3.3.05

This week's Mastercard ad and foodie post

Getting a table at Beach Road hawker centre: $0
Cab fare for some of us to get there and back: $25
Splendid hawker centre repast for five adults and one teenager: $45
Drinks afterwards at a shishka place along Arab Street: $18
Having said teenager look disturbed because he overheard "I prefer to pee in the cubicle instead of in the urinal" as "I prefer to pee in the cubicle instead of in your anus": priceless

For the record, the splendid hawker centre repast consisted of:
  • yong tau foo (fish cake and other seafood-vegetable-flour concoctions served up with noodles or vermicelli)
  • char kway teow (fried wide noodles)
  • noodles with beef slices and beef balls in soup
  • hor fun (more fried wide noodles, but in a seafood gravy), fried oysters, proper olua (oyster omelette, not the same thing as fried oysters)
  • rojak (sometimes known as a salad, but far from any Western conception of salad: vegetables and deep-fried dough fritters in a sweet prawn paste sauce, with a liberal sprinkling of ground peanuts)
  • carrot cake (the Chinese "black" kind)
  • goreng pisang (deep-fried bananas) and similarly deep-fried slices of sweet potato.

Apologies to anyone familiar with Singaporean hawker fare but living overseas, whom I may have just made ravenous with hunger and homesickness with my litany above. We were trying to introduce typical local food to friends from overseas.

Surprisingly, olua was a big hit; we always thought of it as more of an acquired taste. Next food stop: satay at East Coast Park Lagoon hawker centre.

The thing about me and food is that I like it, I'll eat it and I'll compare where's a good place to get it. Terz, on the other hand, actually knows most of the ingredients in local dishes and can explain how some of them got to be that way. So he could explain that carrot cake has no carrots in it and is in fact radish cake, and that the misnomer arose from an inaccurate translation of a common Chinese term for "carrot" and "radish" into the English word "carrot". The things you learn about your own country when you're taking people around...

7 Comments:

At 3/04/2005 9:56 am , Blogger suzie said...

actually i'm absolutely dribbling at the mouth now. i'm going home for easter and i've basically sworn my mum to bring me dim sum-ing the minute i step out of the airport. and kway chap. and laksa. cannot make it, i think i'm feeling slightly faint. 2a01a2001.

 
At 3/04/2005 10:21 pm , Blogger Agagooga said...

I swear this post wasn't here the last I saw.

Backdating posts - how 1984-ish *g*

 
At 3/05/2005 11:15 am , Blogger Tym said...

Hi, Suzie! Sorry to make you hungry. Maybe can get some packet mixes from the local Chinatown to tide you over till you're back?

Agagooga --- My blog, my rules ;) There is a logic to it, even if it's only in my own mind.

 
At 3/07/2005 4:44 am , Blogger ragingyoghurt said...

ok, yes, quite a drool-worthy post, however i direct you to this guy, who was recently in singapore and meticulously blogged everything he ate, in fourteen installments, with pictures. my sister and i were on the floor, gurgling in a pool of saliva.

 
At 3/07/2005 9:51 am , Blogger Agagooga said...

Prawn toast is nice what

 
At 3/07/2005 10:38 am , Blogger Tym said...

TaLieSin --- Revenge is mine!

bowb --- It's a particularly bad idea for me to read that blog at 11:30 at night, because now all I want is hawker food!!!

Agagooga --- I'm not yet convinced. Perhaps I shall have to get TaLieSin to fly a sample back for me.

 
At 3/07/2005 1:21 pm , Blogger Agagooga said...

At least we've 24 hour Kopitiams

 

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