occasional treat

I hit a patch. Or should I call it a block. There isn’t anything that I would really want to blog about, or perhaps the truth is that there isn’t anything that I deem worthy of sharing. Such is my life, running on a routine that most would categorise as staid but oh well, a life is a life.

The weekend that just passed had a slight twist from its usual route though. One of my friends was back in town to settle some big personal matters, and finally, after a great deal of effort, we managed to tie down a time to meet up. Originally, we had planned to head to Hard Rock Cafe, this outlet which I have only been to maybe all of once in my entire life, because Friday night was the night that the UnXpected plays there now. But the problem with wanting to catch live bands are that they typically start at timings that aren’t so friendly to me anymore. I find it an effort to stay out late, even if I can still stay up late at night at home, so 10pm that was the time they would start jamming seemed rather ambitious for me.

We spent a couple of hours chatting over coffee and shared a Banana Walnut Loaf at Coffee Bean, which we couldn’t finish between us, although in my case I was trying not to, i.e. control, whereas for her I think it’s a case of not being able to. Somehow, even with the smaller portions I eat now, my appetite and stomach space are still really healthy and generous. Hmm.

Eventually decided to give the live gig a miss, since it still was sometime to them starting, and went for another session of drinks instead. Of course, what are drinks without these?     

As I munched on these shoestring fries, my favourite type of fries, drenched and soaked in oil no less, looking at how the paper placed beneath the fries had turned soggy, I tried not to think of the detriment of consuming them. Obsession yes, but probably still not to the point of total abstention. My friend was having a sore throat that day, so you probably could guess it right, that for her, coupled with an appetite that is almost next to nothing, I wolved down most of the plate. These were the leftovers. Up to a point, somehow the oily-ness and unpleasant smell of stale oil got to me and I had to stop eating. So maybe, just maybe, my liking for fries has developed some limitations?

Bazin, Marina Bay Sands

Sunday evening was spent at Marina Bay Sands, where I got another birthday treat! Yay to treats! Originally we were thinking of heading to South Coast, as I requested for “casual dining” but when we walked past, the place seemed rather crowded and there was only al fresco dining (if we weren’t mistaken), so we moved a little further and saw Bazin, which is also categorised as “casual dining” as per MBS’ website, and it also features al fresco dining, but it had an added advantage of an open-concept indoor-dining area (no walls) so it wasn’t too warm with some airconditioning and fans. Besides, the pizzas that I saw other patrons having seemed really good and I was sort of having a pizza craving.

Colourful drinks before dinner is served. 

Although we had originally ordered chips and salsa (from the Bar Menu), it wasn’t available that day, so we changed to truffle fries instead. To be very honest, I am ok to have fries plain as I am not a huge fan of truffle fries. I don’t not like it but to me, it’s just adding some salty flavour to fries that works the same as good old salt perhaps; they taste roughly the same to me, and I usually prefer fries without any sale. But still, these were a great welcome to me. I think I have been depriving myself of fries for a long time, even though the last I had fries was actually just a week ago, but compared to days past when I would eat potatoes/fries/whatever on a more regular basis, I think it was a good time to give myself a treat too! These were nicely done and freshly-fried, but felt a tad oily as when they were served, the oil was visibly glistening off the surface of the fries.

Our pizza came next. We ordered the Smokey Chicken pizza, and it was huge! Well, by my standards the size was big. Not the biggest I’ve seen or had (Pepperoni Pizzeria seriously has huge XXL-sized ones), but for two persons this was considered big.

Here’s the pizza taken with other items in the picture for comparison of the size. I love the pizza though, its crust was so thin and crispy and they don’t exactly stinge on the ingredients even if I wouldn’t have minded if there was more! Haha. It reminded me a little of Skinny Pizza, but this wasn’t as crispy. When I had pizza at Skinny Pizza, sometimes I feel like I’m eatng a biscuit more than pizza, but they have great pizzas too. 🙂

Bazin, a celebration of food and drink.

Apparently, they have other types of menu too, i.e. Theatre Menu, Kids & Dessert Menu. They also serve a selection of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, and that evening actually some people were just sitting having some beers enjoying the view of the sunset over the marina. From where we were, we could get a fairly good view of the evening sun setting behind the silhouette of the skyline created by skyscrapers in the business district across the waters. It was a beautiful evening, and a great way to wrap up the birthday weekend.

Bazin serves high tea too! Maybe next time, I’ll return to try that, or the other items on the menu!

diary of a (junk) food junkie

I realise that these days, I don’t have much of main meals with the exception of lunch where it is more of a social affair with colleagues rather than the want to eat a proper meal. It isn’t that I am not eating, believe me I still do eat a fair bit, but the choices of food that I pick probably does not qualify as a proper/main meal to most. In terms of the amount of calories, I think they are equal or even more than your typical meal, although in terms of portion size and person-dependent level of satiation, it could differ rather significantly.

