Eating in Singapore and Bali

Happy holidays and happy new year, dear reader!  I hope the season has treated you all well, however you chose to spend it. I've had the delightfully good fortune of spending the past couple weeks in southeast Asia, mostly with my sister Melanie's family in Singapore. While Singapore is a (_very_) long way to travel to see my favorite niece, it's also an amazing place to eat. I've discussed this on Pearwise before.

While I'm told Singapore has a great and interesting top-end restaurant scene, my favorite thing to do here is eat in small, local restaurants and hawker centers. I've eaten local food nearly every day since arriving here, and will share a few of my favorites with you here.

Murtabak and curry gravy

On the first day (before Melanie got back from a separate vacation), I went to a little Malaysian restaurant nearby that serves great murtabak. This is a fried pancake that's stuffed with mutton (or other meat options) cooked with garlic and onions. It's served with a curry gravy (much like a sambhar) and some sliced cucumbers. I like to dip bits of the pancake into the gravy or sometimes pour a little on top of each bite. It is extremely unhealthy and extraordinarily delicious.

Idlis, chutneys and dhal

Another favorite treat not local to Singapore, but entirely appropriate for the Little India neighborhood where Melanie et al. live is idlis and dosas. Our favorite spot for these is the Murugan idli shop (which is apparently a chain). Idlis are steamed pancakes made from a fermented batter of rice flour (of a particular type) and lentil flour. Dosas, as you may know, are very large, flat crepe-like pancakes made from a similar batter that are wrapped around a filling. At Murugan, these are served on a banana leaf with several types of chutney (here there's coconut, tomato, coriander and mint), and a bowl of dhal. You only pay for the pancake items. They will keep refilling the chutneys and dhal as long as you're sitting there. Idlis have a wonderful spongy texture that sops up the chutneys and a pleasant, slightly sour taste. I'd actually really like to make these myself, so I bought an idli steaming pan and you should watch for a post on my experience. And if you happen to be from South India, I welcome your advice.

Chili Crab

We did have one higher-end meal in terms of price, though it was a pretty simple dish. Singapore is known for chilli crab, a dish in which crabs are stir-fried in a sweet and spicy tomato-based sauce. As with other large shellfish, it's a lot of effort and a fairly messy endeavor, but the meat is tender and the sauce is delicious! The crab was served with some fried buns that were also pretty tasty, and we also had a mango salad with duck and some fried rice.

Seafood dish

Another highlight was when my friend Jude took me to a great little place just outside Chinatown where we had various wok-cooked specialties that I loved eating, but confess that I left ordering in Jude's able hands and don't recall the details. Among other things, we had some sort of wok-fried wide noodle dish and a seafood stew of sorts in a thickened sauce.

Eating prawn mee at the Old Airport
Road Hawker Centre

Plus Melanie and I went to the famous Old Airport Road Hawker Centre. There, we tried several recommended dishes including prawn mee (thin yellow noodles in a rich broth with prawns); char kway teow (fried rice noodles in a spicy brown sauce with Chinese sausage, vegetables, crispy bits of lard and fishcake); chee cheong fun (a large filled rice noodle roll covered in sweet soy sauce), and a curry puff (spicy curry encased in a puff pastry shell and deep fried). This was not a meal recommended by cardiologists, but seriously delicious.

Tropical fruits in Bali

There were many more highlights, of course. Fabulous fresh tropical fruits like mangosteens, tamarillos, soursop, mangoes, rambutans and passionfruit.  A weekend in Bali with plenty of satay, nasi goreng and nasi campur. Soup dumplings at Din Tai Fung. Laksa and otah at 328 Katong. So very much tastiness.

I also picked up a really nice Peranakan cookbook, so stay tuned for some posts on my experiences trying to recreate some of these dishes in Chicago!

Oatmeal Raisin Ice Cream

I've said this here before, but one of my favorite things about food is that the possibilities of what you can do with it are virtually limitless. We are mostly constrained by tradition and lack of imagination; and it can be fun to play with people's expectations. Ice cream can be a great way to do this because it is such a tasty canvas, and people's expectations are so often constrained by what's commercially available.

That's what excited me about David Lebovitz's recipe for oatmeal raisin ice cream. I had never had or heard of oatmeal raisin ice cream. Have you? Surely you've eaten cookies by that name; but probably not ice cream. This recipe takes the cookie as its inspiration and aims to replicate the experience in oatmeal form. This, as you might imagine, is not without challenges.

The first challenge is how to get oatmeal into ice cream. Simply tossing some raw oats into a custard base is probably not the tastiest way to do this, except perhaps if one is making ice cream for horses (who eat raw oats). Lebovitz solves this problem by making an "oatmeal praline" (he actually uses "praline" as a verb, but I didn't have the heart to do that). To do this, toast some rolled oats on a baking sheet in the oven while simultaneously melting some sugar in a large skillet on the stove. Once the oats are brown and fragrant, mix them into the just-caramelized sugar. Then pour this mixture onto a silpat-lined baking sheet to harden. Once hardened, break into small bits in the food processor. Ok, problem one solved.

The second challenge is the raisins. Dumped right into the ice cream they'd freeze and be hard little bug-like rocks. The solution: moisten them with syrup, and keep them soft with alcohol. The raisins get gently cooked in a sugar syrup, to which a couple tablespoons of whiskey are added at the end of the cooking. The raisins absorb the syrup and whiskey, so they are plump and sweet; and they stay soft and chewy in the freezer.


Finally, the ice cream itself. For this, Lebovitz uses a standard egg yolk custard, but it's sweetened mostly with brown sugar for color and a deeper flavor. A healthy dose of cinnamon is added as well, which you can see speckled in the mix.

This custard is then frozen in the ice cream maker, with the oatmeal praline and raisins tossed in just as it solidifies. A delicious treat!

In other news, I'm back in Singapore...so stay tuned for some Asian photos and treats!