Singapore, Day 3

After we lost our playoff game in the morning, I went back to the hotel and showered up. M and I then checked out Little India first.

Veggies at a Indian market. Bitter melon in the foreground, and I think those are some gigantic bhindi/okra in the back right and green beans in the back left.

Another small veggie stand.

Indian food stop number one. Sambal fish (bottom left), bhindi/okra masala (bottom center), garlic naan and ginger lassi. The food was *very* good! The naan was out of this world. Fresh, fresh, freshly baked naan with lots of garlic. I could eat that bread all day. So, so good!

So good we had to order some more. We got cheese naan this time, mainly because I had never seen cheese naan before. This is sort of like a grilled cheese sandwich almost. Also incredibly good.

We only sampled a few dishes, but here's a shot of a lot more of what we missed out on.

Stopped at a roadside stand for some fresh young green coconut. I have been buying these from the markets off of Buford Highway, but my standard method of opening is just with a screwdriver and fist. It seems like a good heavy knife can actually whack through the shell. I'll have to try that next time. As far as the coconut goes, I actually like the ones in Atlanta more because I toss 'em in the fridge first so that the juice is nice and cold.

Indian food stop number two. From the left, rice, some mutton dish, and a lightly curried pumpkin and peas dish. The mutton was tasty, but I think the pumpkin dish was actually my favorite. I also think that this pumpkin is not what we carve jack-o-lanterns out of, but that "pumpkin" is probably a generic term for any orange colored squash.

On our way from Little India to Arab street, I saw this funny sign. On the top left, we have "curry fish head", and on the right, "curry fish tail." Basically the same exact thing, you just have to choose which half of the fish you want.

We also stopped by a street market before getting to Arab Street. Different type of coconut. This is a "thai coconut." It's much smaller (and these were in ice water, too), so instead of hacking the top off, the guy just dug out a hole and stuck a straw in there.

You can see how small it is. About the size of an orange or grapefruit.

We didn't actually eat anything over around Arab Street (shock!). After that, we wandered down toward another shopping area called Bugis Street.

Every year when we go to visit relatives in Toronto over winter break, we inevitably end up going to Pacific Mall in Toronto (more accurately Market Village - see also my younger brother's blog) to visit a Chinese dessert soup shop there (in a week, consumption of well over a dozen dessert soups just for me is not uncommon). Anyway, so on our way to Bugis Street, I found one so I was pretty excited and had to go in. Unfortunately, it's so hot there that ordering a hot dessert soup didn't make much sense.

So I just went with the tried-and-true mango with sago (small tapioca balls). The mango was fresh. Interesting was that their sago was opaque, whereas the few places in North America that I've had sago (Toronto, San Fran, and when I tried making it myself) it was more translucent.

We eventually made our way over to Bugis Street. Nothing fantastic shopping-wise (I'm not a big shopper), but there were more food stalls. Unfortunately at this time, I really only had room for liquids (they can fit easily in the cracks!). Above is a cup of fresh soursop juice. Pretty good. I also had a cup of fresh watermelon juice that M ordered but didn't like.

She instead got dragonfruit juice. I tried a little; I thought it was ok, but I don't think I could drink a whole glass of this.

So besides the final banquet for the ice hockey tournament (pretty must all ok-but-nothing-special Western fare), this ended my Singapore gastronomical adventures.

Singapore, Day 2, part 2 (Lunch, The Dinner Triumverate, and Supper)

After the second hockey game, I grabbed a quick bite to eat for lunch from the mall food court on the floor below the ice rink. (Who says you can't have lunch after brunch?)

This is Laksa, a curry noodle soup dish that is apparently a hybrid of Chinese and Malay influences. Besides the noodles, there were fish cake slices, fried bean curd, and a shrimp or two. The noodles were just plain spaghetti-style noodles, but the soup was very tasty. Along with that was a lychee and shaved ice drink. Delicious as well. After that, I went back to the hotel and showered, but then didn't know what to do with myself (I couldn't walk around because I didn't have all that much daylight left and it was raining out), so I went back to the rink.

