Any self-respecting Singaporean foodie must have at least ventured into the Geylang Lorongs once or twice in search of some mystical food item - be it dao huay (been curd) or ter kah (braised pork trotters).  So three of us did just that.  Bringing steely balls and wallets we ventured to Lor 35 and sought out the famed Sin Huat, that looked something like this in the evening twilight:

Our evening began with a 5min wait for someone to attend to us.  Ok, to be fair, we were served our cutlery and peanuts pretty promptly after.  The cutlery (peanuts notwithstanding) remained clean for the next 15mins as our orders remained unwritten because, apparently, some crazy guy had pre-ordered maybe $10k worth of bee hoon (which may not be that much, as you'll find out later).  So after 15 mins, our orders were taken.  It was over in 15 secs, just one curt guy (could be the boss), no menu, no asking of portions, just scribbles on an order sheet.

Then came T.H.E G.R.E.A.T W.A.I.T.

It was 30mins before our first dish came.  It was simply our baby kailan that we ordered.  So it was just plain kailan eating for another 30mins before the next dish came:

Steamed Frog! I can't fault the freshness of the tiny buggers, the meat was outstanding.  But I thought the garlic was a bit over the top.  And no, they didn't serve us 'original' essence of chicken, it had already been so-called 'processed' or, for want of a better word, diluted, with other liquids.  I suspect soy sauce and/or oyster sauce.  And then we waited again ... 20mins this time:

Yes, this is what we affectionately call the gong-gong.  Other than a term used for your pesky little sister, it was a pretty convenient name for the Strombus Canarium, a member of the conch family.  Once again, freshness was tip top - couldn't fault it.  The highlight apparently is the tear-jerking sticky chilli/honey concoction by the side.  Jia Kai said that he read somewhere online they take half a day to prepare it.  Extremely fiery.

Then it was another 30mins of us discussing career options, politics, geology, property and TV sets before the piece de la resistance, the epitome of Sin Huat, the famed CRAB BEE HOON (2 X Sri Lankan crab) came:

To begin with, i actually found it a little bit too salty for my liking.  But what I immensely enjoyed was the crab roe and the silkiness of the noodle.  Plus, the gravy sauce, not too much to over-drench the noodle but robust and little enough to seduce you and make you just want to stuff your face with more noodle.  Not to mention the fact that we were ravenous by that time (10pm).  Yes, you can taste the richness of the sea in the sauce, no kidding.  Apparently, the legend is that tourists request just the gravy to be packed for take-away.  So finally, our night of gastronomy ended on a crabby note, the one dish at the one restaurant which you either hate or love.

Oh did I forget the bill? Our waitress aunty was obviously smirking and lording over us as she came over with (credit cards are accepted at this kopitiam btw):

Food 9, Service 1, Atmosphere 0.5, Value for money ?

Sin Huat Seafood Restaurant

Geylang Road (Geyland Lor 35)

Tel: 6744 9755

Ingredients above

900g frozen NZ mussels

1 can stewed tomatoes (you can use puree if you prefer)

1 cup of seafood broth or stock

2 medium shallots, finely chopped

4 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1 large chilli, finely sliced

2 bay leaves

Dried thyme (about 2 teaspoons)

Dried basil (about 2 teaspoons)

Black pepper

Sea salt

-Thoroughly defrost your mussels and debeared them.  Heat up three tablespoons of butter and a tablespoon of olive oil over medium high heat.  Saute your shallots for about one minute then throw in the chilli and garlic for another minute

-Pour in the can of tomatoes, bay leaves, dried thme and basil, and your cup of stock and bring to a boil.  Let simmer for 10-15 mins, covered.

-Then put in the mussels without increasing the heat.  Stir constantly so that every piece is evenly cooked.  Remember not to over-cook as the meat becomes hard  Give it about 5 mins.  

-Season with pepper and salt and serve immediately.

-An alternative step is to remove the mussels leaving the soup behind in the pot.  Then add in parmesan cheese and maybe a bunch of coriander or parsley and let simmer for another 10-15 mins.  The longer the tomatoes are cooked, the richer and tastier and gravy becomes

So there!  The mussel juices mixed with the tomatoes and herbs can be considered one of the best comfort foods around.  And mussels are healthy too with loads of omega oils that oils your joints and protects your heart and brain.  Try pairing with a semi-dry red wine and crusty brown bread .

(Somewhere along the jumble of ingredients and the scurrying to and fro, I think I might have made some RSN history of my own.  I can *probably* safely say that I'm the first to concoct a stewed pork leg bee hoon in the galley of RSS Stalwart, state of the art strike frigate of the Singapore Navy.  "Ho hum", "big deal" you might say, well, if Singaporeans can go through the trouble of creating the world's longest popiah, then I can't see why I, true blue Singaporean, with green ic, can't have a little personal victory in the Singapore's most expensive kitchen.  Yes, going by per square foot calculation, excluding equipment, a frigate's gallery is worth at least $5 million dollars.

I digress.)

