Legends of the Sauce, and other sad tales

The benefit of having a coupla Hong Kong aunties in yer fambly tree is that there is a treasure trove of great recipes, fantastic cooking and good advice. The disadvantage is ... I can't understand what they are saying most of the time, unless I have an interpreter sitting next to me at the dinner table.

So the other evening we were seated down and eating the most fantastic soya sauce chicken on this side of the planet. The flavour was amazing. It was rich, it had a complex multi-dimensional structure and I don't even like soya sauce chicken at all but I couldn't stop eating. My colleague (he is dead now) just called me a plump partridge but that's another story. Anyway, everyone was happy until my auntie calls out a bunch of instructions to her maid.

Noor, in case you are starting to clean up, please don't throw away the sauce at the bottom of the pot of soya sauce chicken. I need it.

What do you want to do with it, I asked. Are you going to finish it up tomorrow?

No, I freeze the sauce until the next time I want to make soya sauce chicken, was the chilling response.

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...
...

How old is that sauce? I asked, swallowing hard. I mean, really. How old is that sauce?

Oh, I think it's about 1 year old now. I'm planning to use it indefinitely. This wouldn't have happened if the old lady that gave me the sauce had passed me the recipe as well, but she went ahead and died before passing on anything. Some people are so inconsiderate.
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So after a really satisfying dim sum lunch yesterday at Li Bai Cantonese restaurant, I found out the hard way that most hotel bathrooms do not have infant changing trays. Also found out, by the hardest way available, that when you change a toddler, standing up, on a beautiful black marble bathroom floor, any dark-coloured items that detach from the toddler's butt and fall on the bathroom floor cannot be detected by sight alone. They can, however, be detected by touch.

Oh well. Like the Husband says. You dim sum, you lose some.