Mom usually cooked daily. But father would be the chef during festival. The dishes I liked best were the stewed duck and boiled chicken. We hardly took duck meat or chicken except during Chinese festival.

When recalling the boiled chicken made by father, I thought of the Hainanese Chicken Rice, a classic Singaporean dish.

When I started working more than forty years ago, I used to take my lunch at the road side food stalls. Although there were many varieties of food, there was not much choice for me. It was because I did not like spicy food and garlic. I usually took roasted pork or chicken rice.

After taking chicken rice for years, I was bored with it. Most of the hawkers were only interested in their profit and did not make the food delicious. The chicken could be so dry that I preferred to take the rice with soya-bean sauce only.

Actually Hainanese Chicken Rice is a very delicious dish. Some of the hawkers were just interested in making money. They were selling ‘chicken rice’ and did not put in effort in cooking the chicken. Hence, some people might think that ‘Hainanese Chicken Rice’ was unpalatable.

When my son once asked me to take Hainanese Chicken Rice about a year ago, I was unwilling to go with him. He said that it was the traditional Hainanese Chicken Rice and I must try it.

That evening we enjoyed a lovely dinner at the Margaret Drive Hawker Centre. It was a hawker centre of 40 to 50 years old. The Chicken Rice we took was what I dreamed of for years.

The tender juicy chicken I dreamed of

The tasty soya-bean and ginger sauce (11.01.2009)

I remembered the way my son took chicken rice ten years ago. He would take the rice with the soya-bean sauce and left the chicken in the plate.

The ‘chicken rice’ we used to see nowadays gave people a wrong impression of ‘Hainanese Chicken Rice’. As my son insisted I must go to take the traditional chicken rice with him a year ago, I then fulfilled my dream of taking the delicious chicken rice.

Few months ago, when Mr. Cai Lan (蔡澜) made a comment on Singapore food and some of the people were annoyed. We should be broad-minded. We have to think about other people's comment. We have to make improvement if the comment is true.