PHO

May agreed to go with me to see “2012”, the doomsday movie. Surprisingly, this did not need a big effort at persuasion. So at lunch time, I went down to the Eng Wah cinemas on the 3rd floor of Suntec City Tower 3, my workplace, to book the tickets. While down there, I did a little a exploration and came across this Vietnamese restaurant – Pho Hoa Noodle Soup. It seems to be a chain with outlets in the USA, Malaysia, Philippines, Canada, China and Indonesia, so declares a decorative wall in the restaurant. I vaguely remember this chain. I think they had an outlet in Siglap, in the eastern part of Singapore, before the ascendant of Thai food and the decline of Vietnamese food in Singapore. Now, I have not had pho (pronounced ‘fur’) for a long time, not since returning in March from visiting Ann and Joan in Perth. I do really like this Vietnamese beef soup noodle. Without hesitation, I ordered a regular bowl with a mixture of flank beef and steak beef, after the waitress explained that the flank has some fat on it and I heard the fat calling me. The pho was really ‘cheng’ (‘clear’ in Chinese). There was no oil floating on the soup, like those I ate in California; neither were there beef flotsam. Nice and pleasant looking. It was served with the usual mint, bean sprout and lime that come with pho. On the whole the pho was good. The flank beef was not powdery and the steak beef was chewy but not tough. I made a mistake though, should have asked for the steak beef to be on the side. Then I would have had it pinkish, more to my taste. The soup clearly had a good stock, with a beefy aftertaste that went down well with the light sourness of the lime. Yum. The pho I had in Perth was better. Was it worth the $12.36 I paid for it after adding a service charge of 10% and7% GST? Nay. A bowl of equally good local beef kuay teow soup in a food court would have cost me only $5 at the most. For those who want their bowl of pho, you can find it at Pho Hoa Noodle Soup (Suntec), 3 Temasek Boulevard #03-027, actually Tower 3 on the 3rd Floor, above Carrefour.

FUNGHI POT PIE A LA KOONIE

Yesterday's dinner nearly didn't happen. One weekend morning last week, May and I just happened to be watching Rachael Ray on TV.  She was in Chicago visiting the local favourite eating joints and resaurants.  We were intrigued by a dish she tasted.  It looked like a mushroom pot pie with spaghetti sauce.  So I decide to to make a couple after we got all what we saw were the ingredients.

I needed two porcelain bowls. The pot pie we saw was baked in a bowl, not dish, one bowl for each diner. Alas, there was none in the house. Go and buy some. Easier said than done. No bowl that can be use for baking. Not even at Phoon Huat, the baking haven. Almost gave up. But then my resourceful wife found some at N2 Shopping Street ( that's Tampines Neighbourhood 2 Shopping Street; what's else?) right in front of our noses. But Phoon Huat did have prepared puff pastry sheets. Bought a pack.

Come Sunday, yesterday. All the ingredients were ready. May lightly stir fried about 120 grams of minced beef with chopped garlic and onions in a sauce pan. Poured in half a bottle of a 737 gram bottle of Prego spaghetti sauce ( given by May's friend Mary).

Placed two slices of real, not the processed kind, cheddar cheese at the bottom of each pie-pot.

      
       Halved the button mushrooms, about 5 to 8 medium sized ones for each pot, and dropped them into the pots.

Filled the pots with the spaghetti sauce. Covered the pots with the puff pastry.

 

Began pre-heating the oven to 220°C.  Temperature determined by looking at the baking instructions for the puff pastry sheets. No recipe; everything ‘agak agak’ (guessing, educatedly, be assured).

Poof ... all the lights went out. Tried to reset the earth-leakage circuit break. No joy. Switched off the mains to the oven and tried again. Lights on again. Switched on the oven, lights off. Conclusion – oven faulty. So now what to do with the unbaked funghi pot-pie a la Koonie?

Resourceful May to the rescue again. Use the turbo broiler, said she.

Voila, ready, top brown and crispy.

