Hwa Kee Lemon Chicken Rice (华记柠檬鸡饭), Peninsula Shopping Centre

Came across Hwa Kee Lemon Chicken Rice (#01-12 Peninsula Shopping Centre, 3 Coleman Street, tel : +65 9001 8109) recently and was intrigued by the focus of their sunny yellow branding on lemon chicken rice. I've had those before and most of them haven't been memorable. Could this be different?

They made mistake with the order but I decided not to pursue it. Still baffled by how 白鸡尾 could have been misheard as 油鸡. Soya sauce chicken was decent tasting, tender but flavour falls short compared to places like Maria Virgin Chicken or the Hawker Chan before Hawker Chan. The lemon chicken was outstanding though. Tasted freshly fried with a solid crunch on the batter and had a better tasting lemon sauce than the usual sweet starchy gloop. The eggs were all double yolked!

Rice was lightly flavoured but not bland. There's achar on the side which was unusual but I definitely welcomed those. Chilli was pleasantly bright and limey with heat and a light hint of ginger. 

Don't ignore the soup which one can help themselves to. It's chicken soup with...I don't know what else but it's better than the majority out there.

Xi De Li (西得利), Redhill Food Centre

Xi De Li sells local fried snacks. I've been wanting to get these glutinous rice buns from them for a while. Finally got my hands on one of them at their stall at Redhill Market (#01-14, Redhill Food Centre, 85 Redhill Lane). These glutinous rice buns were essentially a ham chim pang (咸煎饼) stuffed with glutinous rice. Carbs in carbs.

The fried bun was slightly salty and slightly sweet with a bit of five spice seasoning. Pretty decent tasting and if you've had them before, you'll know what to expect. What I especially liked about these were the sweet and tender glutinous rice stuffings in the bun. A subtle textural contrast in each bite from the fried bun to the gummy sweet sticky rice. I gotta get myself one of these more often!

Prosperity Burger season and other stuff from McD

Prosperity Burger is back for the CNY season. I wonder why the Hello Kitty box designs this time round.

Today's sandwich was saucy. The way I like the Prosperity Burger.

Sweet peppery saucy with the crunch of onions. The meat was....well, it's McDonald's.

Ha! Chicken Drumlets has gotta be local because it's marinated in prawn paste and I don't see this happening anywhere else in the world. The taste isn't on par to better quality prawn paste chicken from zi char stalls but credit where its due, they did a decent job with the flavouring for these drumlets.

There's pineapple pie this year. The flavour's akin to pineapple jam/candy with bits of pineapple meat - exactly what I was expecting. Two years ago, it was strawberry pie. 

Fish Noodle @ Koufu, Tanglin Halt

The name of the stall Fish Noodle in the Koufu at Tanglin Halt (#01-08 Commonwealth View, 88 Tanglin Halt Road) was misleading because they don't do fish paste noodles nor are they exactly doing fish soup noodles as most of us know it. It's a Chinese stall selling noodles that have a variety to toppings permuted across a few broths.

Got a couple of bowls - one with the sour spicy (酸辣) broth ☝🏼and the other with their original broth 👇🏽. I prefer the former which was salty, sour and had a bit of heat with Sichuan peppercorn flavour. The latter didn't taste bad, I just didn't know what to make out of the flavour after the 酸辣 excitement. Noodles were almost gummy and soft but not soggy. 

Toppings were decent. Braised pig intestines (肥肠) were tender and chewy. The fish they use have a light muddy taste and aren't batang as the pictures misled me to believe. As a whole, the noodles from this stall weren't so different from the stuff that one can find in Sichuan Alley.

More stuff from Lao Ye Teochew Porridge (老爷潮州粥)

We've been coming back to Lao Ye Teochew Porridge for a couple of more times since. I love their rice. They aren't the dry beady types that many eateries think they can get away with just because they have sauce in their food and they feel that makes up for the poor quality of rice.

Occasionally we encounter the ang go li (sea bream) tail. It's steamed and ladled over with a light soya sauce concoction. Meat's tender and it's pretty decent tasting.

The cross section slice of the fish is okay...I prefer the texture from the tail.

Steamed egg with minced pork appear to vary in how they're done. Sometimes I swear I can taste salted egg in it. Sometimes the salted egg's not there.

Sweet and sour pork's basic. Not bad tasting but it's also not fantastic nor will it be freshly done most of the time because that's just not the nature of food at Teochew porridge/cai png stalls.

Revisiting Two Guys

So we're back at the stall with just one guy. I wanted to try their lamb burger not knowing that the burger doesn't come with a lamb patty.

Looks like stir fried lamb with onions and black pepper. There's also cheese. Meat's not exactly tender and pretty lean. In a blind taste test, I would suspect it might be lamb and wouldn't be definitive on that suspicion. That's how it was. 

Buns were soft and pretty light but failed structurally because lifting the sandwich up with hands will simply result in the bottom bun flopping from the weight of the meat and everything starts spilling.

Decent tasting lamb mandi. The amount of meat on the shank would have fed 2 persons comfortably. Meat was tender but a little crumbly. Had nice fatty parts. The proprietor ladled some of the braising sauce on the rice during preparation so I'm guessing that the lamb flavour came from that sauce instead of the rice? Did not taste bad though.