeks ago we welcomed the new year by having our friends over for lunch. S and T never fail to amaze me by their tenacity in raising a toddler in Manhattan. I am saying this not to judge nor compare our friends who are parents, but simply to share what I observe to be a major challenge for parents living in the Big Apple who use public transport. That's nearly all parents here, actually. 

I mean, how do you carry the stroller with your little darling in it up and down the subway station stairs? Unlike its younger, newer, cleaner, more modern thus even more comfortable counterparts around the world, the New York subway stations do not come with escalators by default. Elevators are either hidden away or questionable depending on who's around you. Oh, and then it snows, which means bulkier outfits and slippery steps that are already narrow.

So unless S and T tell us their preferred location to meet up, we'd try to make it convenient for them by having them over - lunch usually - at our place which is a subway ride away. No need for reservations or queueing for a table, and their son N gets to hang around the living area while the adults keep a lookout from the dining table two steps away. Hey, that's really how tiny apartments here are. 

"Do you want them?" I asked my classmate Bill, referring to the three portions of pâte brisée he had made during our morning lesson. It was approaching the end of our day and we had to clear out everything from the refrigerators. He looked at them, as if remembering the minor struggle he faced when making them, shook his head so lightly one could have missed seeing it, and said quietly, "Nope."

I swear I saw his eyes like a red laser burning through those plastic-wrapped pieces of flaky dough sitting among a few other items left on the sheetpan waiting to be discarded.

This classmate of mine was one of two who took charge of our class since day one. Having worked about four years in restaurants, he left his home-state Florida for New York for our program. I had learned much from him because prior to this I had never stepped foot in a commercial kitchen. So something as trivial as Bill checking the pull-sheet and setting up the ovens and salamanders for the day intrigued me. He made me realize my fillet knife blade was a flexible one even before our chef-instructor did. Bill's greatest strength - my own observation - was in seafood, particularly shellfish, shucking oysters since he was four. I had even suggested that he get himself into Le Bernardin for a trail or even better, his externship.

But on that day, with just two lessons into our pastry module, I could sense his dislike for baking. 

One of the best things I learned in culinary school was neither a dish nor a trick. Rather, it was a concept that brings about the skillful people we see in professional kitchens. The same that makes Jackie Chan's character in Thunderbolt the excellent race car driver that he is. There is a scene where he sits in the car, engine-off, just to practice his gear-switching coordination and speed. The same which sees Donnie Yen's Wing Chun grandmaster Ip Man training solitarily with a wooden dummy. We also witness the same among world-class classical musicians, ballet dancers, not forgetting the Olympics gymnasts.

The concept of muscle memory. 

I never realized I could just buy a whole chicken and spend half an hour trussing it as many times possible, snipping the twine and using a new one to repeat the same movement until my hands remember how to do it, no thinking required. All this I never knew, until my chef-instructor suggested it. 

For several months, I got up four days per week to be ready in our designated kitchen by 7:40 am. The few of us early birds would get the kitchen set up based on the lesson itinerary. (Remind me to describe in detail my life as a culinary student.) Class formally starts at 8:30 am. We have a half-hour break at 12:30pm before our second 4-hour lesson. By five in the evening, the kitchen would look like no one had been there all day. 

I am inclined towards structure, discipline and routine - particularly the possibility of perfection through repetition, but each attempt an improvement of its precedent for a better outcome. I attribute this to arriving in Singapore a sheltered, ignorant kampung kid (sheltered even by fellow kampung kids' standards). Back in the late 1990s, I was very impressed by how the little garden city was so advanced to every detail. People there took great pride in making everything better as the country - at that time - was striving to be world-class in its infrastructure. It was a culture shock but I learned to appreciate it very quickly. In fact, through the years I became such a person, running things in life asking how it can be done better, faster, and so on.

Hence, with much self-imposed pressure to do well - no excuse for me not to! - I cried myself to sleep the night before the first day in culinary school, knowing my life will be different when I wake up. You see, my life in the recent years has been rather "free-form" - I love it very much but at times I fear creating my own prison instead of playground, and growing unappealingly lazy. In Malaysia I took French and scored 90.5 for the minimum certification for a French passport. Having settled down in New York, I was undecided about doing French despite the French Institute having so much to offer. It is an option but not the only one. 

The last time I made mee siam was over a year ago in Kuala Lumpur. Cooking local is the easiest wherever one lives because ingredients are usually in their best conditions in every aspect: availability, form and cost. I can imagine our American friends in Malaysia putting together their Thanksgiving meal - they'd probably gather all their essential ingredients only after numerous trips to different grocery stores. When something means that much to you, all the more you must be determined while maintaining that zen-like calmness so that nothing really gets to you. 

I found myself in a similar situation weeks ago when winter officially set in with low single-digit temperature (Celsius) everyday. There are at least three restaurants in Manhattan that serve Malaysian dishes, but every trip leaves me yearning for more as they never quite scratch that itch spot-on. I still drop by one of them now and then for some prawn fritters (aka cucur udang) which I lack the motivation to make at home, and also to say hello to my Indonesian friend who works there. We barely remember each other's names but can always pick up from our previous conversation. That is, me getting there in the first half hour of opening.

A firm belief of mine when it comes to Malaysian home-cooking, particularly true for one-pot meals that contain carbohydrate, protein(s) and greens, is that you either go big or go home. There is no such thing as cooking for just two portions. Anything less than eight portions is not worth the trouble, especially factoring in the fact that ingredients here in America are packed by default in larger quantities. Gone are the days when you go to the market and ask the makcik for fifty cents' worth of taugeh. 

Exactly a year ago this week, we moved into our current home.

On one hand, it seems like just yesterday that we checked the tally sheet as three young fellas efficiently brought up our 200-plus boxes, setting the large furniture pieces in place before anything else. They took a little over six hours to accomplish what would have taken a team of eight men in Malaysia to complete in two days. One could argue that in Malaysia, labour work is far more tedious due to the hot, humid weather. Then again, moving day for us in New York was on a cold December morning, so cold that one is often unaware of cuts caused by tough corrugated hardboard boxes during all that unpacking, flattening and discarding.