Turned over the pot and dropped the pie onto the dinner plate. Ready to be eaten with fresh cucumber. Let me say that getting the koonie pie onto the plate was quite a feat. The pot was smooth and oily and hot, and had no handle. Difficult to hold. Nearly made a mess of it.



I must say, for a concoction without a recipe, it was good. The funghi was succulent and earthy, the sauce was piquant and tangy (Prego is good) and you could still feel the crispiness of the crust despite the sauce. Yum, yum. Now to see to the oven.

CHENDOL

This afternoon I had a delicious bowl of chendol. After sending her mother home from church and lunch, May wanted to go to Katong Shopping Centre. She had to exchange her new bra for a larger one. Her favourite bra shop is in this shopping centre. She shooed me away from the shop and told me to go and have some dessert.

One of my favourite dessert place is this one, B1-66, in the basement of the shopping centre. Well, I don't know what's the name of the shop as it is in Mandarin. I have been to this shop many times since it opened several years ago. Mostly, I had eaten dessert pastes like 'chee mau woo' (black sesame seed paste, one of my favourite) and almond paste. Never the chendol. For no apparent reason, I ordered the chendol. Boy, was I glad. This chendol is the real McCoy. The chendol is the original light green type, made from sweet potato flour, not those plastiky, deep green you get now-a-days. It is so soft that when you use your tongue to press it against your palette it squishes out and leaves a pleasant mushy sweet taste. Then you feel the sweet, with a tinge of sourness, gula melaka (coconut sugar) gliding down the back your tongue. The soft but firm red beans were a pleasant complement. Yum, yum. Still, can't beat the one in Malacca.

SAUSAGE AND SALAD

Tonight I had dinner at home. I had sausage and salad. I didn't cook the dinner. Why sausage you may ask. Well, when I started out for novena this morning I had intended to have a home-grilled steak. Then I went to Borders to look for the last two books in a fantasy series. As I am prone to, I lost track of time when I am in a book shop. By the time I surfaced, it was past 5 pm. So I took the train back to Novena Square to get my car. There is a Cold Storage supermarket in Novena Square. So I went in to look for the steak, then I spotted the sausages in the delicatessen. They were so tempting and I succumbed, especially since I thought that maybe it was a bit late to prepare the steak.

I always have a fondness for sausages - English, German, Italian, Middle Eastern, Chinese, Taiwanese. In fact, I think most countries have some sort of sausage. But maybe not India; never heard of an Indian sausage. I will Google to confirm sometime. My love affair with the sausage began back in the long gone days I was in the Singapore Armed Forces. I was sent to England for training and stayed for almost a year in a Royal Air Force officers' mess. Once a week, sausage and black mushrooms was a menu choice for breakfast in the dinning hall. After the first time, I had it whenever it was a choice. Those were the days, man.

So I bought two grilled sausage, a package of prepared salad and a carton of pure promegranate mangosteen juice from the Cold Storage. When dinner time came I heated the sausages in the microwave and ate them with the salad, chasing them down with the juice.

One of the sausages was a bratwurst, a spicy German pork sausage with sun-dried tomato; the other was a Mediterranean jumbo sausage, also pork, I think. Both the sausages were firm to the bite, grilled just right - cooked, not over done. The hint of sun- dried tomato in the bratwurst gave it that bit of oomph. The jumbo was just pepperish. And the salad was just a salad with crotons. Overall a satisfying meal. Yum. It had everything I need - protein, fat, carbohydrates, veggies and vitamins. Except something is missing - company. Sigh.

FOO CHOW FISH BALL

For the last couple of days I have been looking for a route to and from work driving through which I don't have to fork out $4.50 to $6.50 daily, depending on how early I leave home. I am quite peeved that I have to part with my hard earned money to enjoy the convenience of driving to work when I don't see the convenience at all, what with the very heavy traffic and sometimes jams. Today, I found one going through Nichol Highway where it will cost me just $0.50 to $2.50. This seems to be within my irritation threshold.

