CHINA: Happy Lunar New Year~ It's Spider Time!

Gong Xi Fa Cai, ladles and jellyspoons!! (note that it does not actually mean 'Happy New Year', it's just an associated phrase)

Songie: "Seriously? How lame are we gonna be. Oh okay, this lame. Wow."

Jia reporting in today (With Song's input here and there)~Yes, we know, there's been some period of silence and its not exactly the first day of CNY but there are actually 15 days before the actual festivities end so we technically aren't late. This isn't quite a review regarding restaurants because it was rude to the elders at the table to take your phone out during meals but I still managed a few photos but no notes... We reviewed what we could. NB: This will be a photo heavy and seemingly long post, with some touristy photos chucked in.

Anyway the reason for our title is that we recently went to China for almost a week and when we got back it was new year and then packing to go home, etc, etc. We started off in Beijing for a day, then Harbin for a few days then the last day in Beijing, then the next day we set off home.

Beijing

On the first night we arrived we went to some place apparently quite famous for specialising in duck dishes (and they really did just do duck dishes well. When asking the waiters about what to get here, all they could tell us about was their duck). Because I was rather sleepy not to mention out of my depth in this foreign country, I wasn't able to get the name for you guys. It was opposite some popular department store mall though,as I recall our guide telling us.

This is apparently the name but sorry I can't translate it...

Steamed chicken, quite nice. 

Pear juice on the side, nothing artificial about it, delicious.

Duck tongue. I had the same reaction you probably just had but it was actually quite nice, aside from the unexpected bone inside.

Some other duck part I presume...

some stir-fried duck dish, vaguely spicy

Fish and Mu Er(black tree fungus) soup, no duck involved. I had the only bony piece in the whole thing, and i found the soup sour.

Xiao LongBao with duck instead of the usual meats. Not bad.

Watched the guy carve up the duck expertly in front of us

This was indeed part of the Peking Duck set, as those of you who frequent Chinese restaurants would know; after all, why not have the local specialty when in Peking/Beijing?

It looks sooo good right. It was, but quite fatty which was hard to stomach, personally. (No idea what she's on about, I LOVED it, so I could see why this was one of the more popular places for Peking Duck)

Cute but rather twisted duck plate where the duck must look at it's own remains....

Since our hotels had buffet breakfasts, our breakfasts in both Beijing and Harbin were something like this most days.

Harbin

We didn't really eat much of note here. Oh in China I like how the orders are taken down via some electronic device. I don't like how even if there are no smoking signs they are basically rules made to be broken. It's thoroughly unpleasant to eat food with cigarette smoke wafting up your nose and ruining the aroma of the food. -15 degrees Celsius was bearable with many layers. There were quite a few places that opened up late, and even 24/7 restaurants with (relatively)nice food, not just maccas and the like. We went to places like The King of Dumplings(again the smoke thing, but the dumplings were nice), Tiger Topoki(not recommended, the fish flavoured things were anything but fish like. Singapore's fish balls and fish cakes beat them 100x over), and some other places we didn't get the names of(sorry!!), but we know it had some delicious ox tail dish where you could eat the tender meat off the bones with a plastic glove over your hand(so handy), and use a small straw to suck the marrow out of it. It sounds barbaric I know but it was truly delicious, if a little fatty.

Arriving at the Harbin train station after 7 long hours on the train from Beijing to Harbin.

Train food is better than airplane food, just saying.

Ice festival on the river. Pretty cool ;D

 Snow sculptures

 It was titled 'Minion Kingdom'

 Ice sculptures

IT IS LIFE SIZED. All the English A students, Fitzgerald anyone ;)?

Ice Bar, a good place to chill ;D (Yes I am having the time of my life here)

Beijing again

Apparently a famous place for hot pot.

It was suuuper crowded but it was nice to see the air filled with hot pot steam rather than cigarette smoke.

It was a very deep metal bowl filled with hot, boiling water, and at the centre the embers were kept, and underneath there was probably a candle to keep it warm. (I'm not too sure about this. From what I THINK we were told, bear in mind my limited chinese, I believe it was actually a charcoal heated hotpot which was meant to be more natural and make it taste better but I don't think they really understood how that was meant to work seeing as it wasn't cooked via charcoal.. Just by boiling water)

 We ordered lots of mutton, mushrooms and vegetables. The bowl with the brown stuff in it has sauce, and it was really, really strong and not in a nice way. I suppose I could only compare it to oyster sauce straight from a bottle and not diluted, but maybe with mayonnaise thrown in too. They also gave us a drink with a name that Songie and I translated into "Sour Lady"(that's most likely not the actual translation since we didn't hear properly but it really fit), and Songie made up a story of why she was so sour every time he took a sip. It was truly sour. Like your face would just look like you sucked a lemon if you drank it. I think it was some sour plum drink. I was wishing so badly for tea to be honest.

