binglemumps

So excited today! Went to Kopitiam in Lafayette for dinner and it was soooooooooooo good. By far the best chicken rice I’ve had here! Germ and I had to create Yelp accounts so we could yelp about it. Then I got all mad cos I read a review that only gave it 2 stars because the chicken rice was decent but not worth paying $9 for. ARE YOU A MORON. If you don’t want to pay $9 for this what are you going to pay $9 for? Of course you’re going to have to pay a premium to eat Singaporean food halfway across the world. I have to pay $7-$8 for mediocre meals on a daily basis. Don’t you?? Can we put things in context here? Jeez. What a dumbass.

Also very excited cos I watched Chi Bi last night and I really liked it. I love this big army in cool formations with the war drums stuff. Step aside, LOTR and your stupid orc CG (no offence to LOTR fans – I haven’t read the books and am willing to believe that they were fantastic, but I didn’t think the movies were all that great). Plus Tony Leung stabbing people with a broken arrow and Jin Cheng Wu being intellectual (I think he has aged very well). Can’t wait to watch part 2!

I am so excited I think they might have put drugs in my teh bing.

Over the past few years of trips home, I accumulated a fair number of chilli sauce packets that kinda lay in the fridge because I stopped going to McDonald’s (I only use them on french fries). In recent months I started facing a bit of a crisis, because Amanda’s opened and suddenly there was semi-healthy fastfood and baked french fries that didn’t make me feel gross and that had to be enjoyed with chilli sauce. So this trip home I’ve been on a sort-of-mission to steal more chilli sauce from various fast food places. I say ’sort-of’ because I’m actually quite lousy at this.

**intermission as my mum comes and is incredulous that I spent $384 at the hair salon the other day**

Ok so I’m very lousy at acquiring said chilli sauce packets because some fast food restaurants have implemented the chilli sauce pumps, so I feel extra pai seh about getting packets when there’re obviously pumps there for me to use. Thankfully I have good friends with thicker skin than me. I have to give them special mention because I’m very useless and I would have got no chilli if not for them.

PY (6 packets from KFC) – She asked for chilli sauce, then I snuck the packets in my bag and went and got pump chilli which we actually ate with >.<

Ypyeo (3 packets from McDonald’s) – He gets extra credit because (a) we didn’t even order food there, we were just using their seats and (b) this is where I discovered that McD chilli sauce is manufactured by Sin Sin, which led to the purchase of a bottle of Sin Sin Garlic Chilli Sauce.

Jerold (6 packets from BK) – She only gave us like 4 at first and thanks to his prompting we ended up with 6 more!

So I am very grateful and happy that I have friends who will help me get chilli sauce.

When I got home I googled ‘mcdonald’s singapore chilli sauce’ to ascertain that my Sin Sin sauce is the right type and found this forum thread. I love how people feel so strongly about this. Towards the end it deteriorates into general fast food bashing, but there is an interesting string on page 3 that hugely pertains to my semi-crisis situation wrt depleting chilli sauce packets-

BrUtUs: total cmi lo… lucky i still got some packs of garlic chilli…
Fantagf: I still have the packet garlic chilli but I don’t know their expiry date leh.
BrUtUs: tink try not to keep more than 6mths ba….
Fantagf: like dat chum liao, mine more than 6 mths.
QX179R: better discard them immediately..
BrUtUs: unsafe but still can try… but if see water then throw liao… me opened 1yr old pack watery….

Chum liao is right!!! Pretty sure that in my desperation I ate packets that expired in 2006/7! And there DEFINITELY was one packet that was watery (I remember asking Germ/Davis whether it was ok!!) Shimatta!

Hopefully it’s all out of my system by now. =(

Was reading about Mshim’s NY trip, and realised that I never got around to talking about mine. It happened over a month ago so everything’s a little hazy, but I think I can still provide a tiny bit of insight.

Haru Sushi – Pretty fancy sushi restaurant, conveniently located off Times Square. We got the Sushi & Sashimi for Two. It came with pretty good variety and surprisingly, was not horribly expensive. Only thing is the whole place felt a bit too white for my liking, so I somehow felt like I was paying more just to be in a nice restaurant. Frankly do not remember how the food actually tasted, which I guess meant it wasn’t particularly mindblowing.

Bangkok House – The website is pretty elaborate for a cheap restaurant. We got the lunch special which comes with appetizer, main course and drink/dessert. Definitely a good deal, but I was very unimpressed with my duck curry. The duck was really stringy. I need to stop getting duck at Thai places because I always end up disappointed, and this was probably the most disappointing Thai duck I’ve had. TJ was pretty happy with whatever he got; unfortunately I can no longer remember what that was.

Kunjip – Waited in a long long line to get into this one, and it was ~9pm when we went. We got the BBQ combo and some beef thing (I forget the specifics). It was good and authentic, loved the side dishes and the soft tofu soup, but in terms of the barbecue I think I enjoyed Park’s BBQ in LA better (TJ also agreed that the BBQ wasn’t the best, so you have a reliable Korean opinion on this).  Regardless, I would highly recommend this place. Sorta pricey, but worth it!

Cafe Muse – Another Korean place, this one serving dessert. We had a huge Bingsoo with green tea ice cream (kind of like ice kachang but with slightly different stuff and a lot sweeter). Having never had Bingsoo anywhere else, I don’t know if this was any better or worse than your usual Korean dessert place, but I definitely enjoyed it. Plus I liked the decor a lot, I’d totally go there again just cos it felt like a nice happy place!

