April 2010

Page 1 of 3.

Click on images below to enlarge:
Takeout Dinner from Jishi (Jesse) on April 2, 2010
Sauteed pea shoots (standard, respectable), sauteed shrimp (okay / eh), pork belly (very tasty, as before), sauteed eggplant (served cold, quite good as as before, though incredibly garlicky, perhaps too much so).	A Shanghai specialty soup, yan1 (salted/cured/marinated) du3 (sincere/true) xian1 (delicious), consisting of salted pork (with layers of fat), bamboo shoots, and tofu knots. I've had this soup before--in fact, this is the second time I had it in two days--and, though everyone else seems excited by it, I think it's nothing special. I forgot to take a picture of the soup before we served it. This is the leftovers.	Dates stuffed with glutinous rice. This is a standard Shanghai dish. I've gradually learned I don't like this dessert; I always find it too sweet. Sometimes it's sweetened with sugar syrup, sometimes honey, but always it's too sweet for me. Di Yin and her dad like this dish, however.
Lunch at Boonna Cafe on April 4, 2010
Boonna Cafe is on a short lane off a major road not far from where I live.	Its pleasant courtyard, much quieter than the nearby road. I haven't yet eaten outside.	Boonna Cafe's cozy interior. Everyone is huddled over his or her sandwich, salad, drink, newspaper, mobile phone, whatever.	My salami panini. Satisfying, perhaps due to the mayo and mustard.
Dinner at Home on April 4, 2010
Di Yin's mom moved in with us after her dad flew back to the states. This is the first meal she cooked; she was excited to cook because she'd been traveling for the past couple weeks and hadn't had the chance. Pictured are chicken soup, bamboo shoots (peppers, neat fibrous texture), goyi berry stalks (tastes wild; also, like a bitter green), and tiny eel with ginger and onions. For dessert we had some rice cakes: black (from black sticky rice flour), yellow (sticky rice pounded with corn), and green (sticky rice colored with spinach). All had red bean paste inside.
Lunch at Yu Xin Sichuan Cuisine on April 5, 2010
Tea-smoked duck. Excellent! At least as good as How Way's version. Di Yin may actually prefer this one because more of the fat rendered out of the skin, making the skin crispier.	Eggplant with garlic sauce in a clay pot. Bleh. The sauce was too sweet. In addition, the eggplant was cut in odd, large shapes, making it uncomfortable to eat. Nonetheless, ignoring the eggplant skin, I liked the texture, the mushiness, of the eggplant itself.	This place had horrible service. It took forever for our food to arrive (despite prodding reminders), and they entirely forgot to give us the rice we ordered (despite asking twice).
Snacks on April 5, 2010
In the Raffles City Mall, with Di Yin's help I got a blended juice at a juice/fruit bar. From the long menu, I selected cucumber and kiwi. Not bad, somewhat tart.	Also in the mall, I picked up a cranberry rye roll from the Singaporean bakery chain Bread Talk.
Dinner at Koyama on April 6, 2010
Di Yin took her mom out to the fancy Japanese restaurant, Koyama. I was there. Here we are, with much of our food arrayed before us.	A tiny cucumber salad topped with spicy beans. Quite good.	Agedashi tofu. Soft tofu with a stretchy skin. I know the usual agedashi tofu is dusted with a starch (e.g., potato) then fried, but this coating was so thin that I never would've guessed it was fried otherwise. Also quite good; I liked it better than most I've had.	Tuna and salmon sashimi. Beautiful fish. Probably the best quality sashimi I've had. (Incidentally, I don't order sashimi much because I generally don't appreciate it.)
Tuna (?) rolls.	Cold soba noodles topped with seaweed. I liked the bite of the noodles but found the dipping sauce boring, despite Di Yin cracking the raw duck egg into it.	Scallop chawanmushi.	Sushi platter. You can play the usual game of asking how many you can identify. I actually ended eating two sushi (where did they all go?), but the two I ate were like any normal sushi joint.
A pitcher of broth that we pour into a bowl with seaweed and seasoning to make soup. I liked the soup a lot.	Broiled unagi (eel) over rice. I thought the unagi was a bit soggy and no better than average. Interestingly, the unagi and the soup came as a pair: we were supposed to consider eating the unagi in the soup. I did so and they went well together.	Assorted mushrooms (those things that look like noodles are enoki mushrooms) cooked in butter. Filling.	Good quality vanilla ice cream for dessert. Di Yin identified it as Haagen-Dazs.
The restaurant made us take off our shoes when entering. Not even slippers are allowed in the sunken booth seats. I mention this because I'm impressed that when we went to leave the restaurant, they took out our shoes and had them ready for us. They keep track of whose shoes are whose.	For context, this meal was about US$43/person, cheaper than the equivalent restaurant would be in the states, especially if you account for the fact that we had too much food.	On the way out of Xintiandi, we came across this long line of taxis. (Notice the green lights receding into the distance.) I guess taxi drivers know they can get a fare here: the kind of people who can afford to eat in this fancy neighborhood are the kind of take taxis everywhere they want to go.
Lunch at Bo Do One - Hong-Kong Style Chinese Cuisine on April 7, 2010
"Fried pork with dried tofu in meggie sauce with rice." Good. I liked the tofu slices. Eating the pork was a pain because it was half fat and I had to on every bite rip the meat from the fat because I didn't want to eat the chunks of fat. The dish tasted strongly of garlic and onions, which are clearly visible in the picture.	The menu entry for my "fried pork with dried tofu in meggie sauce with rice" actually says mei3 ji2 (the English writes this as Meggie or Maggi) dou4 (bean) gan4 (dry) wu3 hua1 rou4 (the three together mean pork belly) fan4 (cooked rice meal). According to wikipedia, "'Maggi' is still synonymous with the brand's "Maggi-Wrze" (Maggi seasoning sauce), a dark, hydrolysed vegetable protein based sauce which is very similar to East Asian soy sauce without actually containing soy." Other places say it tastes like a cross between soy sauce and beef bouillon.	Fried pumpkin cakes. The outside is gooey like melted cheese, but it's actually fried glutinous rice flour. Decent, but I don't think people who lack my love of pumpkin squash will like it.	The menu entry for the pumpkin (nan2 gua1) round-flat-cake (bing3).