Back in the free world

Hi, I just got back from Burma, so I’ll start my “diet watch” a little late.

Friday Lunch
When: 3pm
Where: Airport Burger king
Who: Matti
What: Whopper meal
Why: Cheapest available and needed some quick food after the flight.
How: With my hands. Without the cheese. It too expensive, I’m a poor student after all.

Dinner
When: 8pm
Where: PGP cantine
Who: some friends i met at the cantine
What: Spicy Chicken cubes
Why: Tastes good and clears my stuffy nose.
How:Rice and chicken. Not forgetting the chilies and onions. It’s not actually as spicy as it looks.

Friday

After a week of being cut off from internet, I have returned from Hong Kong. The food was great, but it’s a bit irrelevant for our project. Therefore I’ll start from friday, which represents my everyday life as an exchange student here in Singapore.

One big thing that I think is worth some attention, is the fact that I almost never cook anything in here (if you don’t count the occasional instant noodles when everything is closed). This leads to eating being a much more social event than just making food for yourself at home. This depends also very much on where you live. At PGP, which is a very big student apartment complex on campus, and where most of the exchange students live, people go to eat at the cantine, where the likelihood of meeting a friend is big. Because of this the meals extend to much more than just feeding yourself. People are more likely to stay there for longer periods of time or to continue somewhere together just to hang out. Therefore I think, that eating brings people together and is a factor that increases the amount of social interaction among people. I think this is important, because in other cultures it might have the opposite effect. For example where I come from, Finland, eating out is much more expensive than making your own food. People might sometimes go home to cook some macaroni with tuna and then afterwards resume the social interaction. In this situation eating would have an effect of decreasing the amount of social interaction.

As a case in point, my friday was as follows:
breakfast and lunch, same thing for me…
When?: at 2pm, I slept very late, tired from a weeks trip to Hong Kong.
With who?: I eat slow, so I met first a dutch friend, then followed by an English friend and then by Lauri, a finnish friend who I was supposed to meet there.
Where?: at the PGP cantine, Asian cuisine stall
What?: Kung Pow Chicken with rice
Why?: Because it’s cheap and tasty
How?: With chopsticks of course 🙂 In Singapore you generally get the option of eating either with chopsticks (and a kind of spoon), by hand (indian food), or by spoon and fork combo. They hardly ever have knives available, napkins are also rare.

Snacks:
5pm at the campus pool restaurant, something called a Bing. A kind of fried bun with veggies and egg in it. Ate with Lauri, after exhausting ourselves by doing laps in the pool.
7pm at home, alone. A bag of roasted chestnuts I had bought from Hong Kong while doing homework. Delicious.

Late Dinner:
9:40pm while doing some laundry I went to get a take away meal from the PGP cantine. I got some rice and different kinds of vegetarian food from the vegetarian stall, because it was the only one still open. There was tofu, some veggies and chicken (at least I thought so, might have also been some kind of fake tofu chicken). On the way I met a Korean friend Sinae, and I ended up hanging out in the PGP courtyard until late. It seems to me that the best way to prevent loneliness is to just go get some food :). You’re bound to meet some people.

Thursday[270907]..What, when, where, who, why, how did you eat today?

Brunch [Colloquial way of Singaporean saying Breakfast and Lunch]
Eat When?: 12.30PM
Eat What?:Yong Tau Foo
Eat Where?: @ NUS
With who?: Jeslyn and Cheryl
Why?: You get to choose your ingredient with your noodles!
How?: Choose your ingredient and your noodles. You can also have it dry or soup.

Dinner
Eat When?: 8.00PM
Eat What?: Hor Fun
Eat Where?: @ home
With who?: Mummy
Why?: It is packed from the food store near our place, not as oily as other food.
How?: They cooked the noodle first and pour gravy like soup into the noodle. Usually serve with meat, vegetable and seafood.

Wednesday & Thursday.

Wednesday Lunch
When: 1pm
Where: Home
Who: Alone
What: Chicken rice
Why: Dad packet it for me.
How: Chicken rice comes with rice together with either the roasted chicken or the steamed chicken. I personally prefer the roasted chicken over the latter.

Dinner
When: 7pm
Where: Home
Who: Alone
What: Fried Bee Hoon
Why: Home cooked food by dad.
How: Bee hoon is fried with eggs, vegetables and meat. A simple yet delicious meal. 🙂

Thursday Lunch
When: 2pm
Where: Home
Who: Daisy
What: Minced Pork Noodles
Why: Dad packet it for me.
How: Noodles that comes with mushroom, pork, fishball, fishcake.

Dinner
When: 8pm
Where: Home
Who: Alone
What: Instant Noodles
Why: It’s convenient and easy to cook.
How: Instant noodles come in many varieties. It can be soup-based or dry noodles. Also, there are many flavours such as chicken, curry, tomyum etc. I would normally add an egg to go with my my noodles and more often than not, Singaporeans who are busy would cook instant noodles as a meal because it’s fast and easy.

