Wendy's - the newest chick in town

Popped into Wendy's for a really quick lunch on the go at Liat Towers amid pouring rain.

Good thing Liat Towers wasn't flooded at the basement again!

Had the Ultimate Chicken Grill Combo set ($7.20). Was glad for an option for grilled chicken since Macs took off their grilled option a while back.

Ultimate Chicken Grill Combo



Sadly, for all the hype created with Wendy's in town, the burger wasn't much to die for.

Although the chicken breast fillet was pretty ample, the sandwich was too dry overall. A few miserable pieces of lettuce leaves and a dollop of their special sauce on crumbly bread.

But the fries were pretty good. Crisp on the outside, warm and soft on the inside. And thick enough to provide satisfaction with each bite.

Nonetheless, I think I'll return to Macs for my McSpicy burger instead. Especially with their lunch time value meals -- definitely worth it in every way.

How to drink your cuppa. And other Italian quirks.

As I happily ordered my usual cappuccino to go with my eggs benedict brunch, Kristian laughed at my Singaporean coffee-drinking habits. Italians would find it offensive, he joked.

My friend, Kristian, is Austrian by descent, but practically Italian by nature since he's spent the last decade or so living it up in Venice as an industrial designer. (He's supposedly pretty well-respected and regarded in his field, but despite his many attempts at explaining his work to me, I still don't quite get it!)

Anyway, Kristian educated me on the art of drinking coffee, Italian style.

Lesson number 1: Italians don't drink coffee with full meals, much less after them. Coffee is entitled to its own meal slot.

Lesson number 2: Italians only drink cappuccino in the morning. And at the most with a croissant or a brioche (both of which I smugly pointed out to him were French breads. The Italians should be having biscotti instead! He agreed. Ha.)

Lesson number 3: Italians don't have coffee past 1 or 2pm in the afternoon. A shot of espresso and that's it for the rest of the day.

Unlike us ill-breeds who have our kopi fix at every imaginable hour, paired with condensed milk or evaporated milk or lots of sugar. And taken with all sorts of local hawker food.

The Italians would find our bastardised coffee habits abhorrent :)

The other thing Kristian showed me was how to express satisfaction the Italian way.

Eccellente. (Pronounced eh-chay-lent-tay) With a flourish of the hand in a straight line from left to right, forefinger and thumb together facing you, the remaining 3 fingers in a vertical line up facing across, as if pulling a zip.

It's equivalent to our local expression shiok.

I added a little zest to my zip motion by ending with my fingers higher up, a bit like a 45-degree angle line.

No no, Kristian corrected me. It has to be a straight line, like zipping something across. He demonstrated again.

I zipped an imaginary line across from left to right and curved round my back as far as my arm could bend. I'm zipping up something! I quipped and grinned.

My Austrian-Italian teacher could only shake his head in amusement at me.

Maybe I will try it one day, when I'm sipping a cappuccino at 4pm at an al fresco cafe along one of Italy's renowned streets, and do a little zip motion all round back to see what kind of reaction I'll get. I'll probably get thrown out onto the pavement by the waiter :)

[Kristian just told me that al fresco in Italian just means "in fresh air" but not outdoor seating like we refer to it here in Singapore. Talk about lost in translation! The proper translation to refer to outdoor seating should be al aperto -- in the open.]

Random trivia: Illy, Italy's (arguably) best coffee brand, puts its coffee beans through a glass tube with light sensors on both ends to determine the quality of the bean. The glass tube then tilts either to the reject or accept pile depending on the test results. Wow!

Monkey Business

My grandma used to take me to MacRitchie Reservoir pretty often when I was a kid, and I have fond (albeit a bit vague now) memories of picnicking and running around the area.

Funnily enough, my most vivid memory of MacRitchie is the very painful 10km run that the school made us endure through the wooded greens more than 10 years ago. Surely I was scarred :) 

So it was with much anticipation that my family decided to troop back to the old reservoir for a Sunday mid-morning walk and picnic. 

Much has changed, yet much has remained the same. 

For starters, there is a triple-storey parking lot operating on the ERP system that now stands on what used to be a simple flat open-air carpark that functioned on old-school punch coupons.

Development spares nothing, not even nature parks. Then again, the whole concept of "park" was created because of development. Hmm.

Renovation is also ongoing at one end of the reservoir, although to make way for what I have no idea.

That being said, the rest of the reservoir remained much the same as I foggily recalled it to be -- calm, tranquil and serene.

We couldn't have asked for more beautiful weather - clear, blue skies with just the right amount of clouds to provide that perfect picture opportunity.