Old window inside

Went to this store to pick different types of candy after dinner.

30yuan / kg!.... I think... 

Street food stalls 5 mins walk from the hotel

Was pretty full from dinner but otherwise would have tried these. I've seen them in Korea but again was too full at the time.

Generic things to deep fry

 Basically they display the things, and the prices are generally shown attached to the top of the stall, but the names are in Chinese. Once you pick what you want they'll deep-fry it for you in front of you, and maybe garnish with things if necessary.

'allo guv'nor

I was intrigued by these, and they turned out to be silk worms.

In the process of being garnished.

 The silk worms took a while for me to bring myself to eat, telling myself it was for you guys; our readers. I figured since I was here I'd try these somewhat exotic foods. Once I got past the initial "It's a freaking silk worm" I took a bite. The skin was a bit hard but it was thin and a bit crunchy, and the added flavouring on top was pretty good, just a bit of spices. The inside was a bit crumbly and soft like liver, and had a similar flavour too. While probably not something I would try again, it was definitely edible.

scorpions, silk worms, and crickets

We passed some other stalls with even more exotic skewers... Surprisingly this time it was Songie who decided he wanted to try something foreign; the scorpion.

non-poisonous, apparently.

We chose the smaller scorpions.  The top one is bigger though.

 The scorpions had a much more pleasant taste, though I think it had less to do with the scorpion and more to do with the size and the deep fryer oil. It was really crunchy and it tasted like some salty, garlic-y chip. Albeit with a lot of sharp edges. 

crickets

 Crickets, they tasted about the same as the scorpion with a slight and subtle variation in taste but essentially the crunchy texture and salty flavour remained the same.

Side profile

jackfruit stall. Or maybe it was durian. hard to tell.

There were actually quite a lot of foreigners around and they seemed horrified when we were eating the crickets and such. It was pretty funny.

Naturally he had to go have some durian/jackfruit snack.

Now this; this was very hard to stomach. I was very, very against trying this.

The most expensive was probably the tarantula at 80yuan while the rest were generally at 15 or 20 yuan. 

Starfish~ however they looked too big so if we didn't like it then we still had to eat the whole thing.

 Regarding the starfish they were bigger than my hand so you can understand why we were reluctant to try it. However my father told us later that you dont actually eat the starfish, you break it open at the centre and eat the inside. Makes more sense I suppose.

Snake lollipops anyone?

Yes. We chose the tarantula. 

Okay the spider. The big. Fat. Spider. This too was deep fried and we stared at it in horror. (At this point I actually started shuddering at what I had just signed myself up to do. Note: when you buy beware of the scams they pull. I asked the stall owner how much teh spider was, CLEARLY pointing to the goddamn spider. He replied 15 yuan 15 yuan. I proceeded to ask about 3-4 more times to make sure and only BECAUSE it was so cheap I decided to go with it. I was horrified to find out that he had pulled a real fast one and charged me 80 for it instead. He then said it was all on the sign which, to be fair, it was. But I cant read chinese, I don't even know the word for spider. You can tell I'm still pretty miffed about that. Moving on..) Now, unlike the others, this one had a taste. It was terrible. The initial taste was okay, but the texture was slightly furry and a bit tough, it wasn't crunchy like the others at all. It was a little bit soft, like toast that you toasted but sorta just left out and forgot to eat and when you came back it was still sort of toasted but not as perfect. And the taste. It began as the others did; some salt and some garlic taste, but it was followed by this strange aftertaste that was almost numbing, and personally gave me the idea of something rotting. It was only very faint though, but still enough to be there. Songie didn't enjoy that one at all, and it was probably worse since i let him have the majority seeing as he bought it. Yea, there is no way we're exaggerating this one here. Like honestly, only try this if you're REALLY feeling adventurous and even then, approach with caution. Your only excuse to complain about having this even though we've warned you how bad this is, is that if you're absolutely off your face and have no idea what you're doing. I almost puked and I haven't done that since I was.. 12?

I also tried some beetle after I ate the spider but i think the spider taste just overpowered the beetle so I couldn't enjoy it. Not that beetles were that enjoyable to start with anyways. 

They look glorious, amiright?

