More vegetarian food

Other vegetarian food that I had:


Miso Brown Rice Soup from a packet



Vegetarian chye png with brown rice (top and below)




Vegetarian Mee Rebus - too much ground peanuts in the gravy and the fake char siew was just weird!


Vegetarian fish beehoon (鱼片米粉) - something I eat regularly


This is the organic chicken rice with vegetarian 白斩鸡 which my IT colleage had.

He was (unusually) alone as his usual IT lunch kakis aren't into vegetarian food. I still have not tried this, since it's offered on Fridays when my favourite Korean bibimbap is being offered as well.


Vegetarian nasi lemak - with seasoned "scallop wing" (next to cucumber slices) and "pandan chicken".

I think that was meant to be seasoned "scallop wing" which is common at Japanese sushi restaurants, coz it really tastes like the real thing! Everything tasted alright, except that I didn't like the rice (with weird/oily coconut milk taste), nor did I like the "hae bi hiam" (spicy dried prawn paste) on the long beans.

Uhmm...

More food from our friendly neighbours.


A few days' ago, they gave us a very big bowl of green bean. Actually, we do like green beans... of the normal type.


This one had a "sharp" taste of coconut milk, and (the first time I've come across) pieces of strong, pungent durian chunks...

Some of the food stuff they gave us earlier this year:


Cheesecake


I do eat cheesecake... ie. the normal kind...


That is, the normal kind without an extra layer of sweet jelly on top...


This was their own concocted dessert. I think it had a thick layer of sticky, rich & sweet chocolate over a layer of rich, cream cheese that sat over a layer of sweet Oreo biscuits.


Very sticky, rich, fattening and jelat. Probably concocted by their little girls.

Over at our home, the SO does not eat fresh durian. He only eats processed durian like durian kueh, which we eat once in a blue moon, like when someone buys a tube from Malaysia and give it to us. Fresh durian makes him throw up. I ate durians when I was a kid... and the last time I ate durian was like 2 or 3 years ago (probably ate up to 3 seeds).

I am not a dessert person. I am not into overly sweet food, although I eat Snickers and I love Magnum ice-cream, which I eat selectively since I put on weight easily.

Other than that, we are really not fussy people when it comes to food. We eat at hawker stalls, mostly. We can eat plain rice with vegetables everyday, or just a simple bowl of noodles.

It's a sin to waste food. The green bean is still sitting in the fridge... I don't know what to do... >_<"

Aarrrggghhh!!! *pulls out hair*

Fave green tea swiss roll

Not being a sweet dessert person, I am not really into cakes, but I really like the green tea cakes from Breadtalk. They have the whole green tea cake (the expensive version) and the green tea swiss roll (cheapo version) which appears only every now and then.

With their current anniversary promotion, their green tea swiss roll has come back onto the shelves at a promo price of $1.10 till end of July.


If you're lucky, you may even get a big red bean or two inside the cream.

To date, I've eaten several of these rolls already in a span of 1.5 weeks! Yummy, yummy!!

:))

Soups & Salad

Yummy and filling soups from The Soup Spoon are just the thing to eat for lunch when I'm feeling not particularly hungry, or feeling a bit out of sorts. There's a choice of thick soup, cream or tomato-based soups, or clear broth, with or without meat. It's not too heavy, easy-to-eat and yet not so light that it makes you go hungry too soon.

For a heavier lunch, one can always opt for the large portion, which comes in a bowl that's as big as the "碗公" (in Hokkien) that are typically used for soups in Chinese families in a communal eating setting. A small bun of your choice is served with each serving of soup.


The day's special - Chicken Ciacatore (sp?) with Sage, which was very yummy with a strong taste of ang moh herbs


Spicy Vegetable Gumbo, which was meatless


One can take-away either the hot soup or this package chilled soup and heat it up at home. I opted for this because it's easier to handle cold soup on public transport.


It contains some Japanese chicken soup/broth, enough for about 2 to 3 servings


Sweet and yummy!

On another occasion, I went back to Food For Thought one day to try its salads. This time, I chose to sit at its empty bar counter as I'd wanted to see the food preparation and what goes into their dishes of mainly salad and sandwiches.


The creamless brocolli soup was alright, though hardly exciting.

Now the Chinese Chicken (or was it turkey??) Caesar Salad was the one that bothered me. Instead of the usual Caesar dressing, it's dressed in a Chinese stewed pork sauce, which came from their special stewed 3-layered fatty pork (meant for sandwiches) and topped with fried ikan billis (anchovies). I knew this only because I'd asked them about the sauce.


Salad leaves with a layer of shiny oil

While I'm ok with the Chinese twist of adding fried ikan billis and a Chinese-styled dressing, what was not ok was that they had first added some oil onto the salad leaves, followed by the stewed pork sauce which also had a layer of oil.

Gosh! I wanted to eat a salad coz I wanted something light, so I definitely don't want my salad to be piled with so much oil! There was enough oil for it to drip below the salad leaves onto the plate, and I've had to try to drain out as much oil as I could from the leaves before putting them into my mouth.