This route also gives me the choice to go by Old Airport Road. So this evening, I decided to go to the Old Airport Road foodcentre for dinner. Browsing around, I came to Stall 103 selling Foo Chow fishball. Unlike the normal fishball which is quite ubiquitous in all the foodcourts and foodcentres in Singapore, the Foo Chow fishball is somewhat of a rarity. Thinking it wise to have a light dinner since I had a heavy nasi lemak lunch, I ordered a bowl of the Foo Chow fishball. $3 gives you 4 fishballs and 3 meat dumplings.

The thing about the FooChow fishball is that its centre is filled with minced meat. When you bite into it, you cut to two textures - the spongy fish outer layer and the soft meat centre, like biting through a savoury centre-filled chocolate. For me, a good fishball has a bite. At your first first bite, there is resistance; a little more pressure then cuts through the little rascal. This particular Foo Chow has some bite but I think some flour has been added so that it is softer. The meat dumplings were good and the soup tasty with the added kelp. Overall, worth a go. There are also other balls, I mean normal fish balls and pork balls, at this stall to go with noodles.
Yum, yum.

COUSCOUS

Since my wife, May, left to visit our daughters in Perth, I have been having meals bought from or eaten in food courts, food centres, coffee shops and the occasional restaurants. No home cooked food. Sigh.

So I decided to throw up something simple for dinner tonight, it being a Sunday. Simple in the sense everything on a dinner plate. And what can be more simple than fish with couscous. I am not sure what couscous is really. When I Googled I understand it to be a specially prepared combination of semolina and flour. It doesn't matter though, as you can buy a box of it from a supermarket. We usually use San Remo couscous because it was the first one we found in a Cold Storage supermarket and it was not expensive. Since it was good, we have suck with it.
Our first encounter with couscous was way back in the 1990s when we were invited by an Israeli friend to dinner in his apartment in Singapore. His wife served couscous. We actually forgot about it until our daughter Ann served it during one of our visits to her and Joan in Perth a couple of years back. It was yummy. Since then we have been having it occasionally.

After mass today in the Church of the holy Trinity, I went to the nearby Fair Price supermarket and bought a piece of white snapper (locally known as 'ang go li') and a small pack of frozen mixed vegetables (green peas carrot, corn, beans). There was no need to buy the couscous as there was still an almost full box of it at home. Rubbed some salt and pepper on the fish and left it in the fridge.

When dinner time came, I prepared the couscous by mixing a half cup of it with equal part of hot water and left it to expand. In the meantime I pan fired the 'ang go li'. When the couscous became soft but still grainy, I tossed it up in the frying pan (the fish removed) with browned chopped shallot, left-over diced salami and a handful of boiled mix vegetables. Usually we also add almond flakes but I forgot to buy some and there was none left at home. May also likes some mint and raisins. I like raisins in the couscous too and got them ready but left them out and only remembered about it after eating everything up. Ah yah.

Here's my concoction.

If I may say so myself, it was an enjoyable and satisfying meal. Yum.

LEMPER UDANG

Some while ago my brother-in-law said over Sunday lunch that lately he had yet to come across a good lemper udang - one full of the spicy fried minced dried prawn. It struck me that I had not eaten one for a long while. So I set out to look for the best one (at least to me). Surprise, surprise, I found one I really like in, of all places, the canteen in the Novena church at Thompson Road.

May, my wife, and I go to the Novena on Saturdays. On that particular Saturday I had to go to the loo and went through canteen to get to it. Lo and behold, there it was, a basket full of fat lempers - in the the canteen not the loo. Here's what this delicious treat looks like.



Not only is it choked full of the spicy dried prawn, it is also streaked with the blue from the bunga telang (blue pea flower), a traditional nonya food colouring. It is good because the spicy dried prawn has just the right hot chilly taste with a tinge of sugar sweetness. The glutinous rice is tender and lemak (rich with coconut milk) but not mushy.

If you want to get it, you have to go to the canteen before 10.30 am as they disappear soon after. Trust me, several times I went after the 10 am novena, and they were gone. Now, I buy them ($1.10 each) as soon as I arrive for the 10 am novena. Yum.