Musings

I felt like Linguini in Ratatouille when trying to cook Hannah’s and our dinner simultaneously tonight. The last thing I wanted was a messy kitchen with injuries and broken porcelain wares.

I was browsing through the Internet for easy recipes again and chanced upon this Japanese dish Nikujaga. It is said to be a comfort food for the Japanese. The dish is essentially a vegetable stew with some meat in it. It is a sweet, savoury kind of food which goes down well with many people. Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

• 200g lean pork or beef, slice or cut into chunks (we used more meat as this is the only dish for dinner)
  
• 1 white onion, cut into wedges
• 3 large carrots, cut into large chunks (because Yang loves carrots)
• 1 potato, cut into chunks (original recipe calls for more potatoes than carrots)
• 1 Chinese bowl (250 ml) dashi stock / chicken stock / water
• 2 tbsp mirin
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 4 tbsp light soy sauce (adjust according to one’s preference. I used Kikkoman premium blend)
• 1 tbsp ginger juice (squeezed from freshly grated ginger)

Method

1. Heat up some oil in a medium-sized metal pot. Brown the meat.

2. Add vegetables, and saute for 3-5 mins.

3. Add stock and the rest of the seasonings. Stir well.

4. Leave the pot uncovered and allow everything to simmer in medium heat for about 30-40 mins, or until the meat is tender and the hardy vegetables are softened sufficiently. The gravy should be reduced to a mere thin layer which is thick and full of flavour.

The verdict? Oishi! :P

Hannah has better food while at her nanny’s place. Her nanny is a Cantonese and as many of us know, this dialect group is particular about their soup. Every meal must have a soup dish.

I just got a recipe from the nanny for a watercress soup which she offered me when I picked Hannah up from work last Friday. Wow, it was the best watercress soup I have ever tasted!  The nanny told me that the recipe was passed down from her parents. BTW, she’d always cook a big pot of soup every morning and use some as stock base for Hannah’s porridge.

I was eager to try out the recipe at home and so bought all the necessary ingredients at NTUC this morning. The easy thing about doing soup is that it is usually not labour-intensive. Hence, I was able to multi-task; I cooked Hannah’s and our dinner at the same time. Below is the recipe for those who are interested.

Ingredients:

Watercress – 1 packet (soak in salt water and rinse – this would help to remove slugs & worms)

Pork ribs – 200 g (I used loin ribs)

Pork soft bones – 200-300 g (the bulk of it is lean meat, cut into bite-size cubes)

carrot – 1 large, peeled and chopped into big chunks

red dates – 10 pitted ones (soak and rinse)

honey dates – 1 (soak and rinse)

dried figs – 5

nan xing bei xing – 1 tbsp

water – 1.2 L

salt – a dash

light soy sauce – according to taste, 1 or 2 tsps

Method:

1) Boil 1.2 L of water in a medium-sized pot.

2) In the meanwhile, blanch the pork ribs and soft bones in boiling water for a few seconds. Pour the liquid away to remove the scum and smell. If necessary, rinse with water to wash away the scum.

3) Once the pot of water comes to a rolling boil, add all the ingredients except for the salt and soy sauce. Let the water boil again for 10-15 minutes. Uncover the pot all this while.

4) Cover the pot and bring the soup to a mere simmer by lowering the gas to the minimum. You should only see very little or hardly any bubbling in the soup. Simmer for 1 hour.

5) Add a dash of salt and light soy sauce and stir well just before serving.

6) Serve with steamed rice . If desired, prepare a small dish of freshly cut chilli padi and finely chopped garlic in premium light soy sauce for dipping the pork meat.

I’m finally trying to go back to home-cooking since Hannah was born a year ago! :)

When breakfasts are included as part of your hotel stay, you’d usually marvel and get very impressed with the range of items. There’s also the convenience of having long breakfast periods; so if you decide to sleep later on the morning, there’s no issue. However, the range – from my experience anyway, and certainly so in my most recent experience from Kumamoto – of breakfast cuisine gets boring real quick if you’re staying for a period longer than a few days, and you can never quite shake the experience that you’re partaking in mass-production buffets, unless you’re staying in a swanky hotel providing more personalized meals.

There are pros and cons to having breakfasts at B&Bs in this part of the world in comparison. I’ve remarked in my earlier post that guests need to be respectful of breakfast timings. And while what you might get on a daily basis might not be as wide-ranging as the continental breakfasts served in hotels, I actually really enjoy the experience of eating breakfast as a typical American family would each day. Some of the fare might seem simple, but nothing beats the feeling that the breakfast you’re having was made and customized just for you.

So, here’s a sample of what I’ve been having at Blue’s: they were all on different days – each day is different!

