Dad's on a business trip to China for a week, so Mom and I were the only ones at home. She'd just got off the treadmill and off to the showers, so I rummaged through my brother's extensive DVD collections for something that Mom and I'd like to watch but can never do coz the TV belongs to Dad and his news channels and old Chinese dramas at night. But now that he's not around...
"Ma wanna watch this?" I showed her the Chocolat DVD cover as she came down the stairs, her hair still wet. She nodded with a smile, but then I already knew she would - dainty European desserts in old European settings is right up her alley.
Opting to have a TV dinner, we arranged our dinner dishes onto a tray and set it on the coffee table in the living room. I joked about how Mom used to give us such a hard time for eating in front of the TV and she laughed.
20 minutes later and we were lying on the couch, comfortably stuffed with baked salmon pieces, blanched veggies and brown rice (a far cry from the frozen TV dinners one used to buy in the states), and completely engrossed in the film. I didn't know the movie features the relationship between mother and daughter so prominently, and was applauding myself for making such a wise choice for our increasingly rare mother-daughter bonding sessions when my mom suddenly sat up and said, You want some chocolates? Let me go get some.
...... I guess everyone responds to movies differently. Some go for touchy-feely abstract meanings, others go for...
"Chocolates! And cookies from our trip to Switzerland. Very delicate and aromatic," Mom explained as she laid down a few boxes of chocolates and pastries from her European cruise a few weeks ago, half a cookie sticking out of her mouth. On the screen, a lady was dropping a few pinches of red chilli pepper flakes onto a luscious pot of thick chocolate.
"I wonder what they put into these cookies,,, texture is so light and crispy!" She passed me a thin cookie, and the movie went on as we continued to debate how we should start making our own chocolates.
