Prawn Tauco with A Side of Unconditional Love

The year I got married, I forced Amma to sit and write down her recipe for Prawn Tauco.

Prawn Tauco is my fave dish in the whole wide world. It’s my last meal-in-prison dish. It’s the dish Amma cooks first and last (and multiple times in between) whenever I visit home.

Even though I held onto that recipe for years, dragged it through a house move, and kept it inside an unopen card box for more than a year, I never tried to cook it for fear that I’d ruin it by my own doing, which is not unreasonable, remembering I burned rice only a few days ago.

But this weekend, I made it, assisted by her on multiple video calls—ma how to peel a quail egg smoothly (put it in an ice bath), ma how to know when the tofu sheet is thoroughly boiled (the colour becomes lighter), ma seriously how small is a small tomato (half of the size of your palm), ma does this look right (no, you overcooked the chilli), yada yada yada…

Two hours later (Amm cooks it in half an hour), the Prawn Tauco is done. 

It tasted somewhat… kind of… halfway like my Amma’s. 

And that’s good enough—enough to make my palate happy, enough to fill my heart, enough to send her the above picture and get a thumbs-up. 

But it is nowhere close to having the OG version while Amma stands beside me, continuously topping it onto my plate until the whole bowl of Prawn Tauco is empty as if none else is sitting around the round green dining table, as if none else, nothing else, mattered as much as me. And I know, no matter if I try every day for the rest of my life, I’d never be able to cook that feeling myself.

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