As I mentioned earlier, the shopping area next to the rink has a lot of food hawkers. This is called otak-otak, which is a Malaysian fish cake grilled inside a banana leaf. It was kind of funny because right before I left the hotel, I had the TV on and the Singapore episode of Tony Bourdain's No Reservations was showing and he had just eaten some of this on the show.

Next stop, the Million Fish Ball stall!

This was a very simple dish, consisting primarily of noodles and fishballs in a light stock. But this simple dish may have been one of the better dishes I had in Singapore. (Which is not to say that the other food I had was not good! It was just that this really did it for me.) The noodles were freshly made and so they had that wonderful consistency, texture and mouth-feel of fresh pasta. The fish balls were also freshly made by hand, and they had a softer texture than frozen store-bought fish balls that are more commonly used. And the broth was very light and simple, but it was a perfect backdrop for the whole meal. That was dinner #1.

More food pictures. This stall had all sorts of sausage-y items. I think the red things on the bottom right are grilled or roasted cuttlefish. I didn't eat anything here.

I finally decided on getting some Mulsim food. It just seemed a little more off the beaten path.

I chose a dish at random because I pretty much had no clue what anything was. It turned out to be some sort of seafood fried rice, which actually wasn't all that exciting. However, I did also get a cup of fresh-squeezed pineapple juice, which was very good. Pineapple is supposed to have a lot of some protein dissolving enzymes (pepsin? amylase? I can't remember, but it's why your mouth gets sore if you eat too much and also why fresh pineapple can eat its way out of jello) which I figured would be helpful to aid digestion of all of the food I had packed into my gut. Even if it didn't have that effect, it was tasty. This was dinner #2.

Another food stall. More traditional Chinese foods.

Another shop had various fruit drinks. The unusual one was water chestnut juice (do nuts technically count as fruit since they do actually contain a seed inside?).

So of course I tried it. It actually tasted pretty good. Reminds me of the water chestnut cakes you can sometimes get at a good dim sum restaurant (I don't often see it anymore though). After that, I took a break because I needed to digest enough of this so I wouldn't get sick during the third hockey game of the day. However, after the hockey game...

Some more food. At this point, it was already about midnight, so most of the stalls had closed. Two were still open: one that sold food, and one that sold drinks. How convenient. This dish above is mussels in a fermented black bean sauce. Awesome delicious.

This was a scallops and aspargus dish. Tasty as well, as you usually can't go wrong with scallops. Not pictured, but I also got a lime juice for my beverage. While this was dinner #3, I did have one other person helping on this one. After that, it was back to the hotel, and then out for some partying. There were drinks and dancing a plenty, and after the bar/club closed at about 3am or so, we headed back toward the hotel.

But instead of going to sleep, we went in search of more food. This was the only place I could find that was still open at that hour (it's actually the same place that I went to on the first night that I arrived). Six of us shared a big pot of "bone-meat soup" (gu~ ro\ tang)... or maybe it was meat-bone soup; I don't remember. It came with white rice, some pickled vegetables on the side, and some sort of thick, black sauce with spicy red peppers in it. The sauce was sort of like a super-thick version of oyster sauce perhaps? Anyway, it was a nice simple dish, but it tasted very good. This was too late to call dinner, so I called it supper instead. Then I went back to the hotel, took yet another shower (I think that might have been the fifth shower I had taken since waking up that morning), and went to bed.

Singapore, Day 2, part 1 (Chinatown)

So after the first ice hockey game of the day, I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon wandering around and eating my way through Chinatown.

First stop: Chinese pork jerky! I haven't had this in a while and this was very fresh. You could still smell the smoke/char on the meat. It was so good! ^^

Besides the sliced pork (jerky), you can also get pork "floss"! Most foreigners probably do not know about pork floss, but it's basically dried, shredded pork that looks sort of like brown carpet fuzz. My mom used to make butter and ro\ song (the Mandarin name for pork floss) sandwiches for me when I was a kid. It sounds weird, but they were tasty.

The bin in the top right contains dried sea horses! I didn't buy any of these. I'm not sure if it's for food or for medicinal purposes.