In fact, there was a 25km marathon taking place and we happened to walk right into the last leg of it, and past the finish line!

MacRitchie is notorious for its brazen monekys that run amok through its protected soil and these monkeys decided to take a walk on a Sunday morning as well, basking in the human attention they received.  Some of these monkeys are more daring than humans -- stare them in the eye and they'll stop in their tracks to stare right back at you.

Careful where you leave your food too....we heard a man mimick a tiger roar to chase away the monkeys descending upon his picnic lunch. Pretty hilarious actually, but it worked!

For the first time in my life, I saw baby monkeys, not more than a few months old, walk around on their own, with their mothers watching sharply close by lest any alien being come too close for comfort.

The monkeys also bring new meaning to the term "piggy-back". Check out how they carry their young. Almost like an anti-gravity gymnastic act!

Caught a mother-child pair, where the mother was acutely aware of the human paparazzi surrounding its nursing child, and kept shifing its back towards us to shield the little chimp.

Parental instincts remain the same, regardless of what creature you are, eh? :)

Along the way, I also found this little signboard, hidden somewhat behind foliage. Bet many Singaporeans don't know this little snippet of history.

As the noon-day sun gradually began to creep up upon us, we found our way into a fairly new covered rest area that had a cafe called Mushroom. Perfect for our lunch time break since we were hot and sweaty after the walkabout.

The cafe is very simple, serving modest local fare under colonial style ceiling fans, but surely a welcome reprieve for the many hikers/ runners/ families that thronged its counter.

Pity though that the view from the cafe was blocked by a powergrid substation and a little hilly bump forming the dam of the reservoir.

We ordered the mee siam, laska and nasi lemak (all $3.90), as well as some fried snacks ($1.20 each) to try.

Nasi Lemak.
To give credit to the cafe, the egg yolk was perfectly intact when served,
but my grandma made a dent in it before I had a chance to take a photo!

 

From left: Fried chicken wing and chicken curry puff



The nasi lemak came generously served with a fried chicken wing, fish cake, ikan bilis (anchovies) and a sunshine egg with excellent chilli on the side. However, the rice was not as sufficiently fragrant as coconut rice in nasi lemak should be. Nonetheless, good value for money.

Nasi lemak literally translated from the Malay language means "Rice fat". Little wonder since the whole plate is topped with sinful sides!

The mee siam and laksa (no photos unfortunately since my ravenous family descended upon the dishes like starving vultures) were both pretty good too, served with several pieces of peeled prawns each.

But I think our unanimous favourite was the fried chicken wing -- crispy on the outside, succulent on the inside and just the right amount of taste. Mmmm...finger lickin' good!

We spent a good part of an hour seeking shelter at Mushroom, enjoying the lazy midday warm breeze and flipping through the Sunday papers. Perfect way to wind down a weekend.

I'm going to go hunt for more lazy weekend hangouts for my Sundays. Will share them soon!



And they lived happily ever after. Or not?

As I was planning a trip back to the US to be a bridesmaid for a really good friend of mine, it struck me the inane number of weddings I've attended in the condensed span of the last 2 to 3 years.

I'm at that generational crossroad, where people uncheck themselves from the singlehood list and sign up for (or in some cases, get drafted into) the married or married-with-kids list.

And the thought of it, is pretty freaking freaky.

Think about it: overnight, your life changes.

You acquire a new set of parents, a new extended family on top of your own. As if family drama isn't enough in one family (and every family has its fair share of drama), you now get double dosage, like it or not.

I've heard horror stories of in-laws, even before they officially become your in-laws. Every bride has an anecdote about her mother-in-law-to-be. It seems almost a baptism of fire to suffer a scuffle (metaphorical or not) with the other woman in your husband's life.

You can't just up and splurge on yourself because you feel like it. You can't just have your own social life, do what you want to do, whenever you want to do it.

You now have responsibilities. That's a pretty darned heavy 6-syllable word.

There's mortgage to be paid, financial planning for a lifetime of together-ness, future education fees for children yet-to-be-born.

People wish you a lifetime of happiness when you say "I do"; from a young age, we're all conditioned to believe that happy ever after is a given when the princess finds her knight in shining armour. The End. 

But they fail to talk about life after "The End", when the knight falls into sloppy disarray, becomes a fat, lazy couch potato and snores in his sleep. Worse still, he drools.

Or the princess becomes a naggy squat, constantly berating her useless husband for not doing this or that, retreating into the abyss of auntie-dom.

