Tikka masala chilli linguine

This tasty home cooked pasta is actually much more simple to make than the name may suggest. Well, the tasty part was largely because of the sauce that was used.

By some chance, I've recently come across a jar of Sharwood's tikka masala gravy from the British food section at Carrefour. The deep earthy orange of the sauce beckoned my attention and guided my hands to pick up the jar to look at the ingredients. I decided to give it a try. So that's basically the sauce that is used.


I've had a pack of chilli linguine lying in storage for a while. To be honest, I bought them because they were more of a novelty to me than anything else and having tasted them during the cooking process without any sauces, I can tell you that the chilli flavor was actually barely discernable. A barest hint would be it. So since this wasn't going to really to add any spice or dimensions, I'll just use them as regular noodles.

The process for doing this is quite the usual for pasta with jarred sauces. I'll just summarize it into 3 simple steps.

1. The pasta is firstly cooked in boiling water with salt and then blanched in cold water.
2. Pour the jarred sauce into a pot and heat them up.
3. Move the pasta back into the pot with sauce and toss.

That is pretty much it for this. Nothing complicated. You can top this with ground parmesan if you like.

The optional item here are the bacon like bits of ham on the top.

What I did was to shred some ham. Any kind ham is good for this actually. Throw in some brandy butter to melt in a pre heated pan on a low fire. Add the ham. Both the butter and the ham have altogether enough oil to keep thing sizzling on low for quite a while. The bits of the ham should be browned and starting to curl when you remove them.

A point to note is, the usage of the brandy butter is just for the sugar. Not the brandy. I've done this a couple of times because I have a jar of them which I couldnt' find any other uses for. It can probably be substituted. The end result would be a sort of sweet and saltish bacon bits.

Dim sum @ Crystal Jade Golden Palace

The dim sum here (290 Orchard Road, #05-10 The Paragon, tel: 6734 6866) was pretty good. Comparatively with the recent Shang Palace, I liked this much better. The latter location was a third more expensive than this place even with the early bird discount of 30% off. Food didn't pack as much omph as the one Crystal Jade Golden Palace did for the price. To be fair, there was also some creative differences as to how the dim sum dishes were interpreted.

Some of the noteable mentions included the light and crispy baked skins of the char siew sou; tender glutinous rice; creamy carrot cake with a crisp exterior and the delicious salted yolk prawns which were from the a la carte menu. Those prawns were much better than the ones in Xi Yan. The only let down was the goose liver pastry which while buttery, wasn't very tasty had barely any flavour from the goose liver at all. I'll have to remember to avoid that if I ever come back. There was quite a bit of the stuff which we haven't gotten the chance to try from the dim sum menu alone.

char siew pastry

siew mai

chee cheong fan with prawns

some goose liver pastry

har gao

pan fried carrot cake

some banana and prawn pastry

char siew bao

glutinous rice in lotus leaves

battered prawns pan fried in salted yolk

egg tarts

mango pudding

pan fried shredded taro, sweet potato and pumpkin with sugar

Didn't have much room for desserts so we settled for a ubiquitous mango pudding and a pan fried bunch of vegetables in sugar and ground peanuts. You read that right. Pan fried vegetables for dessert. Which came in surprising large portions considering that everything else was in small servings. Ended up feeling a tad too greasy to finish.

This place is worth a return visit though.

A tofu cheese skewer

These were being sold at the Sky Garden level at Suntec in some temporary booths that were selling snacks for $2. It was mainly the cheese that made me curious. It turns out that, the "tofu" exterior tasted like a soft fishcake and there was enough cheese in it to make this thing rather delicious in a savory way.

Damn it, I forgot to ask for cheese!

I haven't walked into any Burger King for quite some time and didn't realize that they have a triple Whopper on the menu now. Must be trying to reassert their position as the king of fast food burgers by unleashing this monster with 3 whopper sized patties. This outgunned the quad deck cheeseburger that I attempted at McD but also costed almost twice as much. The cheeseburger tasted better because it had more cheese and BK's patties seemed to be quite dry. I wouldn't say that I won't consider this whopper again if I had to eat here once more. I just have to remember to ask for cheese then too.

Baileys Irish Cream Tea Cake from The Cookie Museum

This place (8 Raffles Avenue, #01-02/04 Esplanade Mall, tel: 6333 1965) was previously known as the V Tea Room. I've always been curious about them but haven't walked in until today. It all started with just sampling some cookies that they had on sale and while looking around, I decided to try their Baileys Irish Cream tea cake - something that I recall from seeing here some time back. 

This cake sure was pricey. Then again, so was everything else on menu. The fairly generous portion of single serving dessert was a squarish log of dense butter like cake filled with bits of hazelnut, sitting in a pool of espresso/Baileys mixture. The cake was heated up before adding four dollops of cream and upon serving, had a shot of Baileys poured over the top. This was not bad but I guess most of what made it good was the Baileys.

Jaggi's, Kopitiam @ Bras Brasah

Short story was, I was happening by the area a couple of weeks back and by chance saw this stall by Jaggi's in Kopitiam (No. 51 Bras Basah Road, #01-03 Plaza By The Park, S189554). Having liked their food at their main branch at Race Course Road, I wanted to try this one out. As I had suspected, due to the limited area which the store had as a unit in a foodcourt, the variety was much lesser than the main restaurant. That didn't stop me from ordering some of my favorites of their smokey and creamy butter chicken, cheese naan, palek paneer and some chicken tikka.


I was expecting some differences since this foodcourt stall didn't look like it had the space for the facilities as the original place. To my relief, the butter chicken was still good and the cheese naan still as loaded with cheese. Though the cheese didn't quite melt as well. The palek paneer wasn't too bad as well if not for the fact that it wasn't well heated like everything else and there seemed too be too little of those paneer. There was even their usual onion salsa which one could help themselves to. Altogether, it felt like a fast food version of the original Jaggi's with a smaller variety.

I'm still favorably disposed towards them and having such an alternative outlet is good news for me.