Ah, the wonderful stewed pork leg.   It doesn't matter whether it is Narcissus or Gulong brand, they all probably taste the same once trashed about with with some rice vermicelli (bee hoon), soy sauce and pepper over a roaring fire.  I had to do breakfast this morning onboard the ship and I thought I might as well use the chance to do some cooking.  So from Sheng Siong, I got:

(To feed 12 hungry souls)

-5 cans of stewed pork leg

-2 jars of mushrooms

-1 jar of olive vegetable

-1 packet of wolfberries

-2 500g packets of bee hoon

The excellent thing was that there was an offer going on for the pork leg where every can bought entitled you to a free jar of mushrooms, so good for me!  But you can use shanghai or white cabbage or shredded carrot as a substitute.

First of all, soak the bee hoon into a large pot of hot water.  20mins then drain.  Soak also half or two-thirds cup of wolfberries with a little water.

Second, empty the cans of pork into a large tray and fish out the pork bones.  If you want to easily remove the lard, leave the cans overnight in the fridge so that the fat coagulates.  But then I suggest fifteen extra minutes on the treadmill rather than let the wonderful animal go anywhere but into the bee hoon to liven things up.

Then heat up a large wok or a humongous "nasi biryani"-type stainless steel pot (which I used).  You might want to cook in two batches.  Put in a few tablespoons of vegetable or canola oil.  I threw in the olive vegetable first, just to bring out some flavour from it.  Fry for about 1 minute, then throw in the noodles.  Standby a bowl of water as the bee hoon dries up quickly.  What you're aiming for is a wettish kind of char bee hoon, not the economic bee hoon type.

If you have raw vegetables, cook them first for about 2 mins before adding the olive vegetable.

As the bee hoon starts to absorb water and cook, about 2-3 mins, throw in the pork leg.  The art here is the stirring: aim to stir from the side and inwards, trying as best as possible not to break the bee hoon into small pieces.  I generally disregarded this step as I had to wrestle with a giant spatula and the giant "nasi biryani" pot.  Mix the meat and starch thoroughly. 

Season to taste with a few tablespoons of pepper, a generous pour of sesame oil and dashes of light soy sauce.  You can also use oyster sauce.  In effect, the stewed juices that comes with the pork leg lends the main flavour bulk to the dish.

Lastly, add in the wolfberries.  These for sweetness and colour.

Transfer to a serving apparatus and then serve! What I did for condiments was buy a jar of Singlong sambal belachan and some large red onions.; I chopped and diced up about 4 medium onions and caramelised them in some oil over high heat.  Then poured in the sambal mixture, added about two tablespoons of sugar plus pinch of salt and voila! 

Well, this dish is just simply delicious as the bee hoon soaks up all the wonderful flavours.  I was heartened that seconds were actually taken!  I also like the unique taste of olive vegetable prepared this way.  Well, I hope you give it a try at home!

Owned by Wee Teng Wen, son of Wee Cho Yaw, UOB Chairman, and whose kitchen is helmed by Daniel Sia (who started out in Delifrance and then went on to do stints with luminaries such as Michel Roux and Marco Pierre White), The White Rabbit serves contemporary European fare.  Unsurprisingly, early reviews were not exactly savoury, with the bugbear being the service.  A foodie friend of mine who went had to even put up with a rude waitress; it seemed that service suffered particularly during busy periods.  But thankfully, there was less complaint about the food, the worst review being 'ordinary'.  So why did PY and I make special time from our precious saturday to make our way to Dempsey (thankfully we took a cab this time) when I could have gone to Lavender where I know at least the wonton meet will be good?

Well, its because TWR is one of the few locations for our London-themed wedding celebration lunch.  Yes, we decide to do away with hotel packages with their useless wedding favours and obiang invitation cards.  Plus, TWR seemed an ideal place for our theme!

But then, of course, we were concerned about the quality of the food and the standard of the service too since our guest list was going to be pretty small and exclusive.  But what I couldn't fault was the location, the stained glass as seen above was a nice big plus.

The wooden facades, the more casual design of the furniture and the spaciousness was also in line with what we envisaged.  But then for us, the killer punch could only come from two things: price and food.  So from their brunch menu:

First up we had their chopped cobb salad with cherry tomatoes, quail eggs, red onions, avocado, Roquefort cheese and red wine vinegar dressing.  Cobb lettuce is a type of lettuce similar to butterhead and also known as Boston lettuce.  Personally, a good salad needs only two things: freshness and composition.  Any salad which has these two components done right would be delicious even without dressing.  I like the combination of avocado and blue cheese in this classic salad.  The tomatoes were also sweet and juicy.  I also appreciated the fact that the vegetables were free of water before being mixed in.  I would have preferred the dressing to be a little more tangy though.

For mains, PY had another classic dish, the eggs benedict with smoked salmon.  The perfectly poached eggs on top of fish and muffins.  I thought the poaching was excellent, with compliments to the culinary skills of the chef.  I did my share of egg poaching in London and the two key variables of time and water temperature had to be exact.  What I thought could be much improved was the hollandaise sauce (one of the five key sauces of French haute cuisine, and probably the most finicky, consisting of butter, lemon juice or vinegar and egg yolks).  It was neither rich and buttery, smooth and creamy or tangy.  The sauce didn't seem to have emulsified properly.  I also thought maybe a dash of cayenne pepper or sea salt might have added life to the sauce.

