Friday, June 18, 2010

Singapore Midtown Lunch - What Goes In, Must Come Out

First bout of diarrhea over here... Not sure if it's all the spicy food, or an unclean spoon in one of the hawker centers/food courts.  Anyways, charcoal and lots of water are the main things on the menu for next 24 hours.

I had a 7am meeting with NY (7pm EST) here that got cancelled at 7am (grrr!) and so the boss brought everyone breakfast - from Toast Box I believe.  Mine was a plastic container filled with Mee Siam - thin cellophane noodles doused in a sweet & sour curry sauce with half a hard-boiled egg thrown in for good measure.  In Cantonese, mein (pronounced like mean) is noodles, but here they use "mee", which Connie guesses is the Hokkien dialect version.  Hokkien is a widely-used Chinese dialect in Singapore.  Mandarin, which also uses some kind of n sound though not quite the same as in the Cantonese \version of mein, is the predominant dialect but Hokkien is ubiquitous.  Siam refers to Thailand.  Mee Siam.  It was a bit too sour for my liking, but I did enjoy the slick noodles, and somehow the egg manages to stay white and taste very much like an egg, which provides a much needed relief to the complexity of flavors in this dish.  Might try it again one day, if I ever run out of other things to try.

On the way back from the clinic with our tummy medicine, Connie and I stopped at Banquet food court (right next to Raffles Hospital, so we know it really well by now) for lunch - got some fish porridge ($4.50 and mediocre) and Yong Tau Fu ($3.90 with a good variety of leafy greens at this particular counter).  The seaweed Connie chose was a bit tough and maybe not best for our current digestive state).  But just cause I'm sick it doesn't mean I'm gonna stop sampling the goods...

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