friday the 13th: the vday edition

quite an oddity for once, friday the 13th being back to back with a saturday valentine’s. explains the horror and frenzy of a vday weekend doesn’t it. friday turned out purply sweet though. flowers in the office in the morning. plus wormwood for me, an agenda for you. not quite yorick yet, but in a few months there could really be a green fairy of sorts instead. how spectacular spectacular. titania may be proud.

saturday was beautifully quiet. supermarket shopping, marinade mixing, pork pounding, spinach stirring, mash… well, mashing. all easy, fuss-free, ready in hardly any noticeable time at all. never seen you enjoy cooking so much before. and i relish it. a break before dessert, then it’s crepe creasing, orange oozing, sweet steeping. and now you have your sights set on steak, which is a meatier option by far than the cold mountain on tv.

undermined by the ads every 15 minutes and jarring cuts of scenes to add to a film already slow in pace and long in running time, it was the most tedious part of the day to wait more than 3 severely interrupted hours just to watch inman kiss ada again. and only to die the next day. brilliantly painful, for us and them. even more painful considering the film has a 60:1 ratio of having 60 minutes of footage shot for every 1 minute that was finally used in the film. must be quite painful too for the amount of money sunk into the film just for paying off its main stars and numerous notable cameos. maybe they should have axed some. it’s rather de rigeur now, which gives a new twist to the idea of a boss from hell, like friday the 13th: the financial crisis edition, where the boss replaces jason and easily beats his bodycount.

but that’s a very bad oblique way to digress into. maybe a film like cold mountain should just never be shown on tv, it ruins any effect and pacing it originally has. channel 5 should take note. although i must admit it’s quite an unusual choice for a vday movie. unless that was purely coincidental with its regular saturday night programming. still, at least it wasn’t the expected titanic or love actually sorts.

but for now… the mousetrap summons wormwood, wormwood…

love

love is chicken curry, oven-baked stuffed mushrooms, stir-fried kai lan, rice and bittergourd with pineapple soup on our day, stirred, chopped and brewed by our hands with a little touch from mum who couldn’t help getting in on the action.

a cookie fortune

cracked open today the fortune cookie gwen left me last week from the oriental. it was hers but she didn’t want it. so does that mean the fortune in it is hers or mine? guess that depends on what the reading is. but then again they always say (conveniently) that everything is relative.

“your dreams are never silly; depend on them to guide you.”

pasta de waraku a la petit monde

tried the gratin at pasta de waraku for the first time and was in awe of what i was served. i ordered the chicken and prawn version and it came looking just like the kind i grew up eating at isetan’s petit monde all those years in parkway. sadly over the years it uprooted for a brief while to isetan scotts before closing in singapore for good although i understand isetan still runs it elsewhere, but apparently in taiwan. seems the ones in japan itself have been closing, sadly. it’s been difficult finding another decent jap-euro cafe here at all, let alone anyone that serves stuff close to petit monde. maybe only ma maison can be compared but even then its gratin is rather different and the menu has a different focus.

at pasta de waraku roasted chicken and prawns sat neatly on a bed of creamy macaroni encased in a small round oven dish served up on a wood tray — everything looked exactly the same, even down to the small the size of the dish. and the taste was practically the same as well!! suddenly i felt like i was a kid again and savouring the gratin like it was never any different ever. nostalgia never tasted so… spot on!

what can i say, i’m a sucker for gratin be it the french potato original or the japanese macaroni interpretation. hmm wonder where we have a french place that does it decently…

random eats

 

left: first the stage props are brought in on the set of black canyon coffee.

right: action! and the biscuit fish swim toward the cinnamon submarine periscope in the sea of viennese cream.

green tea latte and sweets with a tiny whisk at ministry of food. finally a place that uses a whisk instead of a teaspoon outside of japan! but the whisk is still a tad large. it really is supposed to be the same size as a teaspoon.

the famous tan tan ramen at kadoman. heavy sesame and spicy soup. competes well with tampopo.

paisley black and canyon cream

 

tried paisley & cream lil while back and black canyon coffee a lil before that. had a cupcake at the former and a cappuccino at the latter but was more impressed by the coffee than the cake. but then again that might not be a very fair comparison. 

tried some lemony cupcake although i really wanted to go for the signature double choc version ’cause at that time i was trying to look for something not too sweet. got a decent zing off the lemon frosting but i think that was about it. heard the rest of the cupcake range is good. guess will try again.

