a few of my 'favourite' things

Oh my gosh.
I went to Spotlight today, and I saw the most gorgeous plates and such! Not the kind for serving dinner on, but random pretty pieces that I an seriously lusting over.


First there were these nice stripey long plate-things: so pretty! these were really what caught my eye first, simply because they are so colourful. I'm not generally a pastels person, but these are nice. I think they're about $30 though. Whoever said that Spotlight was cheap.

Then there were these pretty, swirly-designed plates; I really like the black one. It's not very clear in the picture, but the pattern is in light blue and light olive, against the black and white it's terribly nice and sophisticated. The white and blue one's not bad either, but I do like the black one better. The only thing is that they're both much too big.

BUT! What I really, really, REALLY fell in love with were these 'frilly' plates:

I can't decide which of them i prefer: the cake stand or the long frilly-edged plate. siigh. I want them! but they cost tooo much for my impoverished wallet to afford.

there were also other really cool cake stands and stuff:

like this cupcake tree...

and this cake stand, decorated with tiny cakes:

And then there were these cool retro-esque colanders, in all the coolest colours. I think they'd go pretty well with whatever kitchenaid you happen to have...


I want some money to go kitchen applicance-shopping!

Cravings

Am currently experiencing terrible food cravings. severe and terrible.

1) Japanese food!!!! this is all the fault of that Lonely Planet Japan book. all that talk about tofu, abura-age, miso paste, green tea and all that. oh god. i want to get my hands (and mouth) on some:
a) Sashimi from that Japanese restaurant at Chijmes—seriously the best sashimi I've ever eaten, ever. especially the swordfish. oh. my. god. firm, chewy/bouncy, juicy and creamy, and oh so fresh. mmm. the green tea here tastes excellent—the sort that has roasted rice mixed into it to give it an earthy, roasty fragrance. mmmm.
b) yakitori from Shin Kushiya at VivoCity. They serve a type of yakitori that is not dipped in the sauce when they grill it. Instead, it's seasoned with salt, so that the outsides are dry and crispy, and the insides are just bursting with juice. They also grill their skewers with real charcoal (and apparently a special sort of charcoal too, for prolonged high temp), so there is a very nice hot-coal sort of fragrance to the skewers.
c) the scallops with miso paste from Megumi at Siglap. the best baked scallops ever. really. it's lightyears better than the whole cheese sauce baked shellfish. the miso paste is salty, creamy, a litte sweet, and has this fantastic flavour that is totally out-of-this-world good. ohh boy.
d) reverse California Maki roll from that Japanese restaurant at Paragon—i just can't remember the name. this is a really really good maki roll, rolled with the rice outside instead of inside and then rolled in crushed salted seaweed and toasted white and black sesame seeds. then topped with those little orange egg roes. totally divine. the sushi chef here is very skilled, because the sushi is well rolled and doesn't fall apart, and the rice is deliciously flavoured with that vinegary taste: just right, not actually sour, but fragrant. the green tea here is also good.

2) Breakfast food!!!
a) the pancakes from New York New York: need i say more?
b) sticky cinnamon buns—chewy, sweetandsalty, cinnammony goodness. mmm.
c) scrambled eggs—the kind i make: creamy, cheesy, with lots of 'juice' because of extra milk and butter. also heart-attack inducing.
d) grilled tomatoes. the ones in my pesto pasta at the Wine Garage were fantastic. halved cherry tomatoes griled til soft inside so that they just burst into a flood of warm tomatoe-y goodness in your mouth. mmm-good.
e) chocolate chip cookies. this i am totally going to bake this weekend.

3) Cremé bruleé: for some reason i am totally craving this, completely out of the blue.

okay, i think i'd better stop here before i drive myself insane.

New Food Sensations

Today's post shall be dedicated to the strange and wonderful foods i've eaten in the recent past, dishes that i've never heard of, things that seem normal and mundane but are just so cool i have to blog about them.

