Eating Out (Japanese)

Ever since we've discovered (rather late) about this branch of Sakura buffet at Balestier Shaw Plaza, we've been going to this branch.

This place is bigger, has better ventilation and slightly better food, especially the cooked food section, but their chairs are all the same, i.e. wooden stools.


We were there last Sat, after a massive cleaning up at home. There was a huge mess caused by the installation of the new aircon system, with lots of loose cement powder and concrete from all that drilling. We were so tired and famished afterwards that we thought we deserved a good meal (or just a lame excuse to eat)!

I was too busy and didn't take photos; these are from an earlier visit


Roast duck, oatmeal prawns (麦片虾), baked salmon, baked scallop & breaded oyster


Sashimi platter & sushi, etc.


Durian puff, eclair and mentaiko prawn

"Mentaiko" refers to the sweet orange paste and the name tickles me no end - think of men tiok tai ko (in Hokkien) and you'll understand. :p


On a separate day, we had lunch at Yuki Sushi Village (or something like that...?)


Conveyor belt sushi


Most things are priced at 99 cents, except for items on criss-crossed patterned plate which is $2.99


Some lobster thingy


The hand-rolled sushi are also $2.99 each

Quality-wise, the food is averagely acceptable, and I didn't expect the salmon roe to match those at better (and more expensive) Japanese restaurants. It's not bad a place for a quick and cheap sushi meal.

Another wonderful Jap product

Warning: This product is addictive!

By the standards of instant noodles, the Japanese ones always win!


Five packs costs $9, but it's ok because we're worth it! (to quote a lousy cliche :PP )

I think this one is char siew flavour or something.

Update on 25 May:


Served with baby spinach leaves, sweet onion and fish luncheon meat (black pepper flavour).

Sushi !!

Hmm...I would sure loved to pick a few delectables from this sushi platter, especially the ones with salmon roe and the egg yolk & chopped spring onions.

It would be the perfect gift for sushi lovers. :)

From Sushidisk

Eh....how come there isn't one for the big hand-rolled sushi, huh?
Kekeke!

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

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.

Kuishin Bo Lunch

We had lunch at Kuishin Bo on a Saturday in January 2008 (Oops, not December 2007, my lousy memory!). Lunch is cheaper than dinner, but had fewer special dishes. It didn't have the snow crab legs (so-so) and beef cappacio, which we don't eat anyway, so we weren't complaining. There were already too many items to eat, and we'd probably eaten about 50% to 60% of all the food items available...and that's already more than enough for us!

The appetisers...my favourite things to eat at buffets



Pretty shells



Some tempura, potato croquette and yaki udon and other yaki dishes



Fortune bag soup?


It's very cute, this tau-pok bag...the inside was filled with sticky, starchy stuff...like sticky yam or some starchy root vege stuff.



Other stuff in tasting portions, including Dorayaki, the fave food of Doraemon (小叮当） and mine too



Desserts shared with the SO...they're not my favourite things but must try a bit lah!


Black sesame mochi, macha cake, white chocolate with sour rasberry(?) topping and chocolate-coated apple from the chocolate fountain


I took this item because it looked so pretty!


But the inside is like this...too sweet for me.

That was in December, and also the month which partly contributed to my weight gain. As at 3 weeks' ago, I almost could not fit into an old pair of pants. It was too scary... :PP

Fuji apples

After having eaten the Fuji apple from Japan last Sat (for the first time), the PRC's Fuji apple I'm eating now taste blah!....so bland. The one from Japan has an intense apple flavour and was very sweet, definitely not a taste which I had tasted before. I think I will not buy PRC's Fuji apple from now on.

I saw the Japanese Wong Bok (pek chye) at Cold Storage earlier and was tempted to buy it. One whole cabbage costs about $5, perhaps $1.50 to $2 more than the PRC one. Luckily, the PRC's Wong Bok at this time of Spring (called 元宵白）usually tastes very sweet, so perhaps I'll try the Japanese version after Spring is over.

LHL can try to convince us with his "bread is bread, rice is rice" talk, but I am not convinced lah! If that were true, then there would be no such thing as 一分钱，一分货, would it? Even the Sunday Times' ranking of bread has proven that bread is not just bread, regardless of price, ok? That ranking/taste test by Violet Oon published last Sunday was like a spoof on LHL's theory...haha! And the funniest thing is that "Aunty Lucy" house brand of bread did not even get into the top 10 ranking.

Tsk, tsk, so malu!

Japanese curry & cabbage

I was on leave today, and decided to prepare some lunch. Since we'll be going over to a friend's place for a gathering and dinner later, there won't be a chance to cook dinner, so I thought I'll cook the Japanese curry which I'd been planning to cook, before the potatoes decide to sprout!

I've had tubers sprouting at home, right on the food shelf, until they look like alien things, like the "alienated" sweet potato.



Anyhow, I cooked the Japanese curry using S&B brand of Medium Hot curry paste, as the SO is not quite into spicy food, but it didn't taste a teeny bit hot at all - even the SO said so. I think even if they come out with a Extra Hot version, it would still barely taste a little hot for our Asian palettes.

Here's the chicken curry with the "disappearing" Hokkaido potatoes. I've added some ground coriander and chicken stock to add more flavour.




