Singapore Food Festival Chez Moi

Tomorrow will be the 3-month mark since I've been here in London. How time flies. I think I can say that I'm more or less settled down here although I definitely haven't gone to a lot of the places I want to yet. This coming month will be quite manic for me in terms of work so I apologise in advance if blogging will be sporadic and short.

Here are some pics from my camera that I haven't put up yet. Just some food and flowers at home - made some soy saunce chicken and sting ray the other day yum yum! And the uglily frosted cake is my first attempt at frosting. Can't take full credit for the baking though as I had a friend over from Singapore who did most of it. We made like 2 chocolate cakes (actually 3 since I turned one big one into 2 smaller ones) and it was really fun! Those who want to have an even better version and properly frosted one, go to Truffs at Telok Ayer St and you can buy one for yourself along with handmade chocolate truffles! (Ok end of plug)

I think I twittered or blogged about how I miss doing flowers and so I bought some flowers on my way home from work and created the following arrangements. The combinations weren't really what I envisioned when I bought them but I think these work better.

Last night, I had people over to my place for dinner. I ambitiously tried to cook for 12 and the menu for the night was Singaporean local food. Without the help of my capable sous chef Eugene, I think I wouldn't have made it, so thank you! I didn't manage to take pictures of everything since I was busy cooking and trying to make sure there was enough crockery and cutlery for everyone.

The menu included Rojak, Chwee Kueh, Bak Kut Teh, Chicken Rice, Kai Lan, Char Kuay Teow, Chai Tow Kueh, Laksa, Stingray and Pulut Hitam. Very ambitious and I think Eugene thought I was nuts trying to attempt to cook so many dishes. Well we made it in the end though slightly late as I was still cooking when guests came. I made the chwee kueh and chai tow kueh 'kuehs' the night before and we started cooking all the rest of the stuff at about 4pm (aiming for a 7pm dinner service).

The chicken rice ran into quite a few hiccups as I discovered at 4pm that I did not have any Prima chicken rice packs that I had intended to use. For some strange reason, I thought I had 3-4 when I had only bought 1 and I had used it up (I blogged about it a while back). Luckily I had the small chicken rice mixes for the rice. Then at about 6pm when I wanted to cook the rice, I realised that I had only enough rice for barely 3 cups. Brilliant. I had all sorts of other rice - japanese, risotto, white glutinous and black glutinous but NO thai white rice. The capable sous chef ran down to the corner shop and got some normal long grain rice (that looked yellow) but heck, we mixed it in. When the rice was cooked and I opened up the pot, it was swimming in liquid still. I cooked 5 cups of rice (albeit mixed) and added liquid up to the mark for 5 cups and till now I still dunno what went wrong. By now I was a little freaking out as people had started to come and I had chicken rice porridge. We scooped out the excess liquid and tried to cook the rice some more. Luckily it managed to dry out somewhat and was edible, albeit a little salty.

I think Singapore food needs to be eaten hot and probably in small portions. The chai tow kueh and char kuay teow especially. They were really good as I was cooking them (I snuck in some tastings) but by the time people were eating them they were more or less cold. Another case in point is the laksa I'm eating for lunch right now. It wasn't as shiok eating it last night as it is now after I have just nuked it and made it all hot and warm again.

Anyway, suffice to say that I have tons and tons of food leftover because I probably cooked for 20 instead of 12 and my fridge is piled up with tupperwares of leftover food. I really have NO idea how I'm going to eat it all before it goes to waste. Next time, I'll know just to cook a little less, just a tad less.