1. Bittergourd slivers with honey.
Sounds pretty gross, right? bittergourd? pfft, not my thing. but this is really different and cool. it's strips of raw bittergourd, verrry paper thin, chilled, served with a dish of not-quite-honey, something like what you get when you eat guilinggao. sweet, gold syrup that's a little more watery than honey, and without that distinctive scent of honey. it sounds a little iffy at first, but it's totally excellent. and so easy to do at home too. just a bittergourd and a vegetable peeler, no cooking required. yumm. had this at a place that serves really good crab bee hoon soup, which is a milky soup similar to the sliced fish sort, but with crab, so that the soup tastes of that roasty crab-shell fragrance. yummm. it's somewhere along outram road.

2. "Indonesian Chicken".
They serve this at the cze char place outside my house, Sin Hoi Sai. it's pieces of chicken, deep fried, then stir-fried in this seriously fantastic sauce that will totally rock you socks (assuming, of course, that you wear footwear which requires socks to a cze char place....). it's seriously a flavour explosion in your mouth. sweet, salty, a little spicy, tasting of curry leaves and onions, and something else that defies description or identification. suffice it to say that this dish is fan-freaking-tastic.

3. Cereal Sotong.
Again, a dish from Sin Hoi Sai. Now, i'd heard of and eaten cereal prawns before, but sotong?? but boy does it work. i don't particularly like the prawn part of cereal prawns, mainly because by the time you've peeled the shell off, the prawn doesn't have much added flavour. plus, peeling prawns is messy business in a cze char place or hawker centre. but the sotong...the sotong were fantastic. tender and juicy, with a wonderfully fragrant heap of cereal crumbs, mmmmmmmmmmm. sooo good.

4. Soyabean ice cream.
yes, i've rhapsodised over this already; suffice it to say that a) this is REALLY good, b) i'm totally addicted to the point where i'm willing to travel out of my way to get to it, and c) i've made another convert, and i'm making it my goal to make MORE. hee. spreading the soya-lurve.

5. Hot-plate pork and onion.
E and i stumbled upon this after a movie uhm..slackathon at VQ's house one Saturday, and life has never been the same. okay, maybe that's overdramatic, but it doesn't change the fact that this is good, and cheap to boot. it's basically, pork and onion, stir fried then dumped onto a smoulderingly-hot hot plate atop a layer of raw shredded cabbage. mmm-mm! $3.50, at the Novena Square foodcourt. totally delish. so good that E and i were already planning another movie day the next week so we could eat it again, even before we had finished our dinner. haha.

hmm, can't think of much more. of course, this is not a comprehensive list of surprising good food to be had around Singapore, but it is pretty complete a list of things that i've just discovered.

list

seeing as how this blog has been dedicated to all things edible, i've decided that my latest list shall be put here. it's called 'things my kitchen lacks'—or, if you like, 'kitchen stuff i lust over'. or 'thing's i'll buy when i'm building my perfect kitchen'. or 'how i'll spend that lucky draw top prize i'll never win'. or...well, you get the point.
so. here goes..:
1) an oven. i am so sick of the damn microwave. pfft. no matter how that best denki guy tries to hard sell you, do NOT believe him when he says there's no difference.
2) an ice-cream maker.
3) the woodles waffle machine. hee.
4) the perfect granite motar-and-pestle: big and deep, not big and shallow, please.
5) a set of lovely, big, heavy-bottomed pans/pots.
6) a set of measuring cups. one just doesn't cut it.
7) a hand-held blender/puree-er. whatever it's called.
8) a china tea-set, complete with teapot, cups, sugar and cream pots, the works. i have strange fantasies about drinking tea from thin-thin cups, pouring tea from a delicate pot, etc.
9) a coffee-bean grinder. why? because....
10) how could you have thought that i wouldn't include an expresso machine on the list??! haha. mmmm.

siigh. now if only half a million bucks would materialise.