For breakfast, I eventually settled on a dim sum restaurant. This was really nice sitting on a sidewalk patio eating dim sum in warm weather. What a great way to have brunch! Anyhow, I ordered plenty of dishes even though I was eating on my own, and just trusted in my stomach capacity. Starting with the fuzzy things in the top-right corner and going clockwise: (1) prawn and banana in dragon beard, (2) prawn and mushroom dumpling, (3) yam/taro cake, (4 - skipping the plate) chives and something dumpling, (5 - slightly obscured) baked BBQ pork pie, (6) free peanuts, and (7) carrot cake (obviously nothing to do with the desert that you would normally think of if anyone said "carrot cake" to you).

And there was one more late arrival: cuttlefish balls on soft tofu. In the end everything was very tasty. I left the restaurant as a very content man. And the whole thing only cost $18.80SGD ($12.27USD)! Total bargain for the quantity that I ate.

After that, I wandered over and found another food court/food stall place. Some of the stalls were not yet open (it was before lunch time on a weekday afterall).

I think this stall is sort of like a do-it-yourself hot-pot station. You grab a bowl and a pair of tongs, and just grab whatever you want. You hand it to the person working in the back, they cook your selection in hot broth and add noodles. Since I just had too much dim sum, I skipped this, but I would have loved to have tried it.

This was kind of creepy looking. I'm not sure if they sell these, or if these are just for show to indicate that their meat is all freshly harvested. If you can't tell, it's a bunch of chicken heads plus their spines, but nothing else.

Various fresh baked Chinese pastries.

Freshly made yo/ tiao/ (literally "oil sticks", but sometimes called Chinese doughnuts). Really good with a fresh bowl of hot soy milk. I didn't get any because I was still feeling pretty full and a stick full of oil probably would have caused me some pain. However in retrospect, I'm regretting not having had one. They looked so good!

This is just a menu outside of a congee (xi fan\ or rice porridge) stall. I took a picture of this because if you check out the zoomed in version, you can actually see that "frog congee" is listed there! Weird!

I did have some room for something to drink, and it was so hot out I needed something cold anyway. So I got some fresh squeezed sugar cane juice.

Just a silly display with sugar cane and a green coconut sitting on top.

Sugar cane going into the machine. (I started taking pictures from outside of the stall, but the guy invited me inside where I'd be able to get a better shot of what was going on. That was very nice of him.)

Sugar cane coming out of the machine. They actually pass the sugar cane through a couple of times to extract as much juice as possible.

The juice pouring out.

And, voi la! Fresh, cold, sweet sugar cane juice. After that, it was off to ice hockey game number two. More food to follow after the game.

Singapore, Day 1

So I woke up on Thursday morning and went in search of some food.

I decided on eating at this place more or less arbitrarily.

And I ordered a shrimp noodle soup and a cup of coffee. The broth was quite tasty, and the noodles were ok (not bad, nothing super special). The coffee (not shown) was served with sweetened condensed milk rather than sugar and cream. After that, it was off to the hockey rink for our first game of the day.

After the hockey game, I got a bowl of beef noodle soup (nio/ nan/ mian\), but I forgot to take a picture of that. Then I wandered around the shopping mall there. This was a stand that had all sorts of dried fruits (as well as some gummy bears and similar candies). This picture shows the fruit section which was mostly Chinese-styled dried fruits (e.g., salty dried sour plums).

There was a soya milk stand, so I got myself an almond soya milk, and a "crispy pancake." The crispy pancake was more like a crepe (but firmer, hence the "crispy" part of its name), and the inside was smeared with red bean paste. The crispy pancake was only so-so, but I liked the soya milk.

In the shopping area adjacent to the mall with the ice rink, there were a whole bunch of these food stalls. It's sort of like a food court that you'd see in a mall, but you just order at the stand, tell them your table number and sit down. When it's ready, they'll bring the food to you and then you pay them. I didn't discover this until after I had lunch already, so we'll get back to this tomorrow.

This is just one view of a couple of the stalls. There were a ***lot*** of stalls. Most of them served some form of Chinese food, but there were others including Muslim Chinese food, Thai, Indian and Malaysian food.

Another fun choice was the fruit stall. Lots of fresh fruit (I think the picture has watermelon (top), papaya, watermelon again, pineapple, and then lower quantities of other assorted fruits like apples, kiwi, dragonfruit, mango, etc.). I got a chunk of pineapple and one of papaya, both very good.

