Food Fest

Mon - MOS @ Bedok Point, Junfa's Dinner
Tues - Bumbu @ Muscat St (Bugis)
Wed - Nana's Green Tea @ PS
Today - Potential failed attempt at making English Muffins
Tomorrow - unconfirmed Hoshino Coffee @ PS

Also, I have lost 2kg unknowingly!

Today's muffin-making process reminded me that one step taken wrongly and we will spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to correct that step (all-too-familiar feeling). I put too much milk and now the dough consistency is wrong and I can't knead it properly :( Now I have to wait one hour for it to rise and hope for the best.

~

Junfa cooked Platoon 2-minus a Christmas dinner of beef and vegetarian spaghetti, served alongside ham with applesauce, and a delectable pumpkin soup. I was intrigued by the pumpkin soup and got the recipe from Junfa, but to me I might just use it as a dessert. Junfa asked how the meal might be improved and I told him everything was about fine. Thinking back, I might suggest we heat up the ham to get the oil onto the surface of the ham, serve it hot, and perhaps boil the applesauce to get a thicker consistency.

Bumbu was a surprise to me. Tucked away in Muscat St (near Sultan Mosque) among dozens other food shops and amazingly uncrowded on Christmas Day, the ?Thai/Malay?-styled restaurant sets you approximately $20 back for an adult and in return you get unlimited orders of

- seafood egg salad (mainly prawns)
- tauhu telur (tofu with egg)
- cold tofu appetiser (sliced soft tofu with diced century eggs)
- stir-fried black pepper beef
- sweet and sour chicken
- steam fish
- kangkong

and others (which we didn't order) including
- red/yellow/green curry

I don't like (and am glad to be mildly intolerant of) prawns but the egg was done nicely. The dish barely made one round around the table before all the egg base was gone. Tauhu telur has a rojak-like gravy and the stir-fried tofu was crispy on the outside, soft on the inside. The other tofu dish tasted better than upmarket varieties from Chinese restaurants such as Paradise, without the fermented odour that lingers on the latter.

The beef was nothing to shout about, but the pepper wasn't overpowering and the meat wasn't overdone. Sweet and sour chicken has more skin than chicken but the crispy skin soothes the palate without being too jelat. Steam fish...may want to skip. Kangkong is just kangkong.

Afterwards YL and me decided to be slightly more adventurous and ordered a durian sticky rice, and a pumpkin custard. These were the two desserts that should only be considered, if at all. :P

Nana's Green Tea specialises in supposedly premium green tea. I'm not a tea connoisseur but it's definitely not the sweet off-the-shelf kind (Pokka, Yeo's etc). I chose a hot matcha latte (hot/cold) without all the bells and whistles (cream, chocolate syrup, parfait) to see what it was all about. Had a Locomoko Don - beef patty with rice, cherry tomatoes and broccoli - to go along. Mr Wong wasn't hungry and selected a parfait for dessert. In a perhaps unnecessary flaunt of technology and resources by Nana's, our orders were taken down with an iPad mini by our server; however, with the kitchen being separated from the sitting area, I presume that the iPad was used to send customers' orders directly to the kitchen without too much movement between the two locations.

The food came fast, with the matcha latte in all its frothy goodness, accompanied by a small sachet of sugar. My first sip was centred on the surprising bitter aftertaste, after which I quickly emptied the sachet into the mug. The milk in the latte lent the tea a softer edge, and it flowed easily past the first cluster of tastebuds, giving off a delicate sweetness. Past my second line of defence, the aroma of the tea emerges, and when I swallowed, the slight bitterness followed. Pretty decent. I might give the parfait a try next time.

~

My dough is currently in the second stage of rising. Just another half an hour more.

:)