Below – a really marvelous quiche with mushrooms and spinach:

Below – I didn’t get the full name of this loaf, but what I remember is that it’s cornbread something. Very delicious when it comes out hot from the oven!

Updated, 1 Jul: Blue helped me out here – it’s Anadama bread, a New England recipe using white flour, cornmeal, molasses  and sometimes rye  flour.:)

Below - Poached eggs:

Below – French toast:

Below – Eggs and potatoes:

There’re three regular staples each morning too: my pot of Earl Grey (though I’ve also started trying American coffee), a glass of juice, and a bowl of fruit.:)

Thankfully, Matt and myself weren’t always gouging ourselves with food. On most occasions – the lunches at least anyway – we ate more modestly.

The first night I hooked up with Matt was on Thursday last week – this was before the two nights of vindaloo and steak horror – and he introduced me to a nifty burrito place (‘Chipotle’)  in Harvard Square. I haven’t had very many of these before, and they were pretty good.

These are ordered quickly and are quite customizable. Matt had the chicken, and myself the steak burritos:

One special feature of the burritos is its use of rice in the wraps:

Just before we headed out to the whale-watching trip at Gloucester on Saturday, we had lunch at the Topside Grill and Pub, a rated #5 of #54 restaurants in the small coastal town. No, we didn’t know it was rated so highly. I just sort of liked the façade when we droved past it, and Matt didn’t mind checking it out too.

Everyone says that you shouldn’t leave New England until you’ve tried their lobsters. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what ordering lobsters entailed. So, when we were presented with the lunch specials and saw a ‘lobster’ item, we went for it.

What we got wasn’t the lobster, but a sort of sandwich with lobster meat on it. No wonder it’s called a lobster ‘roll’. These things are hugely popular; we saw them everywhere in both Gloucester and Provincetown (which we visited the next day), and look like the easy foods to partake in compared to the actual lobsters.

The lobster roll was served on a plate with coleslaw and fries; yep the same stuff that those unfortunate fellows returned onto the ship’s deck (Matt’s “Gloucestered” haha) when we went sailing into the Atlantic Ocean later.:)

Likewise, our lunch fares in Provincetown were simple. At this point, we’d both sworn off heavy dinners after the vindaloo and steaks from the earlier nights!

The town square of Provincetown is lined with many eateries, like this one below that we checked into.

Very small town feel to it, though it was a little crowded during the lunch hour with many visitors also grabbing quick lunches.

Matt downed at least three fruit smoothies in the afternoon at Provincetown. I had the ice tea – which was very different from our local versions. Specifically, they were unsweetened. That’s my egg and bacon on a bagel sandwich.:)

The fast ferry bringing us back to Boston was departing only at 7:30 PM in the evening. With plenty of time to kill and weather increasing gloomy, we ducked into a restaurant for a quick bite. That’s clam chowder for me, and some sort of Portuguese concoction for Matt:

Not nearly enough food for me though for a dinner event. No American experience is complete with a hotdog. I wanted to see how bare minimum these go, and found an outlet doing these for USD2.75.:)

That’s about the sum of our non-destructive meals the two of us had. I’ll do a third post on breakfasts at my homestay soon.:)

One thing I’ve always wondered is how Matt – our Ang Mo bud – can manage all the food he takes in, and still lose weight. Now that I get to dine with him in cuisine and food types he’s familiar with, I’m even the more stunned. On both occasions, the workflow is about the same:

1. “Hey, this looks like a cool restaurant – let’s check it out.”

2. “This menu item looks neat. We don’t know what the heck it is, but it sure looks interesting! We’ll have it, waiter.” (repeat several times).

3. <One hour passes>

4. “OMG – I’m about to die here. That was waaaaaaayyyy too much food.”

Basically, what routinely looks like a good idea – checking into a new restaurant – almost always turns out into a really bad idea. And only because we’ll usually order too much food than we both can finish!

Say, for instance, on Friday evening, we checked out an Indian restaurant in Central Square that Matt walked past earlier on. The restaurant prides itself as being the first Indian restaurant in the city:

We’d barely sat down before we were served with Chapatis first – which was ordinary – but the very red-colored chili dip was murder! Or at least, I thought so, because all I could manage was a very thin layer on my Chapatis. Whereas Matt dipped it all in, scooped up a load, and ate it all up in a gulp.:)

Then the appetizers. I had an Indian chicken sort of soup that was very tasty (it looked like it had been stewed for a while), and a Mango lassi. I haven’t had this before – lots of stuff I haven’t tried even as a Singaporean – and it was all good.