A dessert stall selling various Asian desserts with sago, grass jelly, corn (mmm, everyone likes corn for desert!), etc. I didn't get anything here either; I probably should have. For dinner that evening, we went back to Clarke Quay where our hotel is, and ended up at some restaurant where I got a steak (so not too interesting for photo-documenting). But before that, we stopped at a bar where I ordered something at random from the menu whose name I probably couldn't pronounce, and now I certainly don't remember.

It was basically a bunch of small anchovies (or other small dried fish) fried up with some soy and chili sauces. It actually tasted decent, but it's a little too much to eat in one sitting.

Singapore, Day 0

[The non-food posts can be found on my old blog.]

After checking into the hotel, we wandered around a couple of blocks, but didn't find anything to eat. So I just asked some cops, and they pointed me to a 7-11. Across from the 7-11 however, was a little shop that seemed to be in full swing with hungry post-partying partiers (this was at about 3am or so).

I ended up getting some sort of noodles. It had some fish balls (dish cake in little spheres instead of slices), mushrooms, and maybe a piece of fried bean curd.

I asked for only a "little bit" of spiciness. Maybe it was just the heat and humidity down there, but boy was that making me sweat. Good thing I picked up a can of Pocari Sweat at the 7-11 as well.

It's a Dog-eat-dog World

If you are squeamish about eating anything that is not a vegetable, cow, pig, chicken or fish, you might want to skip this post. Given that warning and the subject, you can probably guess where this is going...

So, despite Koreans being (in)famous for eating dog meat (gehgogi/게고기), this is actually a fairly uncommon thing for most Koreans to eat. I'm under the impression that most Koreans, if they've ever even had gehgogi, have only had it a small handful of times. I think this might be due to a combination of it being relatively expensive these days, easy access to other meats (esp. pork and chicken), concerns about Korea's international culinary reputation, and pressure from animal rights groups.

In any case, gehgogi is part of Korea's culinary heritage, and so I still felt I should try it out to better experience what this country has to offer. That being said, here's the restaurant we went to last Tuesday night:

Funny note: the restaurant next door with the blue sign is for "Fugu" or blowfish which is a very (in)famous Japanese food (which can be lethal if not properly prepared). Another interesting thing was that the menus we got made absolutely no mention to dog anywhere. It actually said "beef" in several places, or sometimes just the generic "meat." This is to just avoid trouble with squeamish foreigners who are not accepting of eating dog meat. At first, I thought this was kind of funny, but thinking about it more, it actually makes me kind of sad. It's really a result of the traditional Korean culture being attacked by western customs and practices. Every culture has foods that other cultures find to be weird/gross/bizarre/unfathomable, but it's all just a matter of what we're used to. We don't eat dogs in the West, Indians are known for not eating beef (although there are plenty that do), and kids don't like vegetables. I don't think that really makes any of those food items any more or less acceptable. Ok, enough of the soapbox and let's get on with the doggies.

Before we get to the main dishes, we got this cool sauce that I hadn't seen before. Best that I could figure out, there was sesame oil, yellow mustard, chili paste, and a whole bunch of brown mustard seeds. After mixing it together, it made for a pretty tasty paste/condiment.

Here's the pot heating up for the first dish.

This is a side dish/soup, which is basically either a thin stew or a thick soup made from dog meat. There wasn't any obvious meat in here, so I guess the stock is probably made from bones and what not. It had a very rich flavor, somewhat salty, but quite pleasant over all.

Dog meat and veggies. I'm not sure how to describe this, as it was mostly just the dog meat boiled in some light stock (maybe even just water?), which was probably a good way to appreciate the flavor of the dog without all sorts of other distracting ingredients. Overall, it tasted pretty good. Somewhere between beef and pork in texture (I think the meat was more like beef in feel/texture, but it was fattier like pork), and it had a slightly gamier or other stronger flavor.

Dog dish number three. More dog meat with veggies, but this time it was stewed in a red chili soup base. So a little spicier due to the base, but the meat tasted similar. Overall, I thought dog meat tasted pretty good. If you're not squeamish about it and you're looking for some new culinary experiences, I'd say go for it.