Tuesday is the benz day

Breakfast was late.
It was eaten because gastric juices were burning a hole in my stomache.

I ate a simple fare, egg mayo sandwiches and a healthy serving of coffee.

Black coffee, what would probably referred to as an Americano. However it is something that I’ve grown up as regarding to be very Asian. Kopi-O is what we call it.

So why does Starbucks call it Americano? Is calling a long black, Kopi-O too exotic and uncouth for an American franchise? Perhaps a hint of orientalism here.

Rice
Lunch (with my Dad) was Malay rice from this pretty decent place in Bukit Timah.

Well the observations were that in Singapore we pretty much eat cross culturally everyday. It’s more a Singaporean thing than it is an ethnic thing. So it hardly bothers us that we’re eating simple fare in District 10.

The irony of it being, food seems to taste better in the red light districts. Geylang, Joo Chiat, Changi (the horror). Why the correlation? Or are cheap rents simply an attraction to good food and the flesh trade as well?

Dinner
Oh this has to be glorious. I’m eating ting-kat.

It’s a sort of meal delivery service. It’s commonly delivered (for reasons unknown to me still) in stacked metal tins. (hence the term ting-kat, which is some chinese dialect for metal tin)

the food is decent and is always Asian fare. and what i find more interesting than the food is how the companies handle the logistical nightmare of about 100-200 house holds. each one with a different permutation of orders.

which brings me to an intersting catagorization of Asian fare.

1. staple (rice or noodles)
2. vegetables
3. meat
4. soup
5. finger food/snacks/additional dish (which more often than not turns out to be eggs)
6. fruits/desert

no starters, no entree, no appetizers.

Asian meals seem more focussed on feeding and nourishing.

Food linked to Singapore culture.

I personally tried Masala Thosai, an Indian dish for the first time on Saturday. It was served with a packet of curry, and inside the Thosai was filled with lots of potatoes, onion and spicy fillings.

http://www.goodfood.sg/thosai

I personally do not like the taste of Thosai but it was definitely worth the try on other food from the different cultures. I guess most of us are often used to eating food from our own ethnic group that more often than not, we are not used to eating food from the other cultures. We often do not attempt to understand their traditional food.

One of the aspects in Chinese culture that influences the way we eat will be our upbringing. Often, chinese families love to cook and they often follow traditions. Children who live in Chinese families often are being exposed to Chinese traditional food and thus, we stick to food from our own culture.

I believe that social status also plays a part in choosing the place to eat. Often, we would want to seek for somewhere comfortable, a nice ambience to dine, and food that is within affordable prices. Students like us love to go to coffee places just to chill out and catch up with friends. If we’re dining out with adults, we would normally choose somewhere more formal, depending on the occasion.

I guess based on us liking to dine with a group of friends, we can link it to Hofstede’s value dimension on collectivism. By dining in groups, we can build greater group solidarity and increase interaction between friends.

To me, it is important to understand different cultures so as to aid in intercultural communication, be it on food, language or any other aspect, mutual understanding is the key to a harmonious society.

Wednesday[260907]..What, when, where, who, why, how did you eat today?

Brunch [Colloquial way of Singaporean saying Breakfast and Lunch]
Eat When?: 1.30PM
Eat What?:Home Cooked food from Mummy
Eat Where?: @ home
With who?: Mummy and cousin
Why?: Mummy cooked it!
How?: Mixed vegetable and steam fish.

Dinner
Eat When?: 7.30PM
Eat What?:Home Cooked food from Mummy
Eat Where?: @ home
With who?: Mummy and cousin
Why?: Mummy cooked it!
How?: Onion meat, Vegetable and Soup

That sums up my day.. Yup! I stayed at home the entire day

Tuesday.

Lunch
When: 1pm
Where: The Deck, Arts Canteen
Who: Harris
What: Chinese Mixed Rice
Why: It was the shortest queue in the whole canteen.
How: You get to choose from a variety of dishes, from fish to meat to vegetables to fried food. I chose 1 vegetable, steamed egg, sweet and sour fried fish and toufu.

Dinner
When: 7pm
Where: Bukit Timah Food Centre
Who: Harris

What: White Carrot Cake
Why: Because the stall won some award and we decided to give it a try.
How: Carrot cake can be fried in black sweet sauce or simply just fry it. I personally love both the flavours. =)

Combined post for the past 2 days.. =P

Day1= Monday 24/9

Breakfast
What: 1 packet of dry instant noodles (Myojo Ramen Mee)

When: 10am

Where :Home

Who: Sister

Why: I woke up late and didn’t get to go for breakfast with my parents at the coffeeshop near our house. This was the fast and easy solution to a rumbling tummy!!

How: Open the packet, boil water, put the noodles into the water, cook till soft,pour into strainer to drain off excess water..mix with powder and condiments provided.