I have sort of come to this conclusion that I can live without eating rice or noodles for a relatively long time, but I am a carbo person, or rather I think it is something that at this point, I am unwilling to give up. It is not impossible to alter eating habits and the types of food consumed, but sometimes I would think why I should be so hard on myself. It isn’t like I have some chronic health issues that require me to change the things I put into my system (or at least not that I am aware of), and at my age now, seriously, why? Besides I would like to think that I work so hard in the exercise area to compensate for all the extra carbohydrates that I am loading my system with, so maybe sometimes it is ok to let go a little and enjoy? Then again, there are those days when I think that after working so hard, why should I negate all the efforts that I have expended just for everything to go back to square one?

Anyway it is Friday today, and these few days I have not been feeling too great. For some reason my mood had taken a large downward swing and even though I should supposedly be beaming from ear to ear in TGIF mood, I still have not been able to pick myself up. Like my friend mentioned in her blog recently, sometimes scrolling through pictures that are stored in the phone helps to lift the spirits a little. And as my Bikram yoga instructor said one evening in class, that while we are in the dead corpse pose it is our choice to breathe away all the things that surface during that moment, be it nausea, dizziness or maybe some old memories. Things that are bad, it is our choice to not let them get to us, and surround ourselves only with the good things. Life is hard enough as it is without us beating ourselves up, but things are always easier said than done.

I would want to be positive all day long, whole year round too. And I would want to follow my heart, but yet I am afraid. Singapore has become a place where I don’t think I can survive on my own two feet if I were to give up my office job now to work in Starbucks or maybe take on a position in the retail industry. I can’t just drop everything on a whim and jet off to Japan to pursue my study of Japanese, because I have to think ahead to the future and my ability or not to buy myself a roof over the head. I don’t have that luxury of having a co-owner to share the cost of a property with, or in that respect, the cost of anything. Every dollar that I spend is something I have to work for, whether I like what I do or not. It’s like, because of the need to survive, I have to suck it up. That is how the situation is now in my own home country, where I am part of that unfortunate sandwich class that is not rich enough to live comfortably without too many worries about financial health in future, and yet not poor enough to warrant any assistance from the government. Each month I pay taxes in respect of the income I have earned in the past year, only to see this money being used to fund someone else, who in some or maybe most cases, have the choice to not receive help but due to certain circumstances or country policies they have benefited from the taxes that the rest have paid. It puts me in a dilemma whether I should stop working, or take a lower-paying job so that I pay less taxes or at all, so that maybe I can qualify for some of those benefits, yet then where am I going to live?

Sigh. Enough of this dreariness. It is Friday after all, and so to make myself happier, I shall end off this post with some past pictures of my guilty indulgences where food is concerned. It is appalling to know of the bad of eating all these, so yes I will balance these out by not having any of those sinful hawker fare that I used to have. 

Symmetry, Jalan Kubor, Singapore

Got to know about this place from the various tweets/instagram posts by Shirlyn of Shirlyn & The UnXpected. Finally I got the chance to head down to Jalan Kubor one evening after work. It’s about 10 minutes or so walk along Victoria Street from Bugis MRT station, towards the Raffles Hospital direction, on the right side of the road. Once you reach Jalan Kubor, it is just at the corner, the first unit.

It was Friday, but surprisingly not so crowded, or maybe we were early. I don’t know if they have any upstairs seating, but in the shop itself on the ground level there aren’t that many tables so seating capacity could be limited. Reservations are available though, because we saw names with corresponding times written on a wooden wall in the cafe/restaurant.

We were served a glass of chilled grapes while we mulled over what to order, which I thought was a nice touch. Symmetry serves proper food, i.e. main courses, in addition to light bites, and they have a rather extensive drinks menu as compared to their food offerings. We were planning to head somewhere else after that, so we decided to skip the mains.

Being huge fans of fries, we of course had to order some french fries. Glorious carbo as comfort food at the end of a work week, probably also as a reward for getting through a shitty week maybe? The choices available were truffle, scallop or… I can’t remember the third maybe seaweed, but we ordered scallop fries, which had a slight scallop taste but I thought it tasted more truffle, or was it just saltiness. But I loved it, as I love most fries, unless they have been fried in stale, overused oil. This one wasn’t, and they are a version of shoe string fries that I enjoy more than the thick-cut variety.

In addition to fries, we decided to order the breaded prawns. It was a pretty small portion so if you are really hungry this will only become a small snack for you. I like this because it isn’t too oily, and there is more prawn than flour. I just wished there was more though.

And for drinks, we chose cocktails because they were said to be good. We browsed the menu for a while, like I mentioned earlier about the extensiveness of their drinks menu, and finally decided on martinis, a grapefruit martini and apple cinnamon martini. I don’t know if these were the recommended ones, perhaps we should have asked, because the apple cinnamon, according to my friend, reminded her of the Fisherman’s Friend lozenges. My grapefruit drink indeed did have grapefruit taste, but it was also like a grapefruit martini I had the week before at a different pub. For S$20 per glass, we felt that this was rather pricey. 

