Blueberry apple pie and a ginger latte

I found myself in Dome (51 Bishan Street 13, #01-02 Bishan Community Club, tel: 6354 8939) and since I was there, I decided to get something to eat/drink. This place hasn't changed the way they've served coffee in those bronzed looking glass holders for over a decade. Surprisingly, the blueberry apple pie was pretty good. There was sufficient enough tart and chunky apple bits (instead of sliced) and wasn't excessively sweet. I wonder why it's served room temperature. Would have been nicer if this was served warm. Funny thing is, they actually bothered to get this out from the refrigerated display and microwave them into room temperature.

 

The ginger latte - something I've never had before so I ordered it out of novelty. There was definitely some ginger flavour in there, a weak hint of coffee as with many latte and that was pretty much it. Wasn't sharp and flavourful like certain teh halia.

Swaadhisht, Chander Road

I was admittedly drawn to this place while walking behind the lanes of Race Course Road (47 Chander Road, tel : 6392 0513) because I saw that there was goat briyani on the menu. The manager of the restaurant had stepped out to explain the differences between the regular mutton briyani which he mentions to use mostly Australian lamb and the goat variety which uses, well....goats from Malaysia which he also added was more expensive. I was sold right at the start since I wanted to try it.

We started off snacking on some onion pakora which were freshly fried while waiting for the rest of the food to arrive. These were pretty tasty and there were garlic chips among the pieces of battered onion. There was also a horrible corn soup with pitiful bits of canned mushrooms. I wouldn't have ordered them if not for being misled by the pictures on the menu. I didn't think that anything that had ingredients could taste so bland.


The malabar goat bryani which was $16 a portion didn't look very impressive. Or for that matter, the portions weren't very large neither. There are actually two versions of the goat bryani that were offered. The other one which is a Thallasseri version used a shorter grained rice from Kerala while this one used basmati. The flavour from the meat had also seeped into the rice from the cooking. I thought it tasted pretty much like any mutton briyani and wasn't particularly more robust as claimed. While it was pretty decent, I wasn't close to being wowed by it. I liked the raita though. Was delicious with the rice.


There was a need to supplement the dinner with something else on the side so here's a butter chicken which was loaded with chopped onions. This wasn't how I had expected the butter chicken to look like. But it was not bad at all. It had a bit of heat and was enhanced by those onions. I've yet to come across another rendition of this dish that has the same smoky aroma in the chicken like Jaggi's does.


Their gobi manchurian was not bad as well. Beside the surprisingly firm cauliflowers in batter, there were more chopped onions! Unfortunately, there was also little bit of ginger in there too. The rendition here deserves mention because of those firm and crunchy cauliflowers. Most versions of this dish has limp ones.


The restaurant gave us a complimentary after dinner sweet that seemed to be made of barley. I detected coconut and brown sugar in them along with cardamon amongst other spices.

Spamcakes and pesto gnocchi

This was a kind of a lovechild of a thought. And that thought was 'I've got so much left over bread ends and edges from making sandwiches for 50. I don't want to waste them.'. And thus the idea of these spamcakes were born. I had imagined this to be a fairly easy task, but the making of the bread bits took me a little more than 2 hours of the morning and by the time the cooking was done, it was past the usual lunch hour.

• 2 cans of Spam, mashed
  
• 6 eggs, beaten
  
• 1/4 block of butter
• 2 small onions, diced
• diced bread (I think breadcrumbs don't work)
• some coarse grain pepper
  

Allow the butter to soften or melt them in the microwave. Add them into the eggs and whisk a little. Pour in the diced bread, spam and diced onions.

The bread will start soaking up the egg mixture. So what you do next is to use your hands and knead everything together. You can add in the pepper at this point. Massage them until you feel that they are well mixed, then start shaping them in to little patties. Fry them in low heat over the pan with little or no oil.

The only thing I thought could have been better was that I might have fried the diced onions a little before mixing them into the rest of the ingredients. The low flame pan fry didn't quite brown the onions. The resultant taste was a bready spam like fritter with the texture of hash browns.

