I was really taken aback at how Australian the Chinese family were – The Yips accents and everything were very Aussie. Even though they all sounded like they were fair dinkum Aussies, they were still cooking really traditional, authentic food and keeping up with family rituals like Ching Ming when they all go to the cemetery to pay respect to their ancestors.  

Eileen Yip was bursting with energy and a lot of fun in the kitchen. I liked her story about the rolling pin with the dints in it where she hits Newman over the head. She’d say “his head’s full of stones so there’re big lumps in the rolling pin!”

Learning how to shape the wontons with Eileen and her daughter, reminded me of making the tortellini for the restaurant. I have actually cooked quite a bit of Cantonese cuisine before, because I spent years cooking with a guy called Lu Yan Tak – he’s the chef at Lotus Pond (in Star City). So while it was interesting, I felt very much at home with the food and the ingredients. But it was so nice to see this kind of food being cooked in a domestic home rather than in a commercial kitchen.

What I liked about Eileen’s house as well was all the Christian iconography – every time I would catch the life sized statue of Jesus out of the corner of my eye in the living room I kept spinning around thinking there was someone behind me! That was kind of cool.

And then there was the dancing – I never thought that as a chef I would ever be line dancing. That wasn’t in the contract! But I suppose because of the amount of energy Eileen has she throws herself wholeheartedly into everything she does and that’s kind of infectious. It was so much fun. Her sister in law Aunty Pat was really lovely too. When we all went dancing, it seemed like the natural thing to do.

The men, Newman and Allen, told me their interesting story of tracing the Yips back 27 generations in China and seven generations of the Yip family in Australia. Their great grandparents arrived here in 1890. Allen and Newman’s grandmother missed her homeland and decided to go back to China but it was bad timing as the Communist Party was on the rise and she became trapped in China. Allen was really good at keeping records of all the family history and had traced their history back 600 hundred years.

So much history made me wonder how many generations back I could trace my family.