Something better I had was the Main lobster cheese souffle.  On the menu, it said that it was twice baked, though the reason why escapes me.  But what was great was the texture and fluffiness of the souffle which itself hid bites of lobster meat and a quail egg.  Another thing was the wondrous brown lobster bisque surrounding it that had all the flavours of the sea as its aroma wafts through your nostrils.  What I need to harp on is the price, at $28++, the souffle, no bigger than the biggest muffin from my neighbourhood bakery, was pricey.  I wouldn't have minded if maine lobster were not used, just fresh lobster.  Hell, 19 out of 20 persons on the street wouldn't even have heard of Maine.

Next up:

Something you have to eat at least once and something you must order in any good restaurant : a Baked Alaska.  This is not something you can easily recreate in the home kitchen.  It is essentially an large scoop of ice-cream surrounded by a case of sponge and meringue.  The whole thing is baked in an extremely hot oven to brown and harden the meringue.  The meringue, a bad heat conductor,  keeps out the heat and the sponge preserves the integrity of the meringue.  This dish was executed perfectly at TWR so kudos to the chef once again!  Why it is called an Alaska is as mysterious and contentious as why Roti John and called Roti John...

Finally, we end off with a bit of bacteria and spoilt milk:

Nothing adds a bit of class to an establishment than a food trolley.  I remember Petrus, which Marcus Wareing helms in Knightsbridge, which had not only a cheese trolley but also a grand chocolate truffle trolley with golden curls and trimmings.  So I couldn't resist shelling out another $15++ to have a go at the cheese:

There was brie, roquefort, ossau iraty, le nantoise loire sache, saint marne and a tommette cheese among others; each with its own flavours and textures.  I also enjoyed the "jam cubes" which went pretty well with most of the cheeses there.  What I found disappointing though was the limitedness of the selection of cheeses.  I thought that the range of textures, fermentations and milk type could have been expanded.  I personally thought it was a mistake to restrict the trolley to just french cheeses.  Throwing in some spanish iberico, smoked sheep feta or a stinky bishop would have made the cheese trolley more fun.  And instead of pretentious extremely-hard-to-read-font cheese labels, I would have preferred a clear sign telling me the name, type, origin and general taste of a particular cheese.  

So that brings us to the end of the culinary adventure to TWR.  I am glad to report that I had good service with wait staff who were polite and attentive.  The food arrived in good time too and the bread selection was good.  PY and I spent a nett total of $114 for everything above with no drinks.  I thought it was pricey for a saturday brunch but the atmosphere was pretty good, not too crowded and spacious. Well, perhaps we might be back on 17 july next year for the Big One, until then!

Beef stocks are funny things: why is it that Maggi or Knorr stock cubes have lots of flavous except beef?  Or why is it that instant noodles usually have chicken seasoning rather than beef?  Well, according to Cook's Illustrated, weight for weight, chicken releases more flavour from its meat, bones and skin into liquid than beef does.  Hence, to obtain some serious beef stock, a whole lot of meat is required.  And precisely lots of meat is what is required for the rich beef stock recipe found in the Best Recipes book.

Here's the recipe:

1-2 tablespoons vegetable oil

6 pounds beef shank, meat cut from bones in large chunks or 4 pounds chuck and 2 pounds small marrow bones

1 large onion, halved

0.5 cup dry red wine

1 litre boiling water

0.5 teaspoons salt

-Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a large stockpot over medium-high heat.  Brow meat and oniion on all sides.  Don't overcrowd and add more oil if necessary.

-Remove contents and add the wine and reduce till a brown syrup.  Return the meat and bones.  Reduce heat and sweat the meat and onions until a thick brown intensely flavoured liquid is formed, about 20mins.

-Increase the heat to medium high, add water and salt and let simmer, partially ocvered for 1.5 to 2 hours.  Then strain the contents and tada! 2 litres of ones of the best beef stock ever.  The patient people at America's Test Kitchen found that the traditional method of roasting vegetables for stocks did not really add much flavour; a simple onion did the trick.

 And for the soup:

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

5 medium red onions (3 pounds).  Sliced thin.

2 litres beef stock from above

0.25 cup dry red wine

2 sprigs fresh parsley

1 bay leaf

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

Ground black pepper

Salt

-Melt butter in a large tockpot over medium-high heat.  Add the onions and a sprinkle of salt and stir the onions until thoroughly caramelised to a brown syrup.  30 to 35 mins

-Stir in the beef stock, red wine, parsley, thyme and bay leaf.  Loosen the bits at the bottom.

-Simmer to blend the flavours.  About 20mins.  Then discard the herbs (except onions). Stir in the vinegar and adjust the taste with salt and pepper.

For the top crusts

1 baguette, cut into 1cm slices

4.5 ounces swiss cheese, sliced.

