Food for a lazy Sunday

Home-prepared prawn salad



Prawns tossed with sweet Thai chilli sauce



The other hidden ingredients


The salad leaves were tossed with red wine vinaigrette dressing.
The celery should not be there, as it dilutes the taste...probably better with a creamy dressing

Smoked salmon thin-crust pizza from Canadian Pizza


The salmon was salty...

Hawaiian thin-crust pizza



Moussaka



With eggplant (brinjal), minced lamb and lots of cheese...this was nice.

Saybons, French Food Factory

I hadn't known this take-out joint is so "famous", until I saw the newspaper cuttings pasted all over their counter. I'd recently read from a food blog about their nice soup and crepes.



That's a large sized cup of seafood bisque (price $4.90).



The SO thought it was curry...and actually, it did have a spicy taste.


The seafood bisque was good, with a good "body" and without the strong "fishy" taste, which I'd experienced at some supposedly good restaurant.

The mushroom and cheese savoury crepe (@ $4.50), one of their popular items.


They also have dessert crepes filled with bananas, chocolate, strawberries and peanuts, but not all in the same crepe.

The crepe wasn't as hot or soft, since I'd taken it home to eat, but it was very nice all the same. The SO likes it too.


I drank almost all the soup and ate about 40% of the crepe, but it was quite filling, and I didn't feel like I needed to eat more for dinner, except perhaps a fruit and drink. I think a soup plus focaccia bread (which they also sell) would make a nice lunch.

Stir-fry vegies & oden

Some new dishes which I've cooked/prepared recently (for the first time*).

For Monday's dinner - Stir-fried watercress*, with wolfberries


We always eat watercress cooked in soup in our family, and at the in-laws' home too, but now that the new, smaller breed of watercress is available, it isn't too old/fibrous, so can taste quite nice stir-fried.

Plus Japanese Oden*, a popular street food (I gathered)


The soup is too salty and which I don't think we should drink too much of, even though I'd added extra water.

Chilled Oden package - ready for boiling; enough for 2.5 pax




For Tuesday's dinner, I cooked the big bean sprouts*, with shimeji mushrooms and capsicum


This (soya?) bean sprouts is quite fibrous, and the "bean" part remained very crunchy/ slightly hard, even though the fibrous strips were already well-cooked till soft.

This is almost like the only fish we cook at home regularly - grilled salmon, with ground black pepper and lemon


In addition, we had the ready-to-eat fish toufu for dinner as well...so it was a very very full dinner! :P

Macarons

I wondered what all the fuss was about this relatively new dessert which I keep hearing gushing comments about, especially from bloggers who like to bake. I've not tasted it, though it sounds to me like yet another "high-class" fad thingy. What I do know, is that it's very difficult to bake them well, and they're made of egg white, icing sugar and perhaps, cream (for the filling).


Other than that cafe place at the basement of Raffles City, I found them at Bakerzin when I happened to go to Wisma Atria (which I haven't been to for a long time) to get my hp serviced.


I bought them in rose, lemon and some sort of vanilla-strawberry flavour. Each tiny biscuit costs $1.60, including GST, so all 3 miserable biscuits cost $4.80. Piangz...so expensive!



The surface looks hard, but once I take a small bite, the whole thing crackles like fragile wafer. The inside texture is very airy, made from whipped egg white and held together by the icing sugar.


The lemon one tastes artificial; there wasn't any taste of strawberry in the vanilla-strawberry one, and the rose-flavoured one tastes nice (because I happen to like rose syrup). One thing's for sure: all of them taste cloyingly SWEET! Send out the DIABETES ALERT!!

Luckily, I'm not into sweet things, so I don't think I will purposely buy them again. Haha!

Groceries

From recent shopping trip.



The salad spritzer (cabernet vinaigrette dressing) is pretty cool to use. Just spray it on salads, toss in other ingredients and voila, easy peasy; tastes good too.


The expensive Thai chilli made with fresh chillies was nothing to shout about though...don't buy again.

The Sun Fuji apple from Amori is back at "aunty lucy" mart. This time at a much cheaper price compared to the last time I bought it in Feb.


However, it wasn't as sweet or as tasty this time... hmm...


My best buys of the day...both on discounts. I'm sticking to this RT for my usual morning cuppa (to save time). The Nescafe from Japan is surprising, surprisingly very good, with a smoky flavour, without the bitter aftertaste. Definitely worth buying again... can forget about the UCC (?) Blue Mountain which, more and more, is machiam like wall-paper...hardly noticeable.

The story of "Too Full"

We were here - at Sizzler.



I just wanted to eat the stuff from the salad bar, which had quite a good spread already.



The SO, who must have something more substantial, ordered a main course - some Swiss styled chicken.



You can say, the man wanted to have his chicken and eat his salads too.



In addition, we were given some garlic/buttered toast to stuff ourselves, but it was way too salty, and one bite was all we could take.



I ate my salads, but SO insisted on sharing some of his chicken with me.

BTW, the Thai prawn & cashew nut salad (below) was superb! Too bad they didn't have tom yam soup that night.


