Food Friday 9

Here we are once again.  Another week down and another post to recap the Singaporean pastime of eating.

Let me start by saying that this past week I took things pretty easy.  While I loved having guests to help fill the extra space in my apartment for a solid 6 weeks, I have taken the time to unwind after work and get some me time.  As a natural extrovert, I highly enjoy talking to and spending time with people.  However, in the past few years I've had a lot of time living on my own and farther away from friends and family.  One of the biggest lessons I've had to learn is using alone time to recharge me.  So the past few days I've taken the quiet after work hours to go to the gym, cook my own dinners, and just plain relax.  It was a wonderful and fun 6 weeks having guests and there are more to come, but I appreciate getting some time to recharge.

Reasoning for the above paragraph?  To better explain my lack of a variety of dishes to post about.  I kept it reasonably easy this week, meaning I made a huge batch of rice on Monday that lasted me through the week and required simple additions of veggies and tofu to make complete meals.

Enough’s enough, let’s get you all to the real point of this week’s post, the eats!

Sunday was the day that Glenn, Ethan, and I went to East Coast Park (after turning down the option to wait in a queue for 2+ hours).  Before getting on our bikes we had to make sure we were properly fueled.  Plus we had a Singaporean with us and we had to make sure we got a good lunch in us.  We walked around the hawker center in the park before splitting up to get a few different dishes to share.  And lucky for me everything I ate was a new dish meaning I exceeded my weekly goal!

My task was to get popiah.  This is a wrapped filled with lots of stuff and it was gooood!  Want a better explanation?  Fine you win.  It’s sort of like a spring roll in that it’s a wheat crepe-like wrap filled with turnip, jicama, bean sprouts, carrots, peanuts, and maybe some other stuff.  It’s difficult to tell exactly goes into most dishes at a hawker and is also why I stayed away when Niles was here with his peanut allergy.  But I do have to say that I will definitely be trying popiah again in the future.  Review = good!

Popiah

My second task was to also get fried carrot cake “Chai tow kway”.  Ok now all you westerners don’t say ew yet!  This has nothing to do with the delicious spice carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and those cute little frosting carrots on top (though I’d be more than happy to have a piece of that right now) but back to the point.  See the word for carrot also is the same for radish and turnip, therefore meaning this dish really contains radish.  The best way I can describe it is as a potato omelet.  Don’t knock it til you try it!  It’s good, but definitely something I couldn't eat alone as its pretty dense.

Fried Carrot Cake

 Ethan’s task was laksa which unfortunately we tried to get while Amber was here but were out of luck!  Laksa comes about from a mix of Chinese and Malay cuisine.  It’s a noodle soup dish that has a spicy, curry and coconut milk type broth.  The flavor was very good and for those who enjoy curry, this is a dish to try.  While I’m never a fan of the weird fish cake stuff here, the rest of the dish was yummy.

Laksa

Glenn picked out pork noodles and a green veggie in the far left of the picture below.  I wasn't too hungry at lunch so I didn't each much of those dishes.

Our entire feast!

And to cap off lunch I went with coconut water, from a real BIG coconut!  The inside white flesh of the coconut didn't taste like what I know to be coconut, is that weird?  My only guess is that there are many species of coconut and this one looks obviously a bit different than the usual brown ones we see in the US.  Thoughts?
                

Well that rounds out my post for this week, sorry there wasn't more to share with you all but I hope you all learned something new nonetheless!

Have a great weekend and as always feel free to post something new you ate this week!