3 ounces Asiago cheese, freshly grated (about 1.5 cups)

-Adjust an oven rack to the upper-middle position; heat the broiler.  Set heat-safe bowls or crocks on a baking sheet.  fill each with about 1.5 cups soup.  Top each bowl with 2 bread slices and then the Swiss and Asiago cheeses.  

-Broil till browned and bubbly, about 10mins.

The book also states that you can replace the beef stock (if you have no time to tediously make some
) with off-the-shelf 6 cups of low-sodium chix broth and 1.75 cups of low sodium beef broth.  No doubt about it, the combination of cheeses was found to be the best by the test kitchen.  And red onions gave the best flavour too.

What I did below was to put the bread and the cheese in to a soup pot and just baked the whole thing as I didn't have oven safe bowls.  I used a single layer of country bread, Swiss Emmental (not the same as Swiss cheese!) and mozarella as Asiago was impossible to find.  One mistake I had made was to let too much water evaporate (too focused on getting a nice, rich stock) that I ended up with a cross between a soup and a stew.  Don't be afraid to add water to your beef stock or onion soup.

So with the leftover meat from making the beef stock, I made some sandwiches from the leftover bread.  I shredded the meat, topped it with some gherkins and dijonnaise and, of course, any leftover cheese and voila! there you have it, a full course meal fro ma few simple ingredients.  But all of these took quite a lot of time though, two plus hours, if you're not an experienced cook.  But then good food, good fun, nothing really more I can ask for!

My FAVOURITE recipe site is allrecipes.com .  Not only is it easy to remember but it is a review-based site so at least you can be assured someone tried it out before you (unless of course you're brave enough to attempt an unrated recipe for a flourless choclate cake with caramelised raspberries or something like that).  One tip is to always read the review comments because the really experienced home-cooks will give very good advice and tips on improving the recipe.  So from allrecipes, I got the following red potato salad submitted by Susan Martin.  I liked this recipe because of its simplicity, the rest of the submitted recipes had too much distractions like boiled egg, mustard and fancy cheeses. 

4 servings

-7 medium red potatoes, cooked and cubed 

-60ml sour cream

-60ml mayonnaise

-30g shredded cheddar

-20g chopped red onion

-3 X bacon strips, cooked and crumbled

-2g chopped chives

-Salt and pepper to taste

Red potatoes can be found at Cold Storage and The Marketplace and they're not cheap  but since this is the core of the dish, you probably might not want to stint on quality.  I prefer to leave the skins on for my salad.  One thing ot note when cooking the bacon, pan fry with oil till dark brown and remove quickly, this will prevent it from turning charred.  The bacon will continue to cook once out of the pan and will harden enough for it to crumble.

Well, this being a salad, I obviously didn't stick rigidly to the recipe.  One tip from reviewers was to use twice the amount of bacon (which I did).  I also used a bit more sour cream to give it a creamier taste without it being too muar.  And of course, you can be as generous with the cheese as you want.  Some reviews suggested using parika and garlic powder to spice up the dish.  But I thought using good ground black pepper and good sea salt (adding a nice bit of salty crunch) was much sufficient.  

This potato salad will go great with all kinds of meats especially at BBQs.  Try it and tell me!

I haven't blogged for some time due to a variety of reasons, not one of the least being that I haven't really gone out to eat much interesting stuff lately.  It has been a lot of same old same old recently due to work and financial constraints.  So I thought I might as well save the writing for something truly amazing.  And yes, something pretty interesting did turn up eventually - a nice navigational deployment to Qingdao, China to attend the PLA-Navy's 60th Anniversary Fleet Review.  And yes, that meant five of us including three of my courses-mates depicted above - Josephine, Neville and Pravin (trying to shake the salt water out of his ears) - plus MAJ Sylvan our course instructor, we piled into 1 X frigate and sailed up and up and up and up which got colder and wetter and foggier.  But finally, after enduring not so few hours of bad sea state (something like in the mural in the above picture) ... 

We suddenly found ourselves in Qingdao, No。55 Nanjing lu (南京路), drenched, stinky-socked, in this place called De Heng Roasted Duck Shop, 德恒烤鸭店.  Ok, it wasn't really a 'shop', more like a traditional Beijing kind of restaurant set in a building that had the facade of a Shaolin temple, complete with a couple of the usual stone lions guarding the entrance.  So you enter and you're instantly greeted by rows and rows upon counters of plastic food (yes, the kind you usually find outside a japanese restaurant) and tanks of fresh seafood.  And just to put things into context, we were ravenous.  We arrived in Qingdao, the supposed Marseille of the East, famed for its fine weather, seafood beaches and European architecture, in dense fog and slow, never-ending, rain.  Plus we had only six night hours to squeeze whatever touristy stuff out of the city before jetting back home the next day.  So we just hopped into a cab, rattled off a few street names recommended to us, and somehow found ourselves at Nanjing lu, which ironically, wasn't really our final destination at all.