This plate looks a bit dirty coz I re-used it (once).

We had several rounds of the salad buffet. As if all that wasn't enough, the SO can still stuff himself with the pasta, plus the Chinese fried maggie noodles and the creamy mushroom soup - all the heavy stuff.



Near the end, this was the dessert I had, with no room left for a taste of soft-serve ice-cream (actually, I forgot also).



And the SO was reduced to this.


Because he was, in his own words, TOO FULL !!

So, far from trying to save for a rainy day or prepare for rising food costs, it was because he ate too much!

Afterwards, we decided to walk home (to burn the excess calories consumed), which we did briskly, in about 50 minutes... Heheh! The walk didn't kill us, but the humid weather probably could if the walk was any longer. :P

Coffee & cake

Here's the cafe latte from Sleek Espresso Bar (at basement of Sim Lim Square) which I like.



It's quite a big cup filled with full-bodied espresso + foamy milk, and I think there's more than one shot of espresso at that - good value for money! Their service is friendly too.



They also sell this big slice of ang moh carrot cake at $4.20 nia. I tar-pao the carrot cake to take home to share with the SO.



I dunno why, but I felt so hungry that Friday afternoon, that I ended up eating the whole big chunk of cake for tea...all by myself :P

Furthermore, the SO asked me to go eat steamboat dinner that night...so end up overate again! >_<

The cafe latte from The Soup Spoon, at $3.60 or so (can't remember) , in a very small cup and it had only one single shot of espresso, and it wasn't shiok.



At the office, with one of the blue pens that I brought from home, coz the pens provided by the office all can't be used after some time - the ink wouldn't come out!

Meanwhile, I am still wondering WHEN I will try to bake a carrot cake. I wanted to do that one weekend, then the cat sisters came and it never take off after that.

ps: Speaking of cakes, I could never quite understand the English phrase "to have one's cake and eat it as well". I mean, what's the use of having a cake if one can't eat it, right?

Food art

The SO titled his installation piece:

Too Full.



>_<"

More about this later.

Soup lunch at Food for Thought

Having had a heavy breakfast, I wanted to eat something light for lunch. After gallivanting into PLC to check out the retractable leash, I remembered there was a small sandwich diner close by, so I found Food for Thought, which offered several choices of sandwiches (1 vegetarian s/w), pastas and 2 types of soup.

I chose the shitake mushroom soup (the other was Ham & Potato).


A Sunday Times food reviewer had ordered this soup and on her first taste, thought the chef had forgotten to add salt! Contrary to her experience, on my first taste, I found the soup to be savoury and slightly sweet, which needed just a sprinkle of pepper.

The soup came in a big bowl and had slivers of shitake mushroom. It was served with 4 pieces of lightly-toasted bread...enough to make a filling lunch.



Water is free, but please donate generously, so that the underprivileged may also have clean water to drink... so says the sign.



It was close to 2pm, so the place wasn't crowded, but while I was waiting for my takeaway latte, a bunch of school gals came in to have lunch.


The place is small and cozy enough, though I wish they didn't have those reflective tables which is kind of glitzy. If it remains quiet and not too crowded, I would like to go back to try their salads and fruit freezes.

(Note to self: the cafe latte at $3 was average, in a small cup...can't beat the Sleek Espresso Bar's version at $3.60 which had more oomph... )

Bibimbap & Kimchi

It's been a while since I've had bibimbap, so I went to eat it. Then I ate it again... And again...

I had these within a span of 6 days. Thinking about it now is making me drool... :P


BBB from the revamped J8 foodcourt. It's very so-so...can't really describe why I didn't like it...maybe something to do with the taste and/or texture, but I'm unlikely to eat it again, unless feeling very desperate.

BBB, the organic vegetarian version. This one is fresh-tasting, with a nice crunchy texture of the vegies and nice chewiness of the brown rice. Yet it didn't feel heavy and didn't make me feel sleepy after lunch. It's super yum! I can eat this everyday.


BBB from Novena Square (Velocity) Kopitiam foodcourt, where I get my regular fix of BBB and kimchi. I've asked to skipped the chicken. The ikan bilis and kimchi are the side dishes provided as part of the meal.

I like this version, and their freshly-made kimchi, which does not taste "powdery".


I always tar-pao a box of their kimchi, which I will keep in a glass jar at home. Even then, the smell is so strong that it will "stink" the whole fridge.

Yummy...when will I eat them again?

Steamboat dinner

It's yet another steamboat dinner...at the place we used to go quite regularly, such that the boss will miss us if we didn't go for several weeks. Haha!

The place is called 好粥到 at AMK Central.


They have a choice of chicken soup, tom yam soup or thin porridge soup as the base, @ $13.90 nett per pax. We used to go more often, coz the SO likes their fried beehoon and I liked their vegetable curry, but they've done away with these snacks due to lack of popularity. Haiz...


Anyway, it's good that we help to subsidise the other diners. ;P

I expect our trips there to be even less frequent, now that the SO seems to be REALLY on a diet! *Shock and disbelief!!*

:-O