The market stall had these Hokkaido potatoes on sale, so I bought a couple of big, round tubers to try. When raw, they had the texture of crispy apples!

During the process of cooking, they've somehow disappeared, leaving me with barely half the quantity of potatoes in odd, tiny shapes. I thought I'd scoop them up into a separate bowl before there was nothing left!




The lunch, served with steamed rice.



The Beijing cabbage at this time of year tastes extremely sweet and crunchy in texture. Stir-fried simply with garlic, fresh young ginger and a bit of chicken stock, it tastes so fresh and sedap!

Christmas dinner at Sakura

On a whim, we went to Sakura restaurant for dinner on X'mas day. It came to almost $30 per head, including 7% GST, which was slightly more than the usual price.

I noted the food was a bit different from the usual too, since it was X'mas, but of course, the usual favourite Japanese items like sashimi, sushi, etc. were all there. What was new among the appetisers were the pink prawn sashimi, the smoked salmon appetiser with some mango mayo sauce and smoked duck breast with orange mayo sauce. The hot items too, had some new items, including steamed prawn with garlic & butter*, yam ring, etc. (I can't remember coz my interest at buffets is always on the appetisers).


(* Maiden photo attempt with new hp camera)

In addition, there was roast turkey with stuffing*, honey baked chicken ham* and X'mas log cakes. Both the turkey and chicken ham were so-so. I'm not a dessert person, but I did like the green tea (minty) cake and chocolate log cake.

The bonus was when the chef brought out the scallop sashimi after the pink prawn sashimi ran out. That was like "Wow!" coz it's the very first time I've seen scallop sashimi at Sakura after all these years. We were lucky to have spotted it as we were seated just beside the sashimi platter...heehee! While it wasn't fantastic, it wasn't too bad either, so overall, it was a nice and rather satisfying dinner.

Ikoi Japanese buffet

We went to Ikoi for the a la carte buffet lunch which I'd heard so much about, mostly about the fresh sashimi that's good value-for-money. We didn't eat a lot, but I felt so full after eating most of the sashimi, and a bit of everything. The staff also gave out free soup, perhaps to fill up our stomachs faster? Kekeke...

It was about 12pm, so the lunch time crowd hasn't arrived yet.


Anyway, it wasn't a full house during the lunch, though I was told it's wise to book at least 2 to 3 weeks in advanced for dinner.

The complimentary appetiser - sake sashimi in a slightly sour (plum?) sauce.


I didn't know what that crispy stick of vegetable was (maybe mung guang?), but it was nice and the slightly bitter taste of raw dou miao contrasted well with the sauce...yum!

All tables were "decorated" with a bowl of edamame (Japanese green beans) and soramame (broad beans) that we could eat while waiting for our orders to arrive. Well, we sure don't want to eat too much of these at the start, since they're apt to create gas in the tummy.



The first dish I ordered - mixed sashimi, which has sake (salmon), maguro (tuna), mikajiki (swordtail), tako (octopus) and a dark fish (right next to the octopus) which might be hamachi (yellow tail)? I couldn't be sure coz I'd never had yellow tail before this.


The above is one person's portion. The sake was sweet and tasted great with just a teeny dip of soya sauce. The fish sashimi was generally quite soft, and everything was served cold, which is good.

Then came the yakitori (skewered chicken), tebasaki (mid chicken wing) and california handroll.
Perhaps we could have skipped the chicken wing, and I think I didn't taste any avocado in the california handroll ?


By the way, everything came in 1-piece portion per order, so if you want want more than one, you'll need to specify.

Then came the saba shioyaki (grilled mackerel) and agedashi tofu which came in a tiny piece - about 1 square inch each. These were good, except the tofu was a bit over crispy / hard at the top.



They started serving us the complimentary sake/miso soup. It has salmon, toufu and bits of vegetable. I guess it wasn't too bad except that it was too salty, so we hardly drank the soup.



Mixed tempura with prawns, shitake mushroom, sweet potato, brinjal and ladies finger...generally ok, though I think the batter was a little hard and too thick.


I guess if the batter mixture is too thick, i.e. not enough water, too much of it will stick to the vege, making the fried product hard, instead of light and crispy

The potato croquette was nice, with a curried layer in the middle. These 2 tiny pieces are considered 2 portions.



Ahh...more complimentary teapot soup which had a prawn head inside. The squeezed lime was definitely needed.



I ordered this by mistake, thinking it was soft-shell crab (which wasn't available). It's just one piece, but look at the way it's presented!



California maki, but as one can see, there was no avocado. :-(



Of course, I had to have another portion of sake and tako sashimi. It's just one portion but look how generous they are!


They were very good, but as we get more and more full, the law of dimishing returns sets in and my level of satisfaction per mouthful goes down somewhat...

The SO had the yaki udon, which was not bad.



Stewed meat and potato dish (niku jaga) - the dish that I want to learn to cook!



Broiled tofu (Atsuage tofu)



There were no desserts but there was free flow of hot green tea - all at a price of $33++.

While Kuishin-Bo has more variety, dinner there costs $46++ and it is impossible for anyone to eat everything from the buffet table, and I'd barely eaten one-third of the food the last time I was there, so I guess this smaller Ikoi buffet at a cheaper price is good enough for me.