But anyhow, let's proceed on to the food and i'll fill in the details as we go along:

The first dish was actually a rather pleasant surprise.  We had chosen a few prawns from the tanks and asked for some recommendations.  So the waitresses rattled off something incomprehensible and we just nodded in agreement.  So tada, we have here stir-fried gingko nut, papaya and prawn.  It was a nice combination I felt.  The prawns especially, was unlike any prawn I've eaten, they were pale-white when cooked and tasted somewhat exquisite, almost like crystal prawns.  And the prawns went well with the gingko and papaya for some strange reason.  Sliced onions added the familiar taste to this dish.  I think this dish is a very typical north-east China dish, or what some might know as Shandong cuisine or 鲁菜 lu cai.  It is usually characterised by light flavours and soups.  So in this dish and a few others below, you don't find the typical ginger, oyster sauce and dark soy sauce (Our Singaporean cuisine ... derived largely from Cantonese and Teochew influences) 

Next came another specimen from the tanks - octopus or what the Chinese call 八带.  Once again, very nicely stir-fried Shandong-style, with leeks, spring onions and black fungus.  Because these are live-caught, the meat was just awesome.  It had the crunch and bite you would never find in the typical Japanese restaurant in London or Singapore.  Also, I'm quite intrigued that they used orchids as garnishes which are pretty expensive and something you might expect at a more posh restaurant than this.

And then came the bomb, the Buddha Jumps Over the Wall aka 佛跳墙, fo tiao qiang.  I've never tried this dish, although so famous, before Qingdao.  I've always been regaled by accounts of the culinary treasures thrown into this veritable stew and I was about to find out!  So in it are quail eggs, white fungus, shark's fin, abalone, scallops, turtle and lots of other seafood cartilege I couldn't identify!  To be eaten with vinegar.  Beside the fo tiao qiang, is the famous Sichuan 麻辣 mala hotpot of tofu and pork slices - made from lots of oil, fried chillies and Sichuan peppercorns.

On the left was my personal special dish because the rest weren't too keen on poking around in a spiky bowl - sea urchin steamed with egg.  It was quite tasty and the texture was slightly rougher than your average steamed egg or 水蛋 you find at the chap chye peng stall.  But I enjoyed the addition of a slight bit of soya sauce and sesame oil.  On the right is the fo tiao qiang stew.

Here is something quite commendable: 翡翠虾饺 or crystal skin prawn dumplings.  It had a good bit of chinese chives inside which I quite enjoyed.  Although the skin was a little thick, there were good amounts of well-seasoned pork and prawn meat inside.  But truth be told, after all the china food scares, I was a little apprehensive about ordering stuff with blended unseen ingredients.

One of the freshest fish you can find, from the temperate waters of Qingdao, to the fish tanks, to the chopping board, guts pulled out, scales scrapped and into the steamer.  This 海铺黄鱼 came steamed in what we might know as Hong Kong style, with soya sauce, a bit of sesame oil, springs onions and ginger.  I think it is a species of grouper. By golly, once you taste the fish here, you might even turn your nose up at Ah Yat's live seafood.  This is a classic example of extremely fresh food cooked simply.

The second fish we ordered is what they called 斑加吉鱼.  I've never come across anything like this and I think its a type of flounder.  The cooking style here is what they called 清蒸 or plain steaming.  The sauce is actually thickish and has a mild flavour of fish stock.  The fish meat texture takes some getting use to though, a little bit tough but not as tough as shark's meat.  There was plenty of meat on this bugger.  But I think I enjoyed the first fish more though.

And then finally came The Duck.  We had to order this the very moment we stepped into the restaurant as the waitresses told us that it would take about an hour to prepare the duck.  So we have all heard of the famous Peking Duck.  And I was about to try it first-hand as close proximity to Beijing as I will ever be.  So this dude carves the duck most expertly - first he carves five little slivers of skin from the rear of the duck, near the bishop's nose.  You can see the five pieces of skin in the picture above.  Then from the same area, he cuts out five pieces of the tenderest meat.  So each of us was served with one piece of skin and one piece of meat each.  As explained by our waiter, you eat the skin dipped in salt and the meat dipped in plum sauce.  Certainly made for interested dining.

And then the rest of the duck is carved up and eaten with gusto with the traditional flour pancakes, spring onions, cucumbers and peking duck sauce.  I also liked picking at the duck head (I have this Anthony Bourdain-esque tendency to eat the strangest and most perky flavoured things), going especially for the tongue and eyes.

After serving us the duck proper, the waiter asked us how we wanted the bones cooked.  For those not familiar, this is the usual practice for Peking Duck.  The meat and skin are carved out and served while the remnants are taken back into the kitchen and prepared into another dish.  Once again, in vain attempt to introduce the style we wanted our duck remants prepared, the waiter rattled off some machine gun mandarin which we couldn't catch so we nodded our heads obediently and smiled in agreement.  And tada! out came this quirky mess.  It was kind of dubious at first, compounded by the fact that you could see the odd wingtip and neck sticking out here and there.  But I just took a bite and ooh! heaven - waht they did was to cook the remnant duck pieces in spiced salt and flour and deep-fried the whole batch.  It was truly amazing and ended the meal with quite a bang. 

