Lo Hei at Ah Yat Abalone

Yusheng

Sharks' fins




Fried Prawns

Fried fish fillet in corn sauce

Abalone - whole

Stir-fried chicken

Fried Noodles

Almond paste

Let pictures speak for themselves. I have decided to let you salivate over the sumptuous lunch that I have had with my DnD colleagues.

Phooof - End of CNY

Despite having an extended public holiday for Lunar New Year this time, I was still stunned by how time flew past. Before we knew it, it was already end of CNY.

This year, we celebrated end of CNY, ie Chinese Valentine's at Crystal Jade. My mother wanted a good meal to end of the festivities with a bang. We decided on Crystal Jade because I told my mother that my colleagues felt that the yusheng at Crystal Jade was better than Din Tai Fung.

We had not eaten so much for a long time. In the end, we could not finish the food and had to pack home some of the items. I guessed we were too ambitious when we ordered the food especially when we were fully aware that one's appetite would diminish in the hot weather.

It was still heartwarming to celebrate the end of new year with your closest.

Cupcakes from Colleague

My colleague made cup cakes for us in celebration of the Christmas. She was always an expert in baking. Her cup cakes, in the eyes of novice like me, were certainly on par with the professional.

As the cupcakes were home-made, my colleague has put in less sugar than those sold outside. it was heavenly. I felt guilty chomping down such a pretty cake.

Hmm, I should ask her for the recipe. She certainly inspired me to bake...

Pu Tien

Pu Tien is one of the up-and-coming restaurants in Singapore offering Heng Hua cuisines. Heng Hua dialect is one of the less common dialects in Singapore. Similarly, its cuisine is also less well-known, unlike the Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese food.

Maybe I am too used to Teochew and Cantonese cuisines, Heng Hua cuisine may be more of an acquired taste. The aloe vera soup may be refreshing but being more used to the clear watery soup, the starchy version takes a while to get used to. The steamed sliced pork was slightly more salty for my liking. The home-made toufu was my favourite. The stir-fried bee hoon was its specialty. Perhaps I had too high an expectation and was slightly disappointed when I could not detect any specialty of the bee hoon.

Anyway, as with all food, sometimes the most important is not the food itself but the company. If you have the food with some of your closest friends, then the food only plays a secondary role.

Back at Sticky Rice Again

If you ask for me for recommendations on value-for-money Thai food, I would definitely suggest Sticky Rice at Ang Mo Kio Hub. The promotion is more attractive for weekday lunches as well as for Citibank's credit card holders.

There is also a wide selection of dishes from meat, vegetables, seafood to even soups. When eating Thai food, how can we miss some of the signature dishes such as tom yam soup, pandan chicken and thai prawn cakes.

The dishes are not served in large portions. For those who craved to try many dishes at one go, the smaller portions mean that you can have room in your stomach for many dishes. If you always avoided Thai food for its spiciness, then the dishes at Sticky Rice will suit you better. For someone who often choke on Tom Yam soup elsewhere due to its spiciness, Sticky Rice is the only Thai restaurant in Singapore where I can drink at least a bowl of Tom Yam soup without gulping a glass full of water. It also has a variety of non-spicy dishes for those who do not take spicy food at all, such as stir fried kai lan, prawn cakes, fish cakes, honey drumlets etc. Its food has rich flavours without being too overpowering.

The cosy environment will also remind you of home and makes you feel at ease dining with close friends and family.

If you recently run out of options for a weekend meal, I will certainly recommend Sticky Rice at Ang mo Kio Hub.

Avatar Burger

The Avatar Burger is a new burger introduced by McDonald's in conjunction with the new movie. The Avatar burger consisted of two pieces of sesamed sandwich and succulent pieces of chicken tigh meat. The patty is grilled with teriyaki sauce and reminds me somewhat of the smaller version offered at Mos Burger. Compared to its deep-fried counterpart, the grilled version is slightly healthier, or so I try to deceive myself. The burger is quite substantial for a not-too-big eater like me, but the delicious taste will lure you to eat more than your usual portion.

Shokudo Pasta

I did not particularly like Shokudo Pasta the last time I visited. Of all the fusion food, I think I have only prefer Chinese-Western fusion. Italian-Japanese fusion is not exactly my cup of tea.