Secondly, I really didn't expect anything porky to appear in a chicken/turkey salad, so why did they not mention anything about adding pork sauce, and a rather oily one at that? What if customers were on a white-meat diet? Furthermore, the sauce was not even fantastic.

And finally, I AM NOT A PORKY PERSON (I will only eat some pork done in certain ways), so I absolutely hated it that they'd spoiled my supposedly-healthy lunch totally with the very porky, pork oil-laden and probably cholesterol-laden sauce! Not wanting to waste food, I ate them up, but I was so put-off by their mis-concept that I did not bother to give my feedback.

Needless to say, that was my last visit to that cafe.

Indian Feast

One evening, we had take-away food from Banana Leaf Apollo.


Very heavy to carry all that home.


Yummy feast about to begin...


Free curry gravy, the 2 veggies (cabbage & brinjal) that came with the rice set ($3.50) including pappadom and extra order of some lemony spicy chicken ($8).


And an extra garlic naan.


Oh, and an extra order of dahl, of which they have many types, but I stick to the yellow lentils ($5).


There is so much rice in one person's portion, enough for 3 persons, yet the staff had asked me how many portions of rice I'd wanted. :P

Verdict: Very spicy and super yummy.
- the bryani rice was good even when eaten as leftover the next evening;
- spicy chicken was good and still have that lemon taste;
- dahl was buttery and creamy;
- garlic naan and cabbage were good.

The only thing I didn't like was the brinjal dish which had a tad too much spices which gave it a bitter taste.

All that for $19.80, and very the yummy!!

Coffee Break

Coffee from JCO Donut & Coffee


I must have bought either an Americano or a latte and to my pleasant surprise, the staff gave me a small donut foc, to go with my coffee.



This is not raw sugar, but really brown sugar powder! It didn't interfere with the taste of coffee though, and I do like the understated but stylish packaging.



Local egg & kaya-butter toast set at a new small joint at SMU.


I happened to walk aimlessly to that area, not sure of what to have and when I saw they have soft-boiled egg... well, that settles it! :)

It was too light, so I went to pack a veggie subway for an afternoon snack. I'm still not sure why I got a discount for the sandwich. Did they think I was a SMU staff (I wasn't wearing any tag) or .... a student?!? :-O

Coffee with a friend at Espresso Bar, at Sim Lim Square


The sinful moussey, dark chocolate & banana cake was her idea!


Nice... and the prices are slightly cheaper than most coffee joints. Hope they stay around.

That Elusive 古早味

Nowadays, it's hard to find hawker food that tastes as good as those we've had in the days of yore, i.e. when we were young/kids... *Ahem!*. The hawker food these days just cannot make it! From my observation, I think it boils down to two main reasons:

* Foodcourt food being cooked by people who have no idea what the food they are cooking is supposed to taste like, or in a bid to reduce costs, they shortchange the customers, i.e. 偷工减料. It really irks me when many of these food court workers (many from PRC) try to pass off a brown-looking bowl of noodles as Lor Mee, or noodles with chilli oil and vinegar as Tom Yam! Hello, that is sacrilegious, ok!?! Real Tom Yam does not use vinegar. DUH!!

* The traditional ways of preparing/cooking the food is not being passed down to the younger generation, which isn't willing to take over the business from the older generation of food hawkers/chefs.

Hence, it is always a delight when we come across food that tastes really good, or has got that 古早味 that reminds me of childhood food.


Curry Donut - this recent addition by BreadTalk bakery chain reminds me of the yummy curry donuts from Yaohan Bakery!!

Yaohan Dept Store really holds lots of nice memories for me coz we used to live near to it, and would often visit to shop and to bowl at the bowling alley above it (not that I knew how to bowl, now still a longkang bowler).


However, in terms of taste, it doesn't taste like Yaohan's curry donut at all, and they've even added a piece of hard-boiled egg, which is more akin to local curry puffs.


Duck noodles - this one is very good, from Clementi Central's food centre, and it's only $2.50.

Hokkien mee fried in the 60's style


We found this by chance, at Beach Road. Look at the amount of lard they gave. While I think it will appeal to some, it wasn't quite up to our tastes (we're not that old anyway :P ), and I'm guessing they use prawn stock in the cooking instead of pork bone/chicken stock.

Zhi-Char from Chin Chin Hainanese kopitiam at ... Peck Seah or Liang Seah or something street.


They ran out of hor fun the night we visited (so early!), so we had to settle for fried bee hoon. This is rather good and has a bit of that old Hainanese taste as cooked by the Hainanese Ah Gor of the good old days.


The place I used to live as a kid had many Hainanese, who were then known as very good cooks, so they really did very good zhi-char, although I'm sure MSG was used liberally, which was common then.



The next place deserves special mention as it's so far our most favourite place for fried hor fun and the KL style fried Hokkien Mee.


Both dishes are excellent - very fragrant and very tasty which keep us coming back for more.

The only regrettable thing is that they don't use the big, fat, yellow noodles and have only the thin yellow mee.


The place? It's at Lai Huat Seafood Restaurant (a kopitiam) along Horne Road (#72?), just beside the Jalan Besar Stadium. They do some mean zhi-char dishes too like belachan fish, but we have yet to try it (coz too spicy for the SO).