I studied the Qing dynasty, its fall and the resulting "one hundred years of colonialism" while I was nerding around in LSE.  Reports of how the Empress Dowager Cixi and all the confucian gentry corrupted and squandered country and riches were pretty well-documented.  In culinary terms, this can be embodied in the famous 满汉全席 or the Manch-Han (Han Chinese were and still is the dominant ethnic group in China) Imperial Feast.  This gastronimic orgy usually consists of over three hundred dishes, held in six banquets over three days.  So after our Qingdao dinner, I thought I had unconsciously gone through a mini imperial banquet ... maybe incomplete due only to the absence of roasted bear paw with tiger penis tartare or braised monkey brains in superior whale semen broth.

And the best thing, you wouldn't believe the price we paid per person for all of of the above, a measly, beggarly, thievely, S$35 per person.  That wouldn't even get you a half-decent buffet at the Ritz.

Finally as an encore, as if all of that gorging was not enough, we headed to Beer Street, Pi Jiu Jie, for a drink.  Just to mximise the last hour of our remaining time.  You CANNOT go to Qingdao without having some Tsingtao beer.  On the way in to the port, we were talking to the harbour pilot who told us, at all costs, to try Tsingtao beer from No. 1 Factory.  Why? Because it is only at that factory that the beer is brewed with spring waters from Laoshan, 崂山, the Taoist-revered mountain, the birthplace of Taoism.  And then of course, for the liver-killers, there is the little business of Gaoliang, 高梁, the famous Chinese and Korean liquor, a clear distilled liquid made from Sorghum, responsible for many a drunken stupor.  This Red Star Kaoliang featured here is, quite fortunately, only 53% proof so that Pravin and Sylvan's cigarettes did not result in a catastrophic explosion.  But STILL, the 53% was burning, you could feel the warmth sliding down your oesophagus and killing your stomach cells on the way down and then the permeating stuff entering your head.  Jo, very wisely here, carries her handphone.

So that about ends our short night in China.  What a pity.  We got to see a lot more on the way to airport and on the flight though.  But probably I'll tell you guys more in due time.  Suffice to say, I was surprised that we were treated very cordially and friendly by all the locals, even with our Chinese-looking faces but screwed up Chinese vocabulary and weird Singapiorean accent.  And the streets and toilets were clean, they were almost spotless I must say.  And their buildings were neat and tidy and modern.  All of these ,no doubt, legacies of the 2008 Olympics which Qingdao hosted together with Beijing.  Oh and did I mention the *almost* SIA-like service and food on China Eastern airlines?  Make no mistake about it, Old Lee was right when he indignantly insisted we learn more mandarin - The Chinese are building up one big-ass empire of their own. 

The drive, determination and ambition are unmistakable.

For us commonfolk, BLU Restaurant is not something that instantly pops into mind when one mentions European/French fine-dining. But it may ring a bell in certain circles given that the fact that it has received top awards from Wine and Dine and Singapore Tatler. Rather surprising was the fact that BLU has garnered a pretty impressive at www.hungrygowhere.com where one reviewer gushed that "Be prepared to be wowed by the weird and the wonderful, to have your palates tickled and teased, but at the end of the day still walk out of the restaurant and feel like you’ve had a pretty good damn meal.". 

More impressive still is the resume of its chef de cuisine, a one Kevin Cherkas, who has worked in three-michellin starred restaurants such as El Bulli and Arzak.   Thus, he comes from the school of 'progressive cooking' with strong influences of molecular gastronomy - think carrot foam, bacon ice cream and sous vide cooking. The highly-acclaimed Cherkas came over from Shangri-La Kuala Lumpur (well done!) to Singapore a few months ago to helm the kitchen at BLU.  A pretty long way to come given his Canadian roots.  In the world of fine dining, a restaurant is defined by the stature of its chef as much as it is by its owner and location.

The service at BLU was excellent, even by fine dining standards.  Waiters make small talk, crack (funny) jokes and are generally attentive.  Decor and atmosphere wise, above average.  There were numerous tables with good view from the 26th storey of the Western part of Singapore.  Cutlery and crockery were of good quality and creatively designed.  I liked that they used tiny stone tiles as a bread plate.  The furniture and panelling though could do with some revamp I felt - a little too tacky and they did not convey a sense of class.  With respect to value for money, well, I paid $400 (ouch!) for everything below plus two glasses of wines (a quarter of the cost!).  Consiering that the food could be customised, I thought it was of decent value.

Without much ado, with a 2006 New Zealand pinot noir on hand, we move on to the food.  There is no menu at this restaurant.  People get to choose what they want to eat.  They can opt for an appetiser, a main and then dessert or they just want mains or they want a starter and five desserts.  But normal people usually do the $139++ six course experience menu.  Cherkas comes to your table and asks what you like or don't like - mainly general items such as beef, fish or foie gras.  No, I doubt you can tell him you want white flour and cai por and expect some haute cuisine chwee kway.  So PY's favourites like escargot, beef and foie gras seemed pretty appropriate for the occasion.  