Lunch
None~~(skipped it actually I forgot about taking my lunch until I was hungry again at 4+pm..so I decided to wait till dinner to get food)

Dinner
What: Yoshinoya Teriyaki chicken+salmon with rice combo

When: 6.30pm

Where: Tampines Mall Yoshinoya( Japanese fast food)

Who: Rina & Jiemin

Why: We were hungry(especially me!!) and wanted to get something that served fast but yet was less oily like McD’s and KFC. The meal had rice in it, so we thought that it would be more filling than burgers.

How: The Teriyaki chicken was probably pan-fried and later a sauce was poured over it. They used Japanese steamed rice and boiled vegetables. The salmon was a fried fillet/nugget thingy which was topped with mayonaise sauce.

Day2= Tuesday 25/9

Breakfast

What: Wan ton mee

When: 9am

Where: Coffeeshop near my house(5 mins drive)

Who: Parents

Why: I did not want to have something heavy such as Chicken rice early in the morning so I thought I should get a noodle.

How: You can choose what kind of noodle you want and they have a variety. You can also choose to have it with chilli or not, most Singaporeans just love their food with lots of chilli. The hawker didn’t ask if I wanted chilli in my noodle but included it anyway.(I find this happens almost all the time as long as you don’t ask specifically of them not to add chilli)

Lunch
What: Honey Milk Bubble Tea( not really my lunch but it was what I had for the mid-day period)

When: 2pm

Where: Bugis Junction Rockery

Who: CJ

Why: A refreshing drink that cools you from the hot weather(so hot today!) and the pearls can give you an energy boost(I heard that 1 cup of pearls is equivalent to the carbs you take in to 1 bowl of rice!)

How: A variety of flavours are mixed with teas(green,red,milk) and ice blended ones as well. The pearls are actually balls of tapioca starch boiled in sugar water. You can choose to add nata de coco or jelly in place of the pearls.

Dinner

What: Fried Carrot Cake( black) with Chilli

When: 6pm

Where: Bedok Corner Food Centre(near Bedok Camp)

Who: CJ

Why: I had actually planned to have the Fried Hokkien Prawn Mee that’s famous in the hawker centre but it was closed so I decided to have this. I like the black Carrot Cake because I like the black sweet sauce that they use to fry it with. Some people prefer the white one which fried without the black sweet sauce. Again, the hawker added chilli in my carrot cake because I didn’t ask her not to.

How: You can choose from the Black or the White one with chilli and without chilli. =)

So do you all like Black or White?

Jesus Walks (Monday the 25th)

Can you think of Monday morning?

It is with great precision that my first meal is delivered – Leftovers in a microwave.

In hindsight it is probably the quietest of revolutions we attend to everyday. Chinese food culture has a long history of trying to preserve food. Sure we missed the great leap forward (no pun intended) in not inventing the refrigerator but surely one must contemplate how creative ancient Chinese were.

There is probably an entire sub-culture in the art of preparing tasty preserved food. They are frequently dried, salted and at times even pickled in order to preserve food even in the absence of any proper storage. That said, my breakfast had nothing to do with preserved produce.

It actually was cooked food that was refrigerated and re-heated in a microwave. Which isn’t uncommon in Chinese culture once again – Asians have a habit of “recycling” food by either re-cooking a rather random combination of leftovers, or simply sufficiently frying the materials till the “germs are killed” as our mom’s would have us believe.

The irony? The breakfast gave me a bad tummy.

Ironies.

Lunch was taken over a work meeting in school with Kayvern, buddy of mine, and I had simply chosen to go the canteen because it had a power point, air-condition and food nearby. Was that Singaporean pragmatism exemplified? Food for thought (Pun intended).

I had Lerk Thai – Consider again the quirks that we as Singaporeans are so used to – Thai food, prepared by who is most probably a Malaysian Chinese, I’m eating with a Singaporean Chinese friend in front of an American franchise, Burger King. And we hardly bat an eyelid.

Why did I eat there? More than whim and fancy, I just wanted to try something new. Another quirk I realize most locals ignore – we try new food for fun. It’s almost like entertainment for us, so much so that we hardly hear of locals who eat the same food everyday. Weekly? Monthly? Perhaps.

Are Singaporeans non-ritualistic eaters? If we have a ritual, do we have a longer span of time before we consume the same food again?

Burger King.

I then had Burger King because I was used to it and it hardly required any thinking on my part. And also because I was still married to my now rather taken for granted power point.

Singaporeanism – Chapter II, is the ability to stay connected more important to Singaporeans than the food itself? Would F&B outlets benefit from allowing laptop users free power and internet access? In a country and culture where work is almost 24/7, is the work-food dollar the most lucrative of all?

Dinner.

Dinner ended with a whimper;
a mooncake which bordered on supper.
The clock struck 12 and I went to hell.
(no wait, that’s another poem)

Conclusions?

I ate when I was hungry, and ate with company when I could.
I ate to my whim and fancy, and I ate whatever I could.