Tag Archives: food

Celebrations and Commitments

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Yesterday the Brunei-Bath Society (BruBath) held the 28th National Day Celebration in one of the rooms on campus. The event started with the singing of the national anthem, the recital of the doa, and the President’s speech.

And then we all started eating, singing songs, and playing games. Betcha thought I was going to say something serious, no? :p Well I’ve been busy. Really really busy. I have committed myself to BAMSA Night (where I will sing, act and dance!), a web project as well as my coursework from various university modules.

I’ve also been cooking various dishes, all of which are an adaptation of known recipes because I simply do not have all the ingredients needed. Nonetheless everything I’ve cooked has been palatable and I really love what I eat. The word to describe it is… perfect attempt :D Considering how ‘broke’ I am, I still have a full food cupboard and still can afford to eat good food means that I’m doing well, right? Can’t wait for March when my allowance is out! ;_;

And since I’m busy, I can’t properly take time to pen down my thoughts and experiences during my trip to Morocco until a later date. For now, I hope this picture is enough.

This has been a pic-spam post. I will try to be more word-vomity next time.

Chicken Congee Recipe

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Congee keeps you full despite being mainly water based. As you can see from the recipe, only 1 cup of rice is used. 1 cup of rice is 2 meals, but by making it into congee, it’s for up to 5 meals. The taste is far better than rice, and if you’re a student like me, you buy Sainsbury’s basics Long Grain rice, which tastes absolutely horrible on its own. I usually add chicken stock to add flavour to it, but this is another alternative way of cooking rice.

It saves you both time and money. After cooking the congee, if you have extras, just pop it in the fridge and consume it within 4 days. Just heat the amount you need for your meal and you’re done!

During my trip to Singapore, I was on a plain congee diet because I could not eat proteins (I had a horrible case of urticaria). I roughly know what tastes are in the porridge, and this recipe is based on my experiments. It serves about 5 people, feel free to try it.

Ingredients

  • 1 (rice cooker) cup uncooked long grain rice
  • 400g Chicken Breast, cut into slices
  • Ginger, cut finely into strips
  • 4 cups water
  • 1 Scallion, chopped
  • 1 tablespoon pre-fried Shallots
  • 1 teaspoon pre-fried garlic
  • ½ Salt
  • 1 ½ teaspoon Light Soya Sauce
  • ½ teaspoon Dark Soya Sauce
  • 1 teaspoon Ground White Pepper
  • 2 tablespoons Shaoxing wine (optional)

Method

  1. Add the chicken breast, 2 cups of water and ginger and bring to boil.
  2. Once the chicken is cooked, add in the rice and remaining water.
  3. Turn to low heat to simmer for about 30 minutes with the lid on (or longer, depending on how watery you’d like it to be).
  4. Add the garlic, light and dark soya sauce, pepper and salt.
  5. Simmer for another 30 minutes.
  6. Stir in sesame oil( and shaoxing wine).
  7. Garnish with scallion and shallots and serve.

Oh and this is the most optional step. If you want to add an egg, do that before step 5. Don’t beat or stir it, just leave it to boil.

Enjoy your congee :D

Day 3: Singaporean Hospitality

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Or that’s what Cherlynn said. Oh, and I finally know how to pronounce her name accurately!

In the morning we got up early for our complimentary breakfast at Achi before heading off to Chinatown for some shopping. We had already scheduled to meet my nephew who was going to cook some western food for the three of us. We got lost along the way, but when we finally reached Duxton, the food and the view was amazing.

I’ve been blogging since around 2003 and to be fair, that’s a pretty long time. I’ve gone on and off the blogging scene so frequently as well, changing domains along the way. At the same time, I met so many people online but never in my mind would I ever imagine that I could meet anyone offline (aside from a particular friend, who I met offline briefly before meeting online.) Here I am, a nearly 20 year old with a mind of her own, a bit of wanderlust, and meeting up with people I’ve contacted online since way back then.

Before my trip to Singapore, I had contacted Brenda, Cherlynn, Dayna and Terry and informed them that I was going to Singapore. We agreed on Sunday at Chinatown’s MRT Station. On my part, me getting to Chinatown’s MRT was an epic fail. I walked to Outram park station from Duxton, got to the right MRT line area and thought I was already at Chinatown even without going on the tube. Ah well, I thought that the 200m distance on the signboard meant that. When I finally realized it, I had already contacted Brenda to ask which exit they were at since Chinatown was huge, but yeah. Whoops.

At Chinatown’s MRT station, I looked around for the trio. While they were busy discussing on how to recognise me, I just happened to appear and casually said “Hi!” or at least tried to, since I was slightly trembling because this was my very first time meeting people I’ve known for so long and yet never met face-to-face. We headed off to YumCha in Chinatown and tasted the most delicious egg tarts ever!

After a very filling meal we then moved on to the Singapore Flyer hoping to do some shopping on the flea market but the place was just… sad. There was a few cute things, but they were not worth buying despite offering the cutest bandage post-it’s and Angry Birds sticky notes but sadly I don’t even use them. The last few things that I bought an told myself to use has, to this date, still remain untouched. Disappointed, we went down to get drinks at Each-a-cup, which coincidentally has a branch in Brunei and sells the best Premium Ice-Blended Red Bean I’ve tasted. Pity they didn’t have big pearls though!

Walking along the Kallang River was lovely.  The weather was just nice and so we were leisurely walking and taking a lot of photos at the same time. Terry had to leave early so while we waited for Cherlynn‘s arrival, we had some ridiculously random poses. And when she did arrive, we took more pictures again. (What to do, we’re all photogenic and we have an amazing photographer, Brenda!)

We walked across the Helix Bridge to get to Marina Bay Sands (where I watched Lion King on Saturday, which is amazing since it was filled with local puns and whatnot). We had our dinner at Kraze Burgers. The meal was not bad, but it tasted slightly bland. To be fair, I wouldn’t go there again because I felt that the meal was not worth paying such a high price for, unless you’re counting it in pounds.

We did ourselves a flavour and bought some ice-cream at Cold Rock. I’m a huge fan of cookie dough and the one we had with the waffle was so delicious! The strawberry was great too, despite my keen dislike for berries, this one actually passed the test! Definitely going to go there again with my family. It’s still cheaper than Haagen Dazs (which, charged me 10% for service charge, and then another 6% for GST.)

All in all I had such a wonderful day and haven’t laughed this hard in ages. We must never stop believing that we will always get the chance to meet each other to say, “Halo!” because the walls we built are tumbling down! I can’t wait for another SG bloggers meetup in December! Oh and all the lovely photographs displayed in this post is by Brenda, who, if you’re friends with on Facebook, will be able to see a lot more crazier things going on :)

On a slightly unhappy note, I was very very angry at the horrid taxi drivers one one night. They refused to pick up passengers who were not going to the direction of their homes. Like, come on, there are families with kids and the elderly and what you expect them to do, walk this late at night for such a far distance? If t was one or two drivers I’d be fine with it, but 4 that passed along and refused to carry passengers? Wtf. Singapore has an amazing transport system, but these hired services really disappointed me. It’s your job anyways. You totally ruined my image of Singaporean Hospitality, even though Brenda, Cherlynn, Dayna and Terry gave me the best Singapore experience and hospitality I’ve ever had!

I’ll post more about my Singapore trip and my hauls at a later date! Stay tuned :)