Sometimes all you need for a good meal is a plain cabbage salad in a chilled bowl followed by an incredibly light, flaky and juicy tonkatsu donburi.
Saboten is a chain of tonkatsu restaurants from Tokyo. That’s pretty much all they serve here in Singapore, and they do it incredibly well at a reasonable price. I never thought much of breaded pork before. Consider me a convert.
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Saboten
9 Raffles Boulevard, #P3-01, (Parco Marina Bay)
+65 6333-3432
This was an oddity of a restaurant that G and I both enjoyed in Ubud. While the food was a wonderful mix of local and French at a price perfect for the budget conscious, there were however a few quirks and not-so-good dishes that could be improved to make it the fine dining establishment that it strives to be. Then again, sometimes a restaurant is that much more memorable because of what the chef tries to accomplish in a bold but imperfect manner.
Tropical Bale is better suited for a lazy afternoon idling over tea while enjoying the view of the rice paddies in back. When we went at night however, the dim lighting coupled with the cavernous parlor created an almost spooky atmosphere made worse with a barely lit open kitchen bathed in harsh fluorescent. Once seated however, the friendly staff and surrounding decorations conveyed a much warmer greeting. The nostalgia pictures hanging on the wall implied a story of a local chef that may have once visited and possibly learned to cook in France, but we’ll never know since he was on vacation that week, leaving his very capable and young assistant in charge. Continue reading
It’s not everyday that I come back home to a new kitchen gadget to try out: a shiny pressure cooker. Silit is apparently a well-known brand in Germany for cookware that likes to combine fashion with practicality. This particular model comes with a glossy outer coating and non-stick interior. The lid and handle slide nicely into place but leave just enough wiggle room to allow sufficient venting of steam. This was my first time using a pressure cooker, and I was surprised by how other than the constant hiss of steam, the rest of the pot was remarkably still. It might also be due to the fact that it is incredibly heavy, like cast iron heavy.
To try out the Silit, I made an HK-style beef soup with 牛腩, a cut of beef that benefits from a long braise, at least a few hours. With the pressure cooker on the highest setting, the meat was tender in about 25 minutes. The Silit holds heat remarkably well. Once the desired pressure is achieved, it only takes the minimal of heat to maintain cooking conditions. Clean-up was a cinch, non-stick surface and lego-like lid components. Given our penchant for stews and soups, it’s a wonder that G and I ever got along back in SF without a pressure cooker. This fella is now on my must-have kitchenware shortlist.
Five very short days later and we’re back from our babymoon (part deux). While G and I didn’t get a chance to lounge around as much as originally planned, we did end up touring some great cultural sites, learn a bit of Balinese cooking and even try the local moonshine (just me of course). We much preferred Ubud where there’s still a healthy mix of locals interspersed with the flourishing tourism industry. The food there is also more varied, including a surprisingly decent fusion restaurant (no, not Mozaic). Seminyak on the other hand was much more touristy and suited for the beach-going crowd.
Will follow-up with some posts on where we stayed/saw/ate after I catch up on work … in the meantime, photos from Bali are posted here.
This past weekend was a festive chaos of cooking gone wild, family dinner night, an aborted attempt to relive my youth, friends’ baby birthday, and the Lion King. In no particular order, I learned that:
So after a hectic month and a weekend chock full of activities, G and I are off to Bali for babymoon, part deux. Since we both have excess vacation days and we’ll likely not have any time to ourselves in the foreseeable future, now’s the time for a quick getaway to veg on sandy beaches that weren’t man made. See you all in a week!
I booked a table for Wild Rocket during Restaurant Week since I had never eaten there before and had always wondered about this dining mainstay started by a once hobbyist cook. So for $35 a person, I indulged my curiosity and dragged along G and our buddy T. Wild Rocket bills its cuisine as Modern Singaporean, or “Mod Sin”, and our meal could indeed be described up as Western fare with refined SE Asian flavors.
Ankle-less feet at week 25
During our gynae visit on Friday, the doc expressed concern over my seriously swollen feet. I’d thought it was a common condition in an earlier post and have been told that having swollen feet means that there is enough water for the baby to swim in. However, apparently it is just not normal to have such swollen feet this early in the pregnancy so the doc prescribed me some daflon.
The doc also chided me for wearing shoes that allowed my feet to expand further when I had purposely bought the softest and widest pair of Crocs I could find. It just seemed counter-intuitive to keep my feet in a covered-up shoe but the doc said not only should I switch to sneakers, I should also wear socks to help increase compression! Fortunately, I hadn’t gone out to buy a pair of the soft+wide Crocs in a few different colors just yet.
We had our monthly pregnancy checkup on Friday, and G had an urge to see Junior’s face. In addition to a standard ultrasound, more doctors are now able to perform a “4D” ultrasound scan (not to be confused with the other popular “4D” in Singapore). In a nutshell, a 4D scan is a moving 3D image (or err video) of your baby. The same types of sound waves are used, but rather than bouncing the waves directly, they are angled to produce a 3D composite view.
So even at just 25 weeks old, we can see what (and whom) our son looks like. His nose and forehead definitely take after G (and confirms that it is indeed her child). And the other “trait” that runs strong in this family is a shyness to photo taking. The brief glimpse of Junior’s face was the result of some prodding (and poking) by our baby doc to get him to move his arms away from his face. It really was as if he was trying his best to avoid getting his picture taken (just like mum and dad). Hopefully, photo-averseness is just temporary, and like our chins will be two traits that won’t run in the family.
Posted on Lettur.com is this fine example of engineering and cooking making the usual geek circles (excerpt):
Chocolate Chip Cookies…
7. Two calcium carbonate-encapsulated avian albumen-coated protein
8. 473.2 cm3 theobroma cacao
9. 236.6 cm3 de-encapsulated legume meats (sieve size #10)
To a 2-L jacketed round reactor vessel (reactor #1) with an overall heat transfer coefficient of about 100 Btu/F-ft2-hr, add ingredients one, two and three with constant agitation. In a second 2-L reactor vessel with a radial flow impeller operating at 100 rpm, add ingredients four, five, six, and seven until the mixture is homogenous….
I’m sure this is meant to be humorous, otherwise why else list ingredients using ambiguous volume-based measurements instead of by compound weight (compensated for humidity) or molarity, or heaven forbid mix units of measurement (Kelvin and Celsius, really?). Seriously though, reading this put a smile on my face and brought me back to my ChemE days (yes our textbooks were written like this). Thanks anonymous lettur writer!
For those who might wonder what cooking is like when described by engineers, I highly highly recommend this site: Cooking for Engineers
Restaurant Week is now over in Singapore, and for the budget-conscious it was a great opportunity to dine at new (and old) restaurants that might not have been on your must-eat lists. That said, a few of the participating restaurants are worth patronizing normally, and at $35/$55 per set menu during Restaurant Week they are an absolute steal. This explains why a number of places were fully booked a mere 8 hours after registration opened. Fortunately, I was still able to reserve a table at my top to-try for this year, BLU.
Modernist cuisine, or molecular gastronomy, is still a fairly novel field, so it’s always an adventure to try out a place daring enough to fuse laboratory experiments with cooking techniques. While most of us may never have the chance to eat at Fat Duck, Allinea, or El Bulli, at least there are a few restaurants in Singapore like Fifty-three, Novus, and BLU, that incorporate cutting edge techniques to add avant-garde twists to classic dishes. Continue reading