Choy Love Club: A reflection on bananas...and my dad
Choy Love Club is the paid subscriber area of To Vegetables, With Love…Everyone (free and paid) will see a preview of this newsletter but only paid subscribers will see the recipes. As always, thank you for being here. Onto a reflection for Father’s Day…
I’ve just returned home from the west coast portion of my Tenderheart book tour. It was a warm and soul-enriching trip. Meeting home cooks validates and provides context to the recipes that I develop and share. The conversation is two-sided. I met so many incredible and generous people who enthusiastically shared stories about cooking from my books and my recipes online. I heard the phrase “life changing” more than once. I so enjoyed meeting everyone and I only wish I had more time with each and every one of you.
And it’s not over yet. This week, I’ll be visiting Barrett Bookstore in Connecticut where I will be in conversation with the incredible
who writes the very popular substack Dinner: A Love Story and is also the author of the equally popular The Weekday Vegetarians. Register here. I can’t wait to speak with Jenny, I’m sure we will have a very spirited conversation about vegetables, dinner and feeding our families.
Since I’m pretty fried from all the travel and it’s Father’s Day today, I thought I would use this dispatch to share a story I wrote about my dad for my indie food journal Peddler a few years ago (it appeared in Issue 2: Childhood). This was actually the very very first time I wrote about my dad and it was, in many ways, the precursor to me writing Tenderheart. The story also accompanied a graphic of a face constructed out of food, which provided the inspiration for the Tenderheart cover. I’ve also included the two sweet banana recipes - a banana pudding, and my banana bread - which appeared with the story in Peddler. I hope you enjoy this little trip down memory lane, which provides some background into my personal and creative journey to Tenderheart. Read The Banana Guy below.
The evolution of a cover face
While on tour, a few people asked about Tenderheart’s whimsical cover. The original inspiration was the above image but in creating this new version, I tried a few iterations with different ingredients to build the face. I thought it would be fun to share some of the other veg faces who were in the running to make the cover!
For the hair, I tried black fungus, hijiki seaweed and ramen noodles. For the nose, I also tried the longer and slimmer king oyster mushrooms. The Australian edition of Tenderheart used a banana for the mouth but we replaced this with a yellow squash for the US cover. Which one is your favourite face? A few people were intrigued by the eyes. Can you guess which vegetable the eyes are?
Reviews are love
If you love Tenderheart, I’d love for you to leave a quick review on Amazon! Reviews drive traffic and will help others find it. You don’t have to have purchased the book on Amazon to leave a review. Thank you!
This week
Listen to my conversation with Francis Lam over at The Splendid Table or my convo with Christopher Kimball over at Milk Street.
Read my deep dive interview about Tenderheart in Canada’s National Post.
Cook this fun and delicious new recipe over at NYT Cooking dumpling tomato salad with Chile crisp vinaigrette - this is a gift subscription so no paywall.
The Banana Guy
My dad passed away when I was fifteen years old, so there is more about him that I don’t remember, than I do. But there are a few memories that stand out: he was a big personality, with a booming voice; he loved kids; he bought me gifts from the newsagent after seeing the doctor; he was a happy gift-giver; he shared my love of stationery; he liked to label things with his Dymo; he made us snacks after school; he chopped lettuce so fine, it blew my mind; he was a talented photographer; he wore his hair slicked back with bryl cream; he gave me a bottle of Chanel No.5 for my 13th birthday; he liked to bet on horses; he got dressed up in three piece suits to go into Chinatown; he drove an orange Ford Falcon; he worked two jobs; he was soccer obsessed; he never ate anything sweet (he was a type 2 diabetic). His name was Ken, or Wai Keung in Chinese, but to many, he was the Banana Guy.
My dad moved to Sydney from Guangdong province with my grandfather when he was about 16. He studied business and lived in Chinatown, in a small flat above an Asian supermarket on Campbell Street. During those days, in the late fifties and early sixties, working class immigrants populated the Victorian terraces and semi-detached houses of Sydney’s inner city (and now some of the most expensive real estate in Sydney).
In the Sixties, with the urban sprawl, moving to the suburbs was seen as a sign of rising affluence. My dad bought a house in Kingsgrove, a suburb in southern Sydney, right next door to his older sister Betty and her husband Benny. He married my mum in 1967, and they had three children.
My dad woke up at 3am every morning. He would get dressed in the dark, meet my uncle Benny outside and then drive together to work. Dad worked for my Uncle Benny who was a banana importer at Flemington Markets in Sydney’s inner west. His time as a banana salesman defined him and somehow, he was made for this job. He was sunny and gregarious. And he was supremely generous. Our family and friends benefited from his generosity, and were showered with fruit. Our house always resembled a fresh produce market. We couldn’t turn a corner without walking into a tray of plums, nectarines or mangos. My summers were spent gorging on stone fruit while watching cricket on TV. I once ate so many cherries, I vomited.
My dad loved fruit. Every night after dinner, he ate an orange. He would peel it at the dinner table and sometimes I would stand next to him and see if he would give me a wedge. And then there were the bananas. Mounds of them, all over the house. I don’t remember loving bananas growing up, we were just so sick of them. I think we gave more away than we ate.
As an adult, bananas are incredibly comforting. I don’t eat a lot of them but I do, inexplicably, enjoy sweets with that unmistakable faux-banana flavour – banana Paddle Pops, banana lollies and banana ice cream. I always have extremely ripe bananas in my freezer for making banana bread. But recently in New York’s Lower East Side, I tasted a banana pudding from Sugar Sweet Sunshine which shook my world – layers of fresh banana, vanilla wafers and airy whipped cream, served in a takeaway coffee cup. Somehow, the dessert reminded me of my dad - sugar, sweet and sunshine are words that perfectly capture his genial, kind spirit. The Banana Guy lives on in this cheerful banana pudding.