Then trouble began. Matt said “I got to get me some of those naans!”, and here we went: two naans. Mine was garlic, and his a minced lamb sort of naan. They were HUGE. In the picture below, they’re sliced up into halves and quarters respectively:

The naans alone would have qualified for a full meal. Unfortunately, there was also the main course… I ordered the lamb vindaloo, and Matt a Chicken something vindaloo; he’ll have to comment here to let me know what it was! I haven’t had a lot of vindaloos before, but this one was super spicy. I had a small bit, and the lips went aflame in horror. Matt sampled a spoonful, and said – “Yep, that tastes about alright. Average only though in spicyness – yummy.”

Had water to the rescue. The waiter came with one with a few ice cubes floating in my glass. I called for another glass… but this time FULL of ice!

By the time we were done, we felt sick. I was all camel, downing one mango lassi and three huge glasses of ice water, and still I felt like I’d eaten only chili padi for dinner.

As we stumbled out of the Indian restaurant, I swore that I was going to eat salads for the next dinner.

On the following evening, Saturday, we’d finished the whale watching trip off Gloucester and it was late in the evening at about 9 PM. We passed by a small town – Peabody – that was about midway between Gloucester and Boston, and decided to go get dinner… and Matt was all up for steak at the Outback Steakhouse along Andover Street. Oh boy.

First they feed you with a sort of brown bread:

Then Matt ordered a huge plate of Mexican something that was very much like those KFC cheesy melts that Ling loves:

We should have stopped right there, because the above plate was enough to fill us both up. But heck no. Matt ordered a plate of very unique looking deep-fried onion rings which he remarked is the sort of stuff that will kill us – the dish was called ‘Bloomin Onion’:

And that wasn’t even the main course. We had the same: The Outback Signature Sirloin Specials, with mash garlic potatoes and fresh greens sides. Both of us had 12 oz steaks, he had his medium-rare, mine was well-done. It doesn’t look like a huge plate, but believe me when I say that the plate was “American”-size:

And this time round we couldn’t finish the food. Half of the onion rings were left on the table, the mash potatoes for me went largely untouched, and Matt didn’t have stomach space for either sides. When the waiter came and asked if we’d like the remaining food packed to go, we could only wave – sickly – no need to.

There’s a funny bit of post-mortem. We were returning the car to the rental agency back near Central Square, so Matt put the car through a wash. A very unique sort of wash that I video-taped for fun. I’ll post it up later.:)

There are a lot of places to dine at Compass Point. However,  after taking into account the time in which we usually drive there for brunches + Ling having aversions to the food court on level 4, in practice, our choices for weekend brunches tend to be just one of the following:

Mcdonalds @ basement level

Burger King @ basement level

Subway @ basement level

Swensens @ basement level

Yoshinoya @ basement level

Between the lot, it’s the last two options we usually hit in practice. Swensens on weekend late mornings feel a lot like an childcare center with the number of families with babies and young children patronizing the restaurant. Yoshinoya on the other hand is a lot crowded, on account I think of the sort of food that gets sold there. The adult ala carte menus are fine, but the kid versions don’t really look that good. A meal at the place though isn’t exactly cheap compared to what you’d pay for at a foodcourt.

Hannah wants in, but the milo 冰 is mine!!

That said, it’s fun to see Hannah receptive to little impromptu feeds we do up whenever we go out for brunch. It keeps her especially happy to be able to join in the same meal as mommy and daddy. Here she gets fed a bit from Ling’s bowl of beef congee.:)

Hannah would otherwise whimper if she’s neglected at brunches.

One of the challenges I faced when Hannah started on solid food was time management. Life began to feel quite hurried at home when cooking was part of the daily routine. Gosh, and more washing too!

Since I didn’t start Hannah on commercial baby cereal but home-made white rice porridge, a lot of time was spent in trying to cook porridge until it was soft enough for our ‘bo geh’ (toothless) baby. The thing about cooking porridge over stove fire is that one must constantly stir the porridge to prevent it from getting stuck to the pot base. I ground the rice grains to speed up the rate of cooking but I still had to spend 45 minutes to an hour by the stove to stir the porridge! This was unacceptable to me. And says who that ‘the more you stir, the more love you put into cooking the porridge’?!!! Argh! Thank God that the slow cooker came to my rescue. No more stirring was required. Just put the rice grains and water into the slow cooker and set the dial to ‘high’ or ‘auto’ to cook for an hour. And voila, you get steaming soft porridge minus all the fuss.