I'm sure there are numerous ways of doing these gnocchis out there. Here's how I did mine. The ingredients are relatively simple and none of them are actually made by myself. With the exception of some lovingly hand diced tomatoes.

• box of gnocchi (estimate base on your needs, this is 50 gnocchis)
• pesto (jarred, bought from Carrefour)
• olive pate (also jarred, also bought from Carrefour)
• some parmesan cheese
• 1 diced tomato
  

Put the gnocchis in a pot of boiling water that has a little salt. They cook fast so don't leave them alone for too long. Approximately 2 minutes does the job. Meanwhile, spoon out the pesto and mix with 1 small heapful teaspoon of the olive pate. Mix and heat slightly. You can also dice the tomato at this point.

Drain out the gnocchis into a bowl and pour the pesto mixture in to toss gently with the diced tomatoes. Add shaven parmesan. Eat.

A kedgeree from The Cellar Door

A kedgeree as I've learnt recently, is an Anglo Indian boiled rice dish with fish and eggs. They originated from British colonials in India. This one from The Cellar Door was precisely that and probably also a variant of possibly many renditions. It did contain small bits of smoked fish (mackerel I think) and diced tomatoes. Just that and the mildly creamy curried rice. This curried rice had just enough of the curry aroma and flavour but none of the spiciness normally associated. Even Japanese curries would be considered fairly strong in comparison with this. In spite of the mildness, I thought it was a comforting dish. I think there might have been yoghurt or cream in the rice. It tasted a little bit like a dry risotto. Does anyone know where else can kedgeree be found?

Strawberry cheese pancake from Mr Obanyaki

This I stumbled upon by chance at Takashimaya. I didn't realise that Mr Obanyaki has got strawberry flavored fillings with cream cheese and I'm not sure when did it appear. So in enthusiasm, I burnt my tongue with the hot fillings. The positive side to things is, I have been lucky so far that I've always gotten them really warm which is the best way they should be when eaten. Yeah, that hot gooey cream cheese is definitely good with the strawberry.

Lunch @ Hong Lim Food Centre

This as you see above, was the cumulation of a couple of decades of prawn noodle making. Doesn't look like that much does it? I cannot remember any point of my life in recent years when I've been down to Hong Lim Food Centre to eat despite the location being rather iconic for good local fare. That will be probably because, I haven't. What I do remember is eating there as a child, dragged by my mother to have lunch with my father who used to work in the vicinity and these happened on the basis of once or twice in a week. After so many years, I was wondering if I could reconnect with any of the memories from 20 years or so ago. The only thing that actually stuck was the uncomfortable heat, the crowd and the taste of the prawn noodles. None of it was particularly intimate in any sense. Though it's not necessarily a bad thing.

The prawn noodles from Ah Hui (Ah Hui Famous Hokkien Big Prawn Mee, Hong Lim Food Centre, 531A Upper Cross Street, #02-61) did taste like how I remembered them to be. The noodles were surprisingly al dente firm which was something that I never quite registered from the past. Prawns were decent, also thinly sliced which isn't usually the way I like them. There's a bunch of short pork ribs which were okay-ish, some sliced pork and a generous helping of pork lard. The chilli powder was good and has probably got to be one of the compelling factors contributing to the taste of the prawn noodles.

 

Another dish that I remember from then was the crayfish hor fun from Tuck Kee (Tuck Kee (Ipoh) Sah Ho Fun, Hong Lim Food Centre, #02-41). I joined the lunch queue, grabbed a plate to re-live it and I guess it was pretty ok. I never realised that there were so many crayfishes neatly arranged at the back of the store, all ready to feed the daily lunch mobs. The prices weren't on the lower end for hawker fare and what you paid determined the size of the crayfish that you got. And it's not the cheap and bland starch that many others attempt pass off for gravy in there too. The taste of the gravy is unmistakably crustacean and as I understood of that taste, it's acquired. I wonder if there are any other crayfish noodles out there.