Nevertheless, I still decide to give it a try.

When it is first served, the display of the food looks good. However, the creamy pasta is too rich for my liking. The meat balls had too much spices added for my liking. I am not someone who is big on spices. As the taste is too rich, I feel full soon even before I finish the pasta.

More Abalone Dishes At Ah Yat

Ah Yat has offered more promotional abalone dishes. As we still have $5 vouchers from our last visit, we decide to utilise them before they expire.

The promotion for second serving of abalone rice dish at $5 has been expanded to include new abalone rice dishes. Of course, we have to try them. Yum yum!

The $5 vouchers can only be used on ala carte dishes at regular price. We order a soup and some fish cakes.

Overall, we are still very satisfied with the meal.

Shokudo Bazaar

There is a promotion at Shokudo Bazaar which offered a few Japanese sets at $4.80 each. It was certainly value-for-money. How could we miss it especially when it was only a short walk away at Heeren.

Shokudo Bazaar was a Japanese Marche where one would be offered a card which served as your tab. When you order food, the price of the food would be recorded on the tab. Then after you finished your meal, you could just pay for the value store on your card. It provided a temporary cashless convenience.

With ongoing promotion and lunch-time peak, the place was surprisingly empty. After we ordered our food and started eating, crowd started to fill in, but it was still considered empty. Personally, I thought my udon was ok, but my colleagues who were used to more high class cuisines especially when two of them had just came back from Hokkaido, felt that the food was not authentic enough. Despite the relatively cheap price, my colleagues did not sound keen to come back again.

Udders Ice-cream

After celebrating Tytus' birthday, the single girls decided that the night was still young, so we adjourned to another place to continue our girls' talk. We decided to avoid crowd and settle on an obscure corner of Novena. The best snack to go with chit chat, updates of our latest development and planning for the next outing would be ice-cream.

Udders ice-cream offered various more exotic flavours such as sour sop, durian, chempelek etc. if you prefer the more conventional flavours, green tea, mango, strawberry and chocolate would be for you. If you wished for stronger flavour, you could try their rum and raisin which had a very strong rum taste which could be slightly bitter and alcoholic for the faint hearted.

Despite it not facing the main road at Goldhill Plaza, it was still packed with people. The patrons ranged from youngsters to yuppies to even families. I never knew ice-cream outlet was such a popular hangout by Singaporeans. With its relatively more affordable price than the more upmarket Swensen's and Haagen Daz, its single scoop was at $3.20. Moreover, the friendly and young crew also made the place rather cosy and welcoming.

If you wish to have a diferent place for your next gathering or date, perhaps you could try this ice-cream outlet instead.

Pizza Hut

I have heard about the Pizza Hut pasta for a long time with its rather aggressive marketing strategy on pasta tasting and guessing. It was hard not to take notice of the new item on Pizza Hut's menu. With a free pizza that my mum got from her insurance company, it was the perfect opportunity to try the pasta.

We were slightly overwhelmed by the Pizza Hut menu. I have not walked into any Pizza Hut restaurant for ages and was pleasantly surprised by the choices from starters to main course that it offered now. Not only was its pizza selection plentiful, its pasta and baked rice also catered to vegetarian, meat and seafood.

Finally, we decided on curry rice and pizza. The pizza was as good as before. It certainly stirred up nostalgia with its familiar aroma and cheezy flavour. The curry rice was pretty spicy. However, the taste was not as rich as the baked rice of Swensen's. Personally, I preferred the baked rice of Swensen's.

It was still a good meal but perhaps I have grown up of Pizza Hut and taste has changed. Despite its wide selection, its taste seems not to have left such as last impression as before.

Casuarina Curry

It was meant to be a belated birthday celebration for one of my colleagues. We decided to have some Indian food for a change. I never expected the Indian restaurant - well-known for its prata at its main branch along Upper Thomson, to be so crowded.

We ordered diffferent things. Masala Murtabak was a popular choice among us. We then ordered curry to share. The food was surprisingly quite big portion or perhaps the taste was too rich for us to consume too much. In the end, we could not finish the food and had to pack.