I wish I had discovered the usefulness of the slow cooker sooner. It’s okay, like what my ang mo friend had quipped about his recent flight disruption, "live and learn". Yup yup :)

Matt isn’t a stranger to seafood here in Singapore: there’s an entry he wrote for our blog here more than three years ago tucking into Jumbo Seafood, with photographic evidence to boot. This time round, Matt was taken to seafood dinner by Tchung and Jasmine on Sunday – and that restaurant that’s named after a certain English footballer, “Owen Seafood”.

This restaurant’s a pretty popular spot among Singapore foodies (the Foo clan at Lentor is no exception). One of the really special things about this restaurant, or the place it’s located at rather, is that the seafood comes live and off a multilevel bazaar comprising huge water tanks. Basically, you pick which critters you want for dinner, and half an hour later, voilà – they’ll be on your table, all cooked and ready for you to tuck in. Some of those critters are freakin’ big, as in mutant-size huge. I wonder are they really open for sale and consumption, or are those really just intended as museum artifacts LOL.

No complaints about the food too: it’s as good as ever. We had chili and black pepper crabs, coffee pork ribs that were so good we ordered a second plate of, minced beef toufu and other veggies.

One thing though: the place, or heck the entire Turf City, looks a little rundown and in dire need of a major renovation effort. The pictures turned out pretty alright though on Matt’s D90 DSLR, coupled with the Tokina 11-16mm f2.8. Great lens, tack sharp wide-open.:)

The extended Lentor branch of the Foo clan had our birthday event for my dad at the Majestic Restaurant, located at the newly renovated The New Majestic Hotel along Bukit Pasoh street in a very quiet spot and tucked away from the normal bustle of Shenton Way. The restaurant is headed by an award-winning chef and serves up Cantonese cuisine. According to parents, the restaurant has actually been around since the 1960s, and is quite famous among the older generation.

Dinner was a pleasant affair. The restaurant itself was pretty packed with – surprise – mostly Caucasians, but the 13 of us were hosted in a private function room, with the 7 item menu comprising several of the restaurant’s signature dishes – including its Roasted Spring Chicken marinated with Chinese Wine and Steamed Sea Perch with Sake Sauce.

Hannah was pretty well-behaved for most of the event, though at about midpoint, a mini-crisis took place when she overloaded her diaper with pee while I was carrying her, and it seeped onto the polo-shirt I was wearing LOL. Ling fed her tiny bits of dinner too, and she seemed to enjoy the sea perch especially.

And the family photo. Hannah didn’t want to look up, so here’s the best we could manage.:)

Another change at home since Hannah ‘popped’ 8 months ago has been cooking at home for the both of us. Before Hannah, we’d typically home cook perhaps 3-4 times a week. Since June last year, Ling very rarely cooks dinner anymore since she’s already occupied with Hannah’s milk feeds and in the last 6 weeks solids too.

Ling’s normal ‘free’ window of time at any given moment these days is about 1.5 hours. Hannah’s fed every 3 hours. It takes about 30-45 minutes to feed and burp her, 15 minutes to wash and sterilize her bottles post-feed, and between 15-45 minutes to prepare for a feed, depending on whether it’s milk or solids. And that’s not counting the time for sudden feeding mishaps, baby laundry etc.

So, these days it’s the man of the house who feeds the wife, though I must clarify that my repertoire of what I’ll whip up is really based on my entire value system when it comes to meals. And that value system comprises just one rule: Any meal that takes me more than 45 minutes to whip up is not worth the effort.

When I cook, timing is everything, i.e. I project exactly what time we start eating, then work my cooking and prep time back from there. And that timing’s always spot-on. If one goes into my kitchen, you’ll see a picture of someone who’s honed a small range of recipes to optimum efficiency. Carbonara? Time from reaching to the kitchen counter and having that plate of pasta on your table is exactly 25 minutes. Stir-fry vegetables with rice? Exactly 22 minutes. Green curry? Exactly 40 minutes!

In contrast, Ling takes her time during the months when she did whip stuff up in the kitchen. She’s more an artiste than I ever am – she cooks for self-edification, I cook to feed, factory-styled. Unfortunately, that also meant that our meal times were frequently out of whack. When she says dinner would be served at 6:30 pm, we’d be lucky if we got to eat at 7:30 pm!

In any case, I haven’t been doing quick curries for nearly a year now, but just recently got back to it in view of Matt coming by to stay with us later this month. Have to practice and get my touch back. Here’s Malay-styled chicken curry courtesy of paste from NTUC. This was done in 30 minutes from the moment I stepped into the kitchen and walked out with the pot and bowls of rice. Paste called for nearly enough ingredients and meat to feed a family of 4, but I cooked just for two persons – which made the curry super potent.

Litmus test: Ling said just now she prefers what I whipped up to Lentor mum’s similar LOL.