Was going to write about the musicals I saw too, but that’s going to have to wait. It’s 6.46pm on a Sunday and my last run just got done, so it’s probably time to get out of the office…

Today I picked up dinner on the way home from here. I’ve been here with my coworkers a number of times and they all love it. I think it’s pretty good but a bit overrated; the dishes always sound so impressive on paper but they somehow fall short of expectations. Thai Basil at the Asian Ghetto is comparable (even if it doesn’t have fancy sounding dishes like ‘Volcanic Beef’) and is half the price, so I only go to Osha when I’m not paying.

Tonight I got my usual pineapple fried rice (all the fried noodle dishes are a bit wet for my liking, the green curry fried rice is good too but a bit too spicy for my current recovering-from-cold state) and a cup of tom yum soup.  I usually get the tom yum with scallop, but today I tried the combination seafood, and I’m so impressed! There was a good amount of straw mushrooms (GOOD) and squid, and I was expecting just a couple of prawns, but there was actually crab in there. Like real crab. Complete with shell. And a mussell, also with shell intact. Admittedly I wouldn’t have minded if they’d used the shell space to put in more seafood, but it’s pretty cool opening the little plastic bowl and seeing an actual mussell shell in it. So impressed!

On a separate note, tomorrow is the last day in my cube after 2.75 or so years. Sniff.

On another separate note, how is David Archuleta so cute?!??! Can I pinch his cheeks too??

In the first of this Cooking With Bingles series, I will introduce this easy to cook and eatable for many days dish.

TJK Salad

So termed because this recipe is attributable to TJK (surprisingly). What I like about it is you get some warm meat with it, so it’s not like you’re eating cold and clammy grass stuff, plus the salad dressing is fairly healthy (I only use 4-5 teaspoons per meal).

1. Marinate fish or chicken. I haven’t been very adventurous so I’ve only used salmon and tilapia so far. Rubbing salt and coarse black pepper on it is usually enough taste, but sometimes I also add my McCormick garlic/onion mix thing. You can also bread the meat and deep fry it, though that makes the dish unhealthy x 9.
2. Cut veggies up (I like romaine lettuce).
3. Toast walnuts and sesame seeds in pan (separately!!)
4. Make salad dressing: I don’t really know what the proportions are here, I kinda dump it all in a bowl and hope that it tastes good. But roughly it’s something like – 4 Tbs soy sauce, 1 Tbs sesame oil, 1 Tbs fish sauce, dash of sugar, add toasted sesame seeds. I usually make enough for 3 meals (that’s how many heads of lettuce come in the Safeway pack).
5. Fry fish/chicken until brown. Usually stinks up the house. Poke with fork to make sure edible.
6. Put fish/chicken on veggies. Add toasted walnuts. Cranberries are a good topping too, and they make the dish look pretty. If you are so inclined you may also add a boiled egg (as pictured above). Finish with modest amount of dressing – don’t add too much because it’ll end up collecting at the bottom of the plate and your last layer of veggies will get too soaked in it.

Tada! Nutritious, quick AND yummy (most food only achieves one of the above!)

So good! I’ve been looking forward to breakfast every day now. I can’t believe it took me so long to discover this. Yay for Germ!

Dinner tonight is the chicken katsu + vegetable tempura bento box from Sushi Ko. Taking out bento boxes is always such a huge affair. First there’s the box that has the chicken, salad and california roll. Then the rice box, the soup container and the tempura box. AND three little containers for soy sauce, tempura sauce and katsu sauce. It always makes me feel like I’m having a ten course dinner, except that the dipping sauces are situated in the most undignified places, and the whole affair is so awkward because I just don’t have enough space on my desk.

Sushi Ko is my most frequented Japanese restaurant in the area. Which goes to follow that it’s probably my most frequented Japanese restaurant in the world (which sounds pretty impressive huh). The main reason I favour it so is that I still haven’t found a place that serves raw salmon as heavenly as the salmon they have here. I don’t know why that is because this isn’t supposed to be a particularly good restaurant. Chances are I just don’t really know what good salmon is.

Anyway, despite what the reviews on yelp.com might say, I still really like this place. The service has always been great. The bento boxes are pretty affordable and the portions are generous enough. The chicken katsu and saba shio (my usual bento choices) are really good, as is the vegetable tempura (which I’ve just tried for the first time). They don’t have as many specialty rolls as other places, but I think the regular rolls are pretty well done (for e.g. the aforementioned salmon, the hamachi and red snapper nigiri, and the spicy hotate roll).

My only complaint is that the one time I got the party sushi combination thing, about 1/3 of it consisted of california rolls. The california roll here isn’t bad or anything, but california rolls in general are just kinda cheap. Plus I’m not a huge fan of avocado. In fact, the free california roll that comes with my bento box is about to go uneaten, because I’m already full from the chocolate cupcakes I made this afternoon.

If you ever visit Berkeley for a day and feel like sushi, you probably won’t go to Sushi Ko. I’m practically the only person I know who even knows that this place exists, and the other people who do know seem none too impressed. So much so that I wouldn’t even confidently recommend it myself. What can I say, I guess I just haven’t had enough Japanese food to know any better, and you probably have higher standards than me.

I was starving today, when I picked up lunch at the Chinese fast food restaurant across the street. I’m not very rational when I’m hungry. So instead of the usual fried noodles + tofu, I got fried noodles + tofu + bok choy (as part of my bid to eat ‘healthy’ lawl).

1/4 through the meal I decided I’d had enough. This always happens. Food always sounds so good when it’s as yet unattained, and then when it’s actually in front of you, 70% of the time it disappoints. So I put the food away in the fridge, and on the way back to my cube I realise I’m actually not that full.

…

To be honest, I’m pretty sure the leftovers are going to end up in the bin. Sometimes I think I’m really easy going and un-picky when it comes to most things in life. But sometimes I’m just a food-wasting, fickle little brat.

Be prepared for a deluge of posts while I catch up on a few months worth of raving.