We start with dessert today for a change.  Our last dish for the night was a plant.  Serious man.  Here it is:

I think they had this plastic 'love' tree custom made.  You might be forgiven in thinking that the brown branches and trunks were chocolate but unfortunately they aren't.  The edible parts are the soil (crushed choc covered coffee beans), the two little green leaves (white choc with green colouring) and the pink blossoms (candy floss).  It was a nice surprise and I was just hooked on popping the coffee beans into my mouth.  Sure beats Super 3-in-1 coffee mix.

One of the highlights for the night was this dessert called "Breakfast" which was recommended by Cherkas:

This is definitely not your typical dessert.  It is served on two pieces of acrylic tiles with a piece of paper in between.  Printed on this sheet of paper is the bacon, beans, sausages and toast you see.  The piece de resistance then is the egg in the centre.  It is a pretty big piece, about twice the size of your regular chicken egg.  So the yolk is made of mango puree encased in an algin-membrane globule.  The whites are made from light coconut cream and the shell of hardened coconut fat.  In the egg and underneath it (to prop it up) is passion fruit sorbet.  It was a refreshing dish, and good given that we had some heavy dishes beforehand.  The amazing thing was the yolk, it gives you the "Wow, how did they do this" feeling and is a very classic technique of El Bulli called spherification where the mango puree is dropped into an algin-water mix to allow a membrane to form.  Even the mango puree's texture was perfect to resemble the physical characteristics of egg yolk.

Before this was what was my favourite dish and one of the most delicious things man must have ever created:

This was a nameless wagyu beef tenderloin Mexican style.  The brown sauce is spicy chocolate and the accompaniment is crispy potatoes in Japanese mayonnaise.  The powdery stuff you see is dehydrated coconut and the lump of red stuff at the top is a very yummy jalapeno chilli sauce.  The yellow thingies are corn polenta.  The potatoes were really amazing - crisp and heavenly with the mayonnaise.  The jalapenos were delectable too.  Yet, what definitely steals the show is the rare cooked wagyu beef.  The meat is nothing like what I've ever tasted and to describe the taste would be a challenge.  Imagine tasting countryside, meadows and farm - beef in its pure essence without the basic beefy smell.  The meat was nicely charred on the outside which gave it some crisp, probably done with a cooking torch.  One drawback of this dish was that it was slightly over complicated and the myriad of flavours did not really meld together.

Before this, was a very yummy sorbet to cleanse the palate:

This was a simple yet delightful amuse bouche (literally means to delight the mouth) between the courses.  It is simply yoghurt with a grape sorbet.  The grape you see there tastes 'spicy' because it has been carbonated.  How? Beats me.  A quick google search reveals this.  Some nifty equipment needed most definitely.

And yet another course, we have:

After all that post modern dishes, we have here a relatively unexciting pan fried foie gras entier.  But no less delicious, the trick is to cook to perfect the little morsel of fat.  A slight twist was the topping of Sichuan peppercorns.  Accompanying this were a cherry reduction and poached cherries together with crushed pistachios.  The last time I had foie gras was eons ago in France, probably in 2007.

Keeping to the creative theme, another wow dish was this parsnip puree with escargot:

Each escargot comes accompanied with a soft coconut meringue and the leaves you see are swiss chards (I think).  The branches are made of parsnip puree and topped with crushed almonds and bread crumbs.  Eating this was almost magical.  I was quite intrigued with the choice of parsnip, it complemented the taste of the cooked snails pretty well.

And finally, our appetiser:

A brie de meaux with a pieces of black truffle in the middle - the kind of thing Abramovich and the Sultan of Brunei eat as snacks.  This dish didn't exactly blow us off our feet and probably the chef wanted to build the dinner into a crescendo starting from a low base.  I felt the pattern thing to be a little unncessary and would have preferred a bit of toast or fruit instead.  The little black blobs and the pattern are balsamic vinegar jus and jelly together with dehydrated coconut.  I mopped everything up with bread and it was yum yum yummy.  Luckily brie is one of PY's favourite cheeses (she doesn't fancy blue cheese) - I couldn't afford to screw up the evening because before this was PY's 'main course':

And to make sure she couldn't say anything but "yes" I got a pair of diamond earrings from Soo Kee's solitaire collection.  So I popped the question, hopefully for the first and last time in my life, using diamonds, a piece of mango cut into an "M" and a piece of watermelon cut into an "E".  In case you were wondering, these were the same two acrylic plates used in the "breakfast" dessert.  So the "Will you marry ?" was drawn onto a piece of paper and placed in between.  I had contacted Cherkas a few days beforehand and he had very willingly obliged to make this evening extra special.  (Incidently, Cherkas told us that he himself had proposed to his beau in Langkawi and was getting married in June!)  For good measure, I told him it was best I get the whole thing over with right from the start otherwise I'd have nothing but butterflies in my stomach the entire night.