Indian food was quite a refreshing change from the normal Chinese, Japanese or Western cuisines. I never expected to enjoy the food so much given that I normally did not take food with to much spices. I would certainly come back for other Indian food in future as it was at a much more convenient location than the main branch at Upper Thomson.

Bakerzin 1-for-1

I have seen the promotion for Bakerzin 1-for-1 lunch main course promotion for some time but it was difficult finding time to go. Come on, few will be able to afford lunch at North Point or Jurong Point on weekday lunch unless you are on leave. Needless to say, the reason I am able to savour such great offers is because I am coincidentally on leave.

Initially, I thought the 1-for-1 promotion applied only to the 3 sets that were shown on their promotion board. Only when we set down did we know that it applied to a whole list of sandwich, rice and pasta main courses. With so many to choose from, we were slightly overwhelmed. It took us about 10 minutes to decide what to eat.

We were pleasantly surprised when we were told that we were also entitled to free flow of bread at their bread counter. We were slightly apprehensive about the size of the main course, so we decided to just have a piece of bread each to try before the main course was served. There was a few types of bread to choose from, including plain baguette, raisins and nuts.

When the main course was served, we were awed by the size of the servings. It was not puny like other restaurants when there was any promotion. In fact, we felt so stuffed after we wiped off our plates that we had to abandon our original plans after-meal for desserts and coffee. The curry rice consisted of a whole chicken tigh and part of the wing. The prawns on the pasta were fresh and succulent. The aglio olio was quite spicy though.

If I ever can spare the time again, I will certainly be back for more.

Mayim Chinese Restaurant

It is a new Chinese restaurant in Northpoint. There are queues outside the restaurant often. My typical Singaporean's mentality kicks in at this point: if there are queues, it must be good. There are so many choices in Singapore, so few will bother wasting time if the wait is not worth the while.

When I saw the menu, it did look promising with its myriad selection from staples to snacks. Feeling somewhat full, we decided to have a variety of snacks and 2 staples to share among the 3 of us.

(Shanghai fried noodles which was slightly sweet with its dark soy sauce)

(Very spicy vegetable and meat dumpling - if you have low tolerance for spicy food, take these with caution)

(The roast dick noodles was my favourite)

(The xiao long bao was considerately placed in small aluminium bowls for more convenient consumption)

My conclusion? The food is value-for-money because they are considerably cheaper than the more commonly known Imperial Treasure or Crystal Jade. However, perhaps my palate has gotten too used to these restaurants that I personally still preferred Crystal Jade or Imperial Treasure.

Snacks at Ion Orchard

Now is the lull period of our work cycle for the whole year so we can afford to take a slightly longer lunch than usual. We decided to go and eat the snacks at Ion Orchard.

We had suckling pig (a portion) and takopachi (grilled octopus balls). The suckling pig was so-so. The grilled octopus balls were fantastic. After tasting it, I wondered how I have managed to live with the ones at Taka basement for so many years. Among the 3 of us, we finished about 16 octopus balls.

I was surprised that on a week day afternoon, Ion Orchard B4 could be so crowded.

Bakerzin Cheesecake

I am not a fan of cheesecake. Maybe I am just weird. I am not your typical girl-next-door who simply swoons over chocolates and cheesecakes. Among the so many desserts, chocolates is possibly something that I hate most. I am always ready to swap any chocolate gift. Unfortunately, I have received so many chocolates which still stay in my fridge.

Given a choice of cheesecakes, fruit cakes and chocolate cakes, I will certainly opt for fruit cakes. Boring? Yes, but it beats the other 2.

Maybe cheesecakes are acquired taste. The more you have, the better it tastes. Or I have not tasted declicious cheesecakes before. Gradually, this dislike lessens. Now, I may not be a huge fan of cheesecakes, but I will eat cheesecakes, especially the more renowned one.

Bakerzin is having promotion for its blueberry cheesecake. Now, this is also one of the more tasty cheesecakes. The cheese is creamy but not too rich. The blueberry is sweet but without overempowering the cheese taste. The crust at the bottom is flaky despite my consuming the cake only 1 day after purchase.

Hurry up if you wish to try the cake. The promotion ends end Oct.

Spagghetti - Ma Ma Mia!