 

I think the ambience in the cafe/restaurant is pretty good because it wasn’t noisy like how some places tend to get. It was interesting, because even as the cafe filled up, everyone seemed to be considerate to not speak too loudly. The waitresses were really attentive too, to the extent that they will always come by to clear empty stuff off your table. This works both ways, good and bad, because some customers will like the tables to be free of used crockery/cutlery while they continue with their conversations, whereas others will take it that the cafe is dropping them subtle hints to get the bill and leave; it’s up to the individual how they would want to interpret it I guess. For me, frankly I prefer if we were left alone to talk because it can get annoying when you are frequently interrupted in the midst of your conversation. I don’t know yet if I will return soon, because there are still many places that I would want to check out, and also because the prices tend to be on the high side. Perhaps you can call me a cheapo, but for all that we had above, we spent more than S$80 in total!

helsinki vantaa airport

No, this post isn’t really about the main airport of Helsinki in Finland. I just thought of using it as the post title for today, that’s all. But in my defense, I do have one picture of the departure hall of the airport when I was flying out from there one night, one cold, rainy night.

When I got to the airport just before 9pm, I was wondering if the airport was even opened because it was deserted and appeared devoid of any activity. It was after looking around briefly that I spotted one open check-in counter to deposit my luggage, then prospected around again to look for where I could scan my handheld stuff. It was that empty. With the airport staff working at that time, including one open convenience kiosk and one cafe, I presume that there must have been less than 20 persons around in the whole outside area of the airport.

Anyway, the inside wasn’t any much better. There are plenty of shops inside, but they were almost all closed by the time I was inside. I had a short dinner/night snack at one lonely little cafeteria, before proceeding to the passport control, after which there were slightly more shops that stayed open for the benefit of passengers on the international flights but it was still sad. I guess a lot of airports in the West are like that, because I don’t recall ever feeling this way in Asian airports. Or maybe it was just the timing, if I had been at the, say Siem Reap International Airport at odd timings, there could also jolly well be just a handful persons around.

Ok, enough of Helsinki Vantaa. Let’s move on already.

I had a wonderful weekend, I think it kind of depleted me of every single ounce of energy I could ever have in me! Weekend started with drinks that began at Kandahar Street all the way to Sentosa! It wasn’t the volume of alcohol but the distance covered. We were looking for a place that was recommended by a friend’s friend but then ended up feeling the place to be too ‘hippy’ for us. So we trooped along Haji Lane, Arab Street, before finally going to WitBier at Kandahar Street. It isn’t a bad place to chill at, a tiny little pub chock full of whom I guess are regulars, and they serve a really wide variety of European (mostly Belgium I think) beer, with a small selection of bar food, but if you are into fries and luncheon meat fries (called Porky Fries), here’s where you might want to check out!

Was a little miffed though because we were served by a new waitress who was on her first day, and she wasn’t able to be very helpful in answering the questions we had, and then she got our orders wrong. We ordered a bucket of 5 bottles and she served us two pints (in glasses) and said yes when we asked her to confirm that was what we ordered. It even went as far as us asking if the bottled beer were poured into the mugs and she still said yes. We should already have picked up on that and asked another waitress but we didn’t and it was when a second waitress asked if we wanted another round that we realised the mistake.

After that we went to SkyLoft, which I talked about in the previous post.

Then Saturday! The day I had been waiting for for a really long while… Big Bang Alive Concert in Singapore! I was out during the day, so by the time I went to queue to get into the standing pen area, just before 6pm I think, I was already exhausted. Consider the weather and us having to queue more than 3/4 way around the second level of the SIS, before we were slowly being led down the steps and finally into the arena. It wasn’t a long wait though, as the concert started just 15 minutes after its supposed start time. For 2 and a half hours from there, I never stopped screaming and jumping, and of course gawking at the boys. It sounds really cougarish, but I don’t really care, because that was just how great they were and they were so close, in such proximity with us that we were just about two arm lengths’ away. I wished of course I could then have limbs like Mr. Fantastic and reach out to grab them! More on the concert later.

Sunday was another concert day. This has been two hectic weekends for me, a far cry from the languid days I was having while on the business trip in Finland; of course work wasn’t slow but the pace there generally seems so much more relaxed. Attenedd Keane’s concert at the Max Pavilion at Expo, and recalled that the last time I watched a concert in that area was Lee Hom’s Evolution concert, way back in… I don’t even remember anymore! The sound system was crap but the concert was fabulous, even if this time I was so far from the stage and there were a number of songs I was unfamiliar with. Besides, I spent about half the time sitting down, and another half standing because they were performing my favourite songs, or because my view was blocked by the person in front.

Two very different concerts on two different days but I totally enjoyed myself on both occasions, I love the sound of Keane, like how I like some UK acts, like Suede and Coldplay. They have this quality in their songs that just distinguishes them from American bands somehow, maybe it is the way they sing i.e. the accent? I don’t really know but all in all, they were great that night and I silently berated myself for not taking the effort to ‘revise’ the songs before I attended the concert. I would have enjoyed it even more if I could sing along with them all the time!