In case you're wondering, PY said yes :)

In case you're wondering, what I was served with while the above was served to PY:

 Food 8, Service 9, Atmosphere 7, Value for money 7

BLU Restaurant

Ahoy! And welcome to a day in the life of a PV chef onboard RSS RESILIENCE.  You might have remembered my long ago entry on the LST (aka big big ship) chef.  But the life of a PV chef is somewhat different.  First of all, he works in space no bigger than your average toilet.  Secondly, he needs to cook for more than 30 people onboard.  Thirdly, there is only ONE chef.  And lastly, once in a while, he gets smartass officers like me who try to sneak in on his territory.  But Kang Wei, the featured chef below is the jolly sort who doesn't really mind.  No, he's not trying to say he needs a pair of kitchen scissors.  What he means is that two in the kitchen equals c.r.a.m.p.e.d.

But anyhow, I joined him for one of the days during one of our sailings to whip up some dinner for the crew.  The best thing was that I got to plan the menu (and didn't need to wash the dishes :)))) So below, we roasted some pork marinated with salt and pepper and sliced them.  Then we made some apple sauce using sliced apples and some honey and dried rosemary.  And combined the two.  Tada, one dish done.

Following that,  we got out some frozen prawns, peeled them and roasted them.  Then I mixed some raw chopped garlic with a generous serving of melted hot butter, threw in some chopped chinese parsley and then made our very own prawn salad.  Oh yes, don't forget to squeeze in a generous amounts of lime or lemon juice.  We used calamansi below.

And before we knew it, we had a bit of bad sea state.  No doubt chasing away some pirates.  So our photo for Kang Wei's wonderful roasted chicken got a bit screwed.  But I can tell you that his secret marinate included worcester sauce and honey.  All sold out!

And finally we ended with some staple.  Cooked some rice with a few tablespoons of turmeric powder.  Then cooked tomato puree over low heat till nice and thick.  Spooned in the sauce together with fried cashes and fried shallots.  Voila! Tomato rice on the high seas.

So typing this blog entry was the easy part.  We actually toiled for three hours in a 1m by 3m little space to produce all that food.  A nice little workout no doubt.  After that, it was back to bridge to keep watch with my box of yummy dinner.  But what I find most liberating about cooking onboard? You are not constrained by cost only by availability.  Usually the twin evils of cost and availability wreaks havoc on the aspiring gourmet chef but here you can use the food liberally.  Of course, until you load more rations, some particular types of rations will run out.  Chief among these are eggs which are highly prized commodities.  So let's say you want to cook chicken soup with vegetables, you open the fridge, see a few chickens, well, you can use all of them if you like.  So the soups are usually delicious onboard - in a big roaring pot with two whole chickens flavouring the broth. 

So there, another taste of navy life for you, the land lubbers out there.

I took this picture when I was preparing this dish and never really got down to viewing it till I was about to blog.  When my really 'ancient' 4MP camera, this turned out quite sharp and vivid due to the sunlight.  I'm actually quite mesmerised by the raw-ness of the meat and beans here.  It sounds a bit strange I know but I can see the freshness of the pork ribs really clearly in this photo.  Not one PETA will be happy with but it has satiated my carnivore instincts somewhat. 

Anyway, it was one of those rare occasions when PY and I had time off our busy schedules and my uncle's house to ourselves.  So I decided to whip up something satisfying and simple.  I zoomed down to the NTUC downstairs, got some ribs and some tau cheo or salted fermented beans.  Marinate the meat with the beans, soy sauce and pepper.  You can add some chinese wine like shao xing jiu too.  Careful you do not overdo it with the beans, they are mighty salty.  I put the whole thing into a food plastic bag and refrigerated it for two hours.

Following that, I cooked some good quality calrose rice (found in the supermarkets, its a white paper pack, the most expensive rice you can find in NTUC) together with some wolfberries.  Ah, wolfberries ... my first REAL encounter with wolfberries was in the LSE union shop in London.  They sold various 'exotic' snacks like dried pineapples and organic raisins and what-not.  Plus, they had wolfberries.  The price, though, was the shocker.  If I'm not wrong, it was three pounds for 100g.  I mean, WTF, you could buy a truckload with three pounds in Singapore and it doesn't really cost much to ship.  I seriously considered packing my suitcase full of wolfberries from Singapore and then making a killing selling it in London.  But did you know, the wolfberry, otherwise known as gou ji zi, 枸杞子, it has rich nutrient and anti-oxidant properties? This was realised by the Chinese 5000 years ago and the West 5 years ago.  It contains 11 essential and 22 trace dietary minerals, 18 amino acids, 6 essential vitamins, plants phenols, carotenoids etc etc etc.

So after that, I transferred the rice to a pot, took out the meat and layered it on top.  Then I steamed on high for about 15 mins.  The juices of the pork then ran down to flavour the rice.  Most excellent.   I made the mistake here of using cheaper pork ribs.  I recommend you use prime ribs which are more tender.  you can also use a bit of baking soda or papaya extract to marinate the meat to tenderise it.  Otherwise, you might have to steam the rice and meat for an hour just to cook and meat.  If you decide to do that, I would think steaming the meat separately from the rice would be a good idea otherwise you might overcook the rice.

 In the picture above, I put in a few slices of cooked pig's stomach to give some chewiness.  If you prefer it soft, it would be best to stew it beforehand.  Thus there you have it, a real simple dish, but remember to use good quality ingredients.