Eating in Singapore

My original title for this blog was "Dining in Singapore", but "dining" seems too lofty a term for our eating experiences. Yesterday, Joe and Jill took us to a hawker centre, an outdoor complex filled with stalls selling a large variety of Asian foods. We especially loved the refreshing fruit shakes and all the types of seafood that one can get freshly grilled. There was even abalone for those willing to pay the price for it. We got to sample chili squid, satay chicken and beef, Asian fried rice and a big succulent prawn smothered in garlic, shown above. However, the best dish, in my mind, was the wonderfully gooey oyster omelet in the photo below. Strangely, the only other person in our party willing to share it with me was my brother Joe.


We loved the Asian food courts in Singapore. These food courts can be found at most tourist attractions and in practically every mall (and there are many malls here). It is easy to get a complete meal for the equivalent of $3 or $4 Canadian dollars, and one can choose from Chinese, Malay, Indonesian, Indian, Japanese and Korean cuisines.


At the food courts, you can finish off your meal with a delicious low-fat fruit dessert. I was impressed by the fact that you can buy a variety of fresh fruit by the piece, but what really stunned me was finding out that I can get the following for only $2 (or $1.70 CDN) :


Black grass jelly over crushed ice doused with syrup and topped with longan fruit. Dessert just doesn't get better than this!!

We had other terrific dining experiences, too many to describe fully here, but these included:

• Chili crab and black-pepper crab at the famous Long Beach Seafood Restaurant.
• A very good Chinese lunch at a little back-street restaurant that Jill wandered into, after our yarn-shopping expedition in Chinatown.
• A hearty Indian meal in Little India, eaten on a big banana leaf.
• Excellent home-cooking by Joe and Jill's live-in nanny, Basil.
• And finally, the requisite over-priced but tasty Singapore Sling at Raffles Hotel.