For many novice cooks, the Italian pasta is often one of the first culinary experiments that we endeavour. With many of the ingredients that we can buy off-the-racks of our supermarkets, we need not fret as much as some other more complicated dishes that we do not even know the procedures or the ingredients that the recipes were dictating.

Making edible pasta may not be as difficult but making world-class standard pasta will be a different mountain to climb. Don't all chefs always proclaim that the easier the dish, the more difficult it is to make it good? Hence, there is even a show revolving one of the easiest dish - Ratatouille?

After attending a talk in her company, my sister was dying to lay her hands on some pasta to cook us some pasta. Off we went to the supermarket on a Sunday morning to get the freshest ingredients. For the pasta, we decided upon Angela's hair (I was surprised to find that my favourite Macaroni was known as Elbows in Italian pasta). For the sauce, we were getting Prego's tomato sauce. White cream sauce was often too rich for our liking. We decided on a seafood pasta with prawns, squids and mussels.

Well, good work for her first atempt.

The pasta was chewy without being tough. The seafood was delicious. The only area of improvement perhaps lied in the sauce. There was too much and too sweet for my liking.

Hmm, maybe I should try it the next time round.

Abalone Feast

I heard raving reviews from some colleagues about the value-for-money abalone feast which is just across at Orchard Central. The more I heard, the more I was looking forward to eating my abalone feast. A few of use decided to check out this new eatery.

We were expecting queues for its promotional offer. We were pleasantly surprised that it was not as crowded as we thought. Perhaps it was still relatively new and few had heard about its current offer.

Of course, we had to go for the $5 offer for the second order of abalone fried rice. Initially, we were concerned if 4 servings of abalone fried rice were enough to feed 5 starving girls, especially when one of them would be eating for 2 people. We decided to add a plate of vegetables to balance our nutrients.

The abalone fried rice was certainly more than enough to go by. In fact, we were feeling so full after the meal that we were worried that we could not stay awake for the remaining afternoon (lucky, there was no meeting scheduled). We were pretty satisfied with the meal and hoped to come back for more.

10-cent Bread

My lunch for the past few days were made up of nothing but 10-cent bread. I was not exactly scrimping and saving in particular, though I could always welcome more money. I was eating the bread purely out of cheap thrill. Do not worry, I was not torturing myself with any plain buns. In fact, I was feeding myself with high-class bread from one of Singapore's most well-known confectionery - Breadtalk.

From teriyaki chicken, cranberry and cheese to strawberry pickaboo, I was basically having a bread party. All those years of wondering the taste of these exotic bread were gone. With each bun going at 10-cent, I could afford to be adventurous. After all, if I disliked any of these exotic flavours which were less tried-and-tested, the opportunity cost was only 10-cent.

The 10-cent promotion was offered to loyal SingTel customers. A SMS was sent to these customers. They only had to flash this SMS at any Breadtalk outlets, they would be able to enjoy each bun at 10-cent. Each person was entitled to 2 buns per day. How could I let such a good chance slip? Of course I had to have my fill of Breadtalk buns.

Hence, for the last 3 days, I ate 2 buns each for both breakfast and lunch. There were some that were nicer than they looked. Some of the nicer looking buns were not quite my cup of tea. Ahh, I hope there is more of such promotions.

Quiznos

My colleagues and I have always dubbed this "Subway-lookalike". Given the recent popularity of Subway, I am sure many are acquainted with Subway and its sandwich offerings, especially with its mission of providing the fresh ingredients in its sandwich. Moreover, with the ability to customise your sandwich with your choice of bread, sides and sauce, it has been a hit among the yuppies and students.

Now, Quiznos can give Subway a run of its money with its flagship store at Orchard Central.

It has less customisation than Subway. Other than its bread, the rest of the ingredients come in sets and cannot be mix-and-match. Oh, don't we all love mix-and-match where we can impose our creativity on our sandwich? It is also part of the fun. Hence, the lack of customisation causes the sandwich to be perceived more of a commodity.

Notwithstanding this, the sandwich is still delicious. Perhaps the lack of customisation is a good tactic because being amateur means that we often ending mixing weird concoctions that ay be detrimental to our taste buds instead. Also, sometimes it is better to trust the expert. Having less choice may be the best choice.