Showing posts with label Singapore. Show all posts

Mid-Autumn Festival!

Tomorrow is Mid-Autumn Festival which marks not only the end of the autumn harvest, but is also supposed to occur during full moon. However, contrary to popular belief, the Festival doesn’t always fall on that exact day (or moon). The date of the festival is always the 15th day of the 8th lunar month. Although there isn’t always a full moon, there will be one within two days of the festival.

Anyway, like any other festival, there is always food involved. In this case, mooncakes.

"Moon Cakes" by misbehave - Moon CakesUploaded by Atlaslin. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moon_Cakes.jpg#/media/File:Moon_Cakes.jpg

A traditional mooncake is a small covered tart filled with lotus bean paste. Occasionally, you might find salted egg yolks as a filling together with the lotus bean paste. The dough is made from a mixture of flour, alkaline water, sugar, oil, and it is wrapped around a ball of lotus bean paste before being pressed into a traditional engraved wooden mould to give it a round shape with a beautiful design. The top is then glazed before baking.

By Zane80 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
These days there are also snowskin or unbaked mooncakes, where the dough is made from glutinous rice instead of flour. The skin can be flavoured giving patissieres room to express their creativity. The mooncake also has to be stored in the refrigerator, hence the name snowskin. 

These days, there are many variations of mooncake flavours and fillings. In Singapore, if I remember well, there is even a unofficial competition on which restaurant, cafe or hotel has produced the best mooncake of the year. Even Starbucks have created their own. Every year there is a new flavour. From durian to champagne truffle, the flavours have expanded tremendously and not always in the right direction.  For a complete list, take a look at Hungrygowhere's guide to Singapore Mooncake 2015.

Luckily for me, I like the traditional one which can be found in my local Asian supermarket in London. So I will be enjoying some mooncakes while admiring a not too full moon with some friends.

A tourist's guide to ordering drinks at a Singapore coffee shop

It has been a while since my last post and I have no excuse. My only defence is my new found inspiration from my trip home to Singapore.

While I love my cappuccino, I do enjoy the local coffee shop coffee at a quarter of the price. Firstly, there are a few things one needs to understand. There are no cows in the country and therefore milk is imported and fresh milk is not really fresh. So the replacement is either evaporated milk or condensed milk. Also, by default drinks come with sugar.

So to make an order, you have to do math. You take the most basic word Kopi and add words to it to say what you want:
Kopi:         condensed milk + sugar
+ Kosong: no sugar
+Si:           evaporated milk instead of condensed milk 

If you get lost, here's an info graph:

If you navigate from left to right, top to bottom, the sweetness of the drink increases. If you replace Kopi with Teh, you can the an assortment of tea drinks.


It took me a while to create this but it has been quite satisfying. Enjoy.

Kuehs from my childhood

I had dinner with a fellow Singaporean last night and we started to talk about food. What else. But last night we started reminiscing about our favorite childhood breakfast. I remembered that my mum used to buy a variety of kuehs from the coffee shop across our block and serve them as breakfast the next morning. Kueh is actually cake but the consistency is very different from cake as you know it. It is closer to pudding rather than cake. Talking about them made me missed them. So I decided they deserve a space on my blog. You can still find them easily in almost every market. Thanks to a blogger Rose, here are some of the pictures and recipes if you would like to try making them at home.

Bak Tong Gou (steamed white sugar sponge cake)
This is a white sponge cake with a honey comb texture. Bak Tong means white sugar in Cantonese so it is slightly sweetened. They were sold in triangular pieces. I remembered that they also sold the same using brown sugar instead but I never knew what the name for the brown ones were. Here is the recipe.



Huat Kueh
I call this the chinese muffin without the cake texture. It is also sweet like a muffin. I like those that comes in pink or yellow rather than the brown one. Sometimes they also buy this as offerings during chinese festivals.
http://roseskitchen.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/huat-kueh/


Gu Cai Kueh (Steamed Chive Cake)
These are little steam dumpling stuffed with chives. There is also a similar version but stuffed with turnips (Sun Kueh) but I prefer the ones with  chives. Unlike other dumplings, this one has a flat  half moon shaped. I must say this one is an acquired taste. It is savory and is served best with dark sweet sauce and chili sauce.
http://roseskitchen.wordpress.com/2007/02/24/koo-chai-kueh/



Peng Kueh (Steamed Rice Cake)
Again, these are more like dumplings rather than kueh. The skins are made from flour and they are stuffed with a mixture of glutinous rice and mushrooms. Because of the filling, it is savory. The dumplings are then shaped using a mould into a tear drop shaped dumpling. What's interesting is the color. The skin is pink in color! My grandma used to make them a lot when I was a child.
http://roseskitchen.wordpress.com/2007/04/10/teochew-png-kueh/


Ang Gu Kueh (Steam red cakes)
Opposite to Peng Kueh, these are sweet. They are stuffed with peanuts. They are also shaped using a mould into a turtle shell like dumpling.
http://roseskitchen.wordpress.com/2007/05/23/ang-ku-kueh-ii/

Singapore hawker food

On request from a friend, here is a list of places not to miss when you are in Singapore.

Chomp Chomp Food Center (Serangoon Gardens) 
There are two hawker centers in Serrangoon Gardens, so please look for the one nicknamed Chomp Chomp. I don't know how the name came about. Unfortunately, the only way I know how to get there is by taxi or by car. It is also really busy on weekends. So try to go on a weekday or get there really early. I like the oyster omelet, the wan-tan noodles (made from spinach flour), the soy bean curd (dessert).

Newton Hawker Center
A little overpriced because it is a tourist attraction. Still, one of the best places for BBQ chicken wings (Weng's wings stall #01-025) and beef noodles (sorry I cannot remember the stall number). It is next to the Newton Circus MRT station and it usually comes alive in the evening.

Mui Thiang Kee Eating House (Blk 34 Cassia Crescent)
I will always try to visit this coffee shop once when I am back. They have the best Zhi Char ever. The concept of Zhi Char is like a restaurant but in a coffee shop. It is very tasty and you can have anything from one dish meals to a full family dinner. But this one in particular has a long list of dishes which I like. Remember to order the Marmite pork ribs, yam basket, calamari and sambal kang kong. They only operate at night, 7 days a week. Remember to reserve in advance.

That's all for now. Off to cook dinner.
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