Vulnerability, Death and Dinner
An essay and recipe for soy and lime salmon with sticky rice, broccoli and miso soup. Words and photographs by Nyla Ahmad.
Good morning and welcome to Cooking From Life: a Vittles mini-season on cooking and eating at home everyday.
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Cooking from Life is a Vittles mini-season of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world. Cooking as refusals, heritage, messiness, routine.
Our seventeenth writer for Cooking from Life is Nyla Ahmad. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.
Vulnerability, Death and Dinner
An essay and recipe for soy and lime salmon with sticky rice, broccoli and miso soup. Words and photographs by Nyla Ahmad.
Growing up, I’d often come home from school to my mother lying on her bedroom floor. Dropping my backpack next to her, I’d ask how her day was and try to cajole her into getting up before settling on the question hovering between us: ‘What’s for dinner?’ Sometimes the answer would come in the form of a takeaway, which would be over-ordered so the meal could stretch a few days. Other days it would be pasta sloshing in a watery sauce, my mum choosing to prioritise a quick meal on the table over simmering to reach the desired consistency. My mum loved cooking in theory, but didn’t have the base knowledge to love it in practice. She never quite found the time to hone her skills and become the domestic goddess that so many women – especially mothers – are expected to be. She often made meals bone-tired. They were an obstacle standing between her and the end of the day.
What my mum lacked in culinary skills she more than made up for with appetite. When we had the budget we would try new restaurants, order the strangest thing on a menu, and revel in the small pleasure of a sweet treat. She instilled in me a deep love of Japanese food, and how to savour the temperature contrast of hot fudge sauce on bite-cold mint choc chip ice cream. Seconds were requested with glee.
My mother did not moralise about what we ate, and thanks to her I never saw my appetite as a negative or something that could make my body softer and less desirable. Food was a source of joy, and had to be treated as such. She refused to keep scales in the house, telling me weight was not a metric I needed to measure myself by – a gift I didn’t fully understand until my friends began starving themselves and pinching their stomachs with disgust when changing for PE.
When my mum was in the last few months of her life, her illness robbed her frame of its softness. As I held her protruding shoulders, I’d reminisce about falling asleep on the bed of her stomach, lulled by her steady breathing.
Some parents wait for their children to become adults before showing vulnerability, but my mother did not have that liberty. As a teenager, I sometimes wished I didn’t need to bear the emotional brunt of getting her off the bedroom floor, but when she became ill in my twenties I was thankful for it. It meant we already had an established dynamic, and it was easy for me to take charge of her care in the last few months of her life. I have an older brother, but growing up it was my role to cheer our mum up and hold her hair back when she was sick. I felt the gear change into fully fledged carer keenly only because I knew she was dying, not because I needed to look after her.
In the last few months of my mum’s life, cooking became a way for me to show my love and care for her, the same way her joy of food provided pleasure and built resilience in me as a child. To say, ‘I want you to enjoy this’, and ‘I love you just the way you are’. Making her meals allowed me to say things that were hard to utter in words because it would be acknowledging our time was limited. Instead I’d spoon my care onto the plate; I’d say ‘Eat what you can’ and hope she’d hear ‘There’s no shame in me seeing your bones. I will love you forever, long after you’re gone’ I’d hope a small serving of roast potatoes, which she half-ate but still savoured, would remind her of Christmas dinners past. I’d pin my hopes on a salmon fillet, trying to conjure memories of us eating together at her favourite restaurant. I was using food to revel in the life we had lived together, to bring the good times to her when she was too ill to sit at the table.
I was told by my mum’s doctor that I should prioritise lean meat, fish and protein in her meals. I had taught myself to cook after becoming a vegetarian at university, so cooking in this way was new for me, as was cooking for someone with a stoma. My recollection of dates is hazy now, but I believe my mum’s stoma surgery occurred in Spring – maybe July at the latest. She died at the end of September, with the nub poking out of her abdomen still freshly raw and red.
To prepare her meals, I pored over the materials from the hospital telling me which foods were allowed, and began watching cooking programmes that featured meat and fish recipes. I also turned to YouTubers, finding those with stomas and watching their ‘What I Eat in a Day’ videos. It seemed I needed to cook proteins, with carbs as a supporting cast member. Lots of salt. No dried fruits.
The first dish I cooked for my mum was soy and lime salmon with a small serving of sticky rice and broccoli. I made miso soup for the side, in case she couldn’t stomach much solid food. One of my favourite memories is going to a restaurant called Ichiban with my mum when I was about ten. With her encouragement, I ordered a Kaisen Bento, which included salmon, scallops and prawns. I hadn’t been sure if I really liked fish before then. I certainly had no idea if I liked scallops. I loved most of what was in the meal but couldn’t stomach the texture of prawns, passing them on to her to finish. Ichiban became my mum’s favourite restaurant, and I wanted her to feel like she was there when I made this meal.