thing that bowled me over about the coffee was that amazingly for $4.20 i’ve never had such a satisfying cuppa for such a low price. on top of the balanced brew it comes with a mini side serve of crispy fish biscuits and a shot glass of tea (jasmine if i remember correctly and a decent enough grade) to help wash off post-coffee breath. but that’s not all, it appears that coffee milk foam art is a staple as well. not bad for just ordering a coffee and getting everything you see in the picture. and the side sugar packets are soft ground brown sugar, not the super white cane that could be all chemical or even the chunky golden crystals that sometimes don’t dissolve very well. coffee could be a tad hotter though.

must say this coffee chain made quite a good first impression although it only has 1 outlet here so far in katong. the outlet is quite large, great for chilling out with friends, hope it’ll do well and open more. it’s the biggest in thailand although i’ve no idea about how it’s like over there considering i haven’t even been back to bangkok in more than a decade.

merveilleux macaroonies

if not for marie antoinette 
i’d have never discovered laduree
oh drooooool…

thank goodness we at least 
have the likes of gobi here. 
didn’t know the original shop’s 
been hiding in katong mall all this while!!

if i could see my insides now…

today has just been total public holiday sinfulness… there was beef and prawns at lunch, chye tao kueh, orh lua and hokkien mee for dinner with even more prawns prawns prawns since we keep off sotong. not forgetting the likes of creamy pastas earlier in the week together with meltingly fatty pork ramen steeped in pork bone soup and fresh cream cake. 

too many prawns, too much egg, cream, and red meat. i’m just screwing my system. need to jog jog jog!!! before my arteries choke and die.

black pig chilli noodles in 2-day-old soup

ok not exactly like that, but finally made a trip to tampopo today to eat their famous kuro buta shabu shabu ramen!! generous amounts of thin slivers of berkshire (black pig) from the states with cabbage, bamboo shoots, loads of chilli flakes, and kyushu ramen in rich pork bone soup cooked for, yes, 2 days. very satisfying size of a serving and all for only $13.80. the ST rave review was right about this one being one of the best ramens in town although i kept hearing about it even before that.

kept thinking tampopo was of those joints somewhere on the upper floors in liang court but didn’t realise it was actually inside meidi-ya in the basement. good spread of a menu with very tantalising range of tonkatsu dishes that made me wanna order an entire katsu set after the ramen. but had desserts with the girls instead and the scoop short cake was pretty darn good considering i’m not the sort to fancy fresh cream fruit cakes much to begin with. think this is the best and most worth it dessert of the lot. the rest seem more run of the mill and not as worth the price for the small helping. oh well cholesterol be damned.

didn’t realise that the new tom ton place in central is actually under the same management as tampopo. thought they were rivals. but their management company has a very uninspiring name – creative food concept. and its cfc acronym is a bit unfortunate.

chindian or indianese?

finally got round to trying indian wok over the last weekend. a very cosy but still nicely posh-looking place considering it’s located in the corner of an old shophouse stretch and the previous occupant was savoury fare. i didn’t even know what the one before savoury fare might have been in all those years so i was wondering how long a place like indian wok would last. never mind that the place is so small that to get to the washroom you actually need to walk out of the restaurant and down the alley next to it to get to it round the back.

wasn’t sure if the indian and chinese cuisine mix would mean more chinese or more indian originally. maybe it’s that confusion fusion that disuaded my folks from giving it a go for so long. as it turns out the cuisine is basically chinese but a chinese that evolved along with local indian tastes when hakka immigrants settled in india. so it’s chinese with an indian twist. an ST review of indian wok labelled the cuisine served as “chindian”. but wouldn’t that mean chinese indian or chinese version of indian? but this was more like “indianese” since it’s indian chinese or indian-ised chinese. oh whatever. the food was good and a refreshing departure from the usual and sometimes hum drum chinese fare. i loved the generous but balanced use of spices. the portioning is just nice and the food warmly filling. everything is good from starters through to desserts and drinks. but it does start to get pricey when you order through everything and it starts adding up. we had 2 starters, soup, 3 mains, white basmati rice, desserts and drinks. they make even plain steamed white basmati rice so good; light, even, well-separated grains you can taste every one individually as you chew. totally stuffed, totally enjoyable. they don't serve any pork or beef and all meat and seafood dishes are made boneless and shelled. perfect.

the exec chef himself popped by to say hi and it was so obvious he looked chinese though somewhat more tan and he had an indian name. cool, authentic. service was excellent and they wait as attentively and serve as they do in the style of some really good north indian restaurants. decor was modernly opulent but not overbearingly so. must go there again soon to try other dishes….