For many years once I started living on my own, and as an ode to my paternal grandma, I would make a whole yu tou gao 芋頭糕 or Chinese savory taro cake around Lunar New Year. Since I was very young, I always loved taro. I also have fond memories of my grandma making it around Chinese New Year every year. She would fill her savory taro cake with generous amounts of Chinese sausage, shiitake mushrooms, dried shrimp and scallops, then steam them and top them with scallions and cilantro. Unfortunately, having lived with just one roommate, and then one partner and now husband, we could never get through the cake in time before it would start drying out and feeling very dense. Taro is a very starchy root vegetable, and as such, once you cook it, it doesn’t really retain too much water. And after it’s cooked and you let it sit there, every day that goes by means more moisture loss, resulting in a dryer and denser cake. My grandma also made luo bo gao 萝卜糕 or Chinese turnip cake, but not as often as taro, likely because she preferred the taro one herself. One year, I told Chris that I was going to make the turnip cake. This is a bit misleading because no turnips are in the cake; the base of the cake is radish, usually daikon, which is high in water content. He didn’t seem too enthused by it… until after the cake was steamed and he had some pan-fried slices. He declared that it was much lighter than the taro one, predictably. And given the radish has more water in it, it also didn’t dry out after day 4 or 5 the way the taro cake did. So from that point forward, I started making the turnip cake more often or alongside the taro cake. And so it stuck.

I spent some time this morning grating and cooking the daikon, folding it into my rice flour batter with all the generous fillings. It steamed on the stove for an hour. And as usual, it was a beauty, one that I will be sharing with 13 other hungry people on Sunday when we host our Lunar New Year lunch.