Let's not even get started on the children. As far as I've heard / seen, it gets worse before it gets better. And that's if it even gets better.

And it all starts when you take that leap of faith to spend the rest of your life with who you think / hope is your soul partner (well, that's my hope at least).

I am, of course, stereotyping and oversimplifying the nuances of marriage.  But I'm trying to make a point here.

I attended a wedding recently, and during the homily, the priest said to the couple, "If you don't remember anything from my homily today, just remember these 4 phrases, all 3 words each.

I was wrong;

I am sorry;

Please forgive me;

I love you.

And if you're right, just shut up."

And the congregation erupted in laughter. It was telling just by watching the nodding and knowing looks of the married couples present, that this was no laughing matter, that underneath the surface, this was indeed a much-needed antidote to complacency in a relationship.

Wise words indeed, particularly from a man who had taken a vow of chastity for the rest of his life.

Relationships are a constant work-in-progress. I do find it rather amusing that as human beings we spend effort and time on our jobs, on securing that next paycheck and upgrading ourselves to be better managers at work, more competent at our domain jobs. But we don't do the same for our relationships.

Then again, I'm guilty of such treason myself on occasion.

How many couples do you know have gone for couple enrichment programmes in the course of their marriage? How much investment do we put into our  relationships with unquantifiable ROI?

Little wonder that the romance fizzles out, the husband is more interested in his soccer game and the wife constantly asks where is the love.

Lest I fall into that trap (and horror of horrors, become an auntie), I'll be sure to be 100% ready when the time comes. Because it's going to take the next 50 years and more to keep it going. And I damned well be willing (and wanting) to do that.

This wonderful thing called Friendship

I'm blessed. Very blessed, in fact.

For many reasons of which I am well aware of. But today, in particular, I was made acutely conscious of one specific beautiful gift.

The gift of friendship. 

A really good friend -- let's call him Jack (not his real name because he once told me in jest that if he ever made it into my blog, he wanted to remain anonymous) -- was a real gem of a buddy today. 

Jack and I first met almost 10 years ago. We were then signing a good part of our youth to what would be our first career together in the same company.

We first started to bond as newbies, plunged into a local environment and struggling to adjust to a corporate world, after having spent a few years in the US and having our brains liberalised by 15-hour school weeks, freedom of speech and global travels.  

We both loved (and needed) our morning coffee fix and a jaunt to the the pantry soon became our workday morning routine. Our friendship was built on 15-minute conversations each day, over steaming mugs of coffee and eyes still beady from lack of sleep.

Even after our careers took divergent paths, Jack and I kept in touch. He was my go-to buddy in the office, and even outside the office, our friendship was (and still is) solid. 

Jack knew that in the last few weeks, I was having a really rough patch dealing with home care matters for my mother and juggling my full-time job.

He had a few days of time left to himself before he started a new job. He messaged me today to offer any help, be it running an errand or watching the house.

I was so grateful. There were so many things I had to do at the same time, but I couldn't be everywhere all at once. I felt bad taking him up on his offer on his day off, but I knew that I needed the help.

Jack didn't have to offer his time. He could have just offered a word of support, or even none at all. 

In fact, he even had to make a detour because I initally gave him the wrong address to run an errand.

But he did it all without grumbling, not even jokingly. And his simple act of kindness gave me the space to take care of other pressing matters.

Man was not created to be a lone creature. Even God fashioned woman from man's rib to provide companionship. And that's what our existence is really all about - our relationships with our fellow human beings. 

Not just boy-girl relationships, or parent-child relationships. But also the simple, fundamental concept of platonic friendships.

Of like-minded people who may not have had the natural privilege of being related to one another, but who love you not despite your flaws but in spite of them.  Who stand by you in your best and more importantly, in your worst, of times; put an arm around your shoulder and help you hobble through the pain and difficulty when the terrain gets rough. And who don't ask for anything in return but the intangible gift of your friendship.

Thank you, Jack. You know who you are :)

Italian Nannies

Well that's what it sounds like and looks like to me.

Actually, the restaurant's proper name is Italiannies (see the resemblance to Italian Nannies??)

Located at 111 Somerset (the revamped Singapore Power building), the Italian restaurant self-proclaims authenticity with the mantra "We cook more than we eat".

Although, shouldn't a chef eat what he cooks to know whether it's any good?

Well, I love my Italian (country, food...and men!) and a sampling of Italiannies was certainly in order.

Ordered the Bruschettona for an appetiser. Italiannies' version was a more elaborate take on the humble bruschetta - toasted focaccia topped with tomatoes, capers, onions, arugula leaves and a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese.