I am a better cook than my mum ever got to be. With the luxury of time on my side, time she never had, I have been able to teach myself how to get the right consistency of sauce, how to crisp the skin of a salmon fillet, how to make mashed potatoes smooth, buttery and light. I was able to capture the magic she never quite managed. I remember my mum’s sullen eyes lighting up when she tasted my cooking for the first time. I think she was genuinely surprised it wasn’t shit. A beat passed and she smiled. ‘You’re a good cook. You get that from me.’
Recipe: Soy and lime salmon with sticky rice, broccoli and miso soup
Serves: 2
Time: 30 minutes, plus 30 minutes marinading
Ingredients:
For the salmon –
· 2 cups sushi rice, about 120g
· 2 tablespoons light soy sauce, plus extra to serve
· 2 tablespoons sesame oil, plus extra to serve
· 1 tablespoon white miso paste
· 2 cloves of garlic, crushed or grated
· 1 teaspoon lazy ginger or 2cm fresh ginger, grated
· 1 lime, juiced
· 2 salmon fillets, skin on
· ½ head broccoli, about 200g, cut into small florets
· A handful of sesame seeds, to serve
· 2 spring onions, thinly sliced (optional)
For the miso soup –
· 2 tablespoons Dashi miso paste (or use 2 instant miso soup sachets)
· 3 pinches of dried seaweed
· 500ml boiling water
· 150g pressed or silken tofu (silken tofu is easy to find in supermarkets)
Method:
1. First, soak the rice in a bowl of cold water and set aside whilst you prepare the remaining ingredients, about half an hour.
2. Next, tip the soy sauce, sesame oil, miso, garlic, ginger and lime juice into a container or sandwich bag and stir to combine. Pat the salmon fillets dry with a paper towel and add to the marinade. Pop into the fridge to marinate; overnight is best if you have time, but if not half an hour will do.
3. Drain the rice and pour into a rice cooker (or a small saucepan if you don’t have a rice cooker). For both methods, cover the rice with water so that the water above the rice comes to the joint of your first knuckle on your pointer finger. To cook on the hob, add a big pinch of salt, bring to boil, then reduce the heat to its lowest setting, cover with a lid and cook for 10 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and set aside (with the lid on) until you are ready to serve.
4. Whilst the rice is cooking, warm half the oil in a large frying pan set over a high heat. Place the salmon fillets skin side-down in the pan, immediately lower the heat to medium, and cook for 4-5 minutes, until the skin is crisp. Flip the fillets (they will release from the pan when they are ready, don’t force it) and cook for another 4-5 minutes, until just cooked. Remove from the pan and set aside.
5. Because you are tired and have told yourself that the leftover marinade is a gift, or at the very least, better to have than another pan to wash, add the remaining oil to the pan, followed by the broccoli and garlic. Cook for 5 minutes, stirring frequently, until tender, then season with a splash of soy sauce. You might like to add a splash of hot water to the pan to speed up the cooking process. Whilst the broccoli is cooking boil the kettle.
6. To make the miso soup, add the miso, seaweed and boiling water to a large mug or bowl, stir to combine and drop in the tofu. When cooking for someone who is ill, a gentle soup may be the only part of the meal they can handle so it is a good option to have available.
7. Assemble a bed of hot sticky rice with broccoli lining the sides. Place the salmon fillet on top. Garnish with sesame seeds and chopped spring onions if, unlike me, your stomach can handle them. Serve with miso soup on the side. Ask for seconds with glee, life is too short not to.
Credits
Nyla Ahmad is a writer and musician from Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire, now living in Glasgow. Her writing has appeared in SINK #11, The Drouth and various zines. She is part of the team behind literary magazine Extra Teeth and currently works in the Scottish literary sector, leading on programming Book Week Scotland. She serves on the Society of Authors Comics Creators Network Steering Committee and the Glasgow Zine Library Board of Trustees. She has played bass in punk bands since she was fifteen and performs mononamously as a singer-songwriter. She lives with her big ginger rescue cat, Oscar.
Twitter: @nylanylanyla Instagram: @nylanylanylanylabatmanVittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Sharanya Deepak and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead. These recipes were tested by Joanna Jackson.
Thank you for sharing your memories of your mum in this way. Your love for her shines through beautifully.
"In the last few months of my mum’s life, cooking became a way for me to show my love and care for her". I did exactly that for my other last year, before she passed. Which made this a very moving piece for me. Thank you!