Home-grown cooks

WHAT spurs people to cook at home?

Cost is one factor. Eating out is not cheap – not where quality is concerned.

A plate of mixed rice with vegetables and meat in the city can cost up to RM7. If you are feeding a family of three, then one meal alone can easily come up to RM30 with drinks thrown in.

Then, there are parental concerns.

The upper floor of Huck’s Cafe, a private kitchen started by Poh Huck Seng in his double-storey corner house in Gasing Indah. As Poh limits the number of diners to 20 per night, the waiting list is one-and-a-half months long.

Two years ago, Susan Beh, 40, discovered that her son, Aidan, now six, had eczema.

“We found out that this was caused by a food allergy, and triggered by oyster sauce, sesame oil and mushrooms, the very things which are often found in commercially prepared food,” says Beh.

As a full-time mother, Beh is lucky that she can supervise Aidan’s meals personally, something she could not do during the first two years of his life when she was working and cooked only on weekends.

Beh says it is love for her family that motivates her.

Poh Huck Seng

“When your loved ones request for a certain dish, it is hard to say, ‘no’. That was what sparked my interest.”

For Poh Huck Seng, a 47-year-old father-of-three, cooking at home was the last thing on his mind in his bachelor days.

But when his first child was born 19 years ago, he had a change of heart, simply because he wanted the best for his son.

“The first thing I made was apple juice. At that time my son was only three months old.”

Since then, this doting dad has used his kitchen skills to impress his children. Since it was Poh’s wife who did the daily cooking, this event organiser thought that he would provide some novelty to their diets.

“They learned how to count by watching me bake almond butter cookies. Each child would have their own shape and they’d recognise which one was theirs. They would gobble everything up before the cookies had time to cool!”

Home cooking eventually paid off for Poh. When he started posting everything he cooked on Facebook in an album called Huck’s Café, it attracted his friends’ attention and soon, they began to request for “sampling sessions”.

“It’s a popular trend in Europe where people will go to an individual’s house for a taste of home-cooking. I thought why not give it a try so I started taking reservations,” he says.

Today, Poh has taken to cooking as a full-time venture, opening his double-storey corner house in Gasing Indah in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, to diners who will either give him a menu to follow or surrender themselves to the surprises he comes up with.

As Poh only limits the nightly capacity to 20, the waiting list is one-and-a-half months long. For reservations, check out Huck’s Café on Facebook.

Published in The Star 28, June 2011.