Bruschettona

It looked really good. But unfortunately the taste test came up short.

The bread was too dry and hard.  Tomatoes were not sweet because they weren't ripe enough, and Italiannies' used the local tomatoes instead of the much sweeter (and more suitable) vine tomatoes or roma tomatoes. There was insufficient olive oil in the mix and just not enough punch of flavour.

Mediterranean food has so much natural goodness and flavour, the explosion of flavours in your mouth should be a natural occurrence. But this dish was just bland.

Clearly Italiannies' motto about cooking more than eating backfired on them in this case. They've been cooking too much to do a taste test.

Gave them a second chance with their Pesto and Prawns pasta dish. We asked for linguine noodles instead of the recommended fusili.

Pesto and Prawns with linguine

Thank goodness this dish saved them some.

Generous serving of prawns paired with a very moist and tasty pesto sauce. The pasta was cooked perfectly al dente with the right amount of chewiness. I have to say the flavours of this dish came together very very nicely.

A pity though, for a self-proclaimed authentic Italian restaurant, they don't make their own pasta noodles from scratch. 

Their fresh fruit shakes were not bad either, a welcome reprieve from a humid evening in Singapore. These are essentially fresh fruit juices blended with ice (not to be confused with their fruit coolers which are served with soda water).

Strawberry and mango fresh fruit shakes

We tried the mango and the strawberry fruit shakes. Both were very refreshing and thirst-quenching, although I personally preferred the mango one more for its stronger fruit oomph.

Overall, I wasn't particularly enthralled by the quality of my meal, and service was also mediocre. On several occasions I had to wave my hand frantically before a manager noticed me and sent a waiter/ess scurrying over.

Doubt I'd go back there again, until food standard improves....

Photos taken with Nikon D5000

Hari - Sedap! - Raya

One of the best things about Singapore is the multi-racial hodgepodge that makes up our 5 million population.

Yep, you read that right. 5-freaking-million people on this little island of a little over 600 sq km. Although at the rate we're reclaiming land from the sea at every possible coastline, one day we might find our north coast adjoined to Malaysia in the same way we merged 7 little islands into one big Jurong Island.

Anyway, back to the point of this entry -- multi-racialism. And all the public holidays that come along with recgonising a myriad of races and religions. Who can complain? :)

Well, Hari Raya Puasa happens to be a new favourite of mine.

A - because it's like Chinese New Year but I don't have to be slaving at home cutting vegetables or cleaning the house or hosting visitors; B- because I get to be the visitor and eat and sit and shake my legs.

Ha. Lest I sound like a bigot, it's really because of the amazing food that the Muslims churn out on their big feast day.

Thanks to my colleague Joh, this is my second year savouring his wife's homecooked delicacies in the comfort of their beautiful home.

Hari Raya Puasa (also known as Eid in the Western hemisphere) marks the end of the Ramadan month of fasting. Ramadan is actually the holiest month in the Islamic calendar, believed to be the month that the Qu'ran was revealed. As one of the 5 Pillars of Islam, the period of fasting is supposed to burn away all sins.

Joh said he lost 5kg after fasting for a month!! That's a lot of sins! :)

So in celebration of that, his wife cooked up a storm for all their guests.

And boy, was I spoiled. Beef rendang, lontong, curry chicken, mutton curry, udang....mmm.....

One of the yummiest snacks on the table was this ikan bilis and peanut keropok (anchovy and peanut cracker). Excellently fried to a perfect thin crispiness, the whiff of fragrant ikan bilis and peanuts catches your breath when you bite into one...

But a celebration is only as sweet as its sweetest offerings, and there were definitely enough sweet goodies to go around at Hari Raya.

My favourite at Joh's house is the kueh kukus which literally means steamed cake. It looks a bit like the traditional English fruit cake but without the alcohol and the heaviness usually associated with the British invention. 

Kueh Kukos (centre focus) and other delectable goodies

I'm pretty sure that the first thing I ate when I entered the house was a slice of kueh kukos, as was the last thing I munched on before taking my leave. Lost count of the number in between :)

And of course, as with all festivals, the most important thing is to visit your friends and relatives to celebrate life together. What's the meaning of happiness if there's no one to share it with??

Here's one of my favourite photos of that afternoon. Featuring Jimmy's adorable (and photo-happy) daughters, Jacelyn and Danielle. That's what a good party does for people - puts a smile on their face! :)

Now I'll have to wait another year before I get to have another helping of beef rendang and kueh kukos....