We cleansed our palates with some toffee strawberries on a skewer. Previously this was 5 yuan but somehow it became 15 yuan that night. Or perhaps I heard wrong the first time. In any case, it was delicious. the thin(but thicker in some parts) layer of caramelised sugar coating the strawberrry was kept crisp by the cool air, but it broke easily and the strawberry itself was red, juicy and delicious; making it a perfect combination. Between the toffee grapes we had in Germany and these, I would have trouble deciding which was better. The only thing with these strawberry skewers is that they have some small, sour apple type thing at the bottom posing as a strawberry; also glazed, but I cannot fathom why they thought such a comparitively sour thing would be the taste they thought you wanted to finish on. I say apple type thing but it only looks like an apple; the inside is some sort of medium sized pip, and size wise it would be about the size of a table tennis ball. 

In any case that wraps up our trip to China, we will leave you with some obligatory tourist shots and more of the first picture.

Not sure but I think his pompous pose was because we were on Wangfujie Rd, which is something to do with the emperors of the past. Or because finally someone is driving him about instead of vice versa ;)

window shopping

le awkward me because I'm not in many of these, i realised.

Happy Year of the Goat from The Lambs!!

SINGAPORE: Icecream sandwich

Hellooo ladles and jelly spoons :D

Joke time(got it off the net):

The young man entered the Ice Cream Shop at the amusement park and asked, "What kinds of ice cream do you have?"

"Vanilla, chocolate, strawberry," the girl wheezed as she spoke, patted her chest and seemed unable to continue.

"Do you have laryngitis?" the young man asked sympathetically.

"Nope," she whispered, "just vanilla, chocolate and strawberry."

This post's topic is ice-cream sandwiches. I know, doesn't seem like an actual thing but it totally is! You can probably find it in some cafes in Singapore too but most often its found on the street in a busy area in a cart and an umbrella over it. (Song here. Most often found frequently along Orchard Road if you all don't want to go hunting for this)




Bro queuing. was a hot day so everyone was in line haha

It seems you can order up to 20 sandwiches, or perhaps more but on the paper the largest amount I saw was 20 (But honestly who on Earth would order 20 sandwiches, unless its for a party obviously. I mean, they're really good but..20??) It can come in between biscuit or bread, and it's $1.20 SGD for one. The line seemed pretty long at first, but over time it got shorter. I suppose people got many sandwiches at once, since the owner is actually quite efficient for an old man, and our sandwich was done in less than 3 minutes. (Okay I disagree with this. 3 minutes is considered efficient for an ice cream sandwich? It's literally chopping a block of ice cream and putting it between two slices of bread or biscuit.. Let's face it it's not fine dining haha)

The owner cutting up the icecream

Songie being greedy with his two sandwiches. Jk he shared the vanilla with me.

 It's a childhood treat for me and Songie, and I think it could be the same guy with his wife that I had my first one from years ago, also on Orchard. Totally possible since people seem to retire pretty late around here. There's a range of flavours like classic vanilla, mint, chocolate and stuff like mango, yam and durian. The bread they use is the usual Asian bread, which if you guys haven't tried its softer and has a hint of sweetness in it even without any spread.



durian



vanilla

Overall this is a delectable treat that is so refreshing(not to mention super affordable) on a hot day(which is pretty much everyday) in Singapore.

A selfie just cos'.

Cheers,
The Lambs

SINGAPORE: Tampopo

Greetings ladles and jellyspoons,

While we have been talking about hawker centre food a lot, we do eat at other places, such as this time when we ate at Takashimaya, a popular shopping mall on Orchard Rd. This .. restaurant I suppose, is called Tampopo, which I believe means dandelion in Japanese. (Song here: Off topic, there's a pretty good manga called Tanpopo, quite old, good though..)

It was a little crowded considering it was no longer lunch time but maybe lunch is eaten late in Singapore. It seems to be a family restaurant, and quite popular. It has art on the walls but I wouldn't consider it especially decorated in Japanese things as most Japanese restaurants are. It's a nice, clean and bright area to eat with a nice atmosphere for maybe a casual date or something with friends. It's bright and welcoming and doesn't feel like there's much of a standard for diners to have. The waitress was attentive and cleared the table quickly, and was nice to kids so that's a plus.

I ordered the chef recommended curry, pictured above.

Songie ordered a chef recommended curry too, but a soup type while mine was a pork Katsu one. His had beef and udon. The beef in it was few and far between it seemed like there was some sort of famine happening, but on the other hand, was so tender and just melted in your mouth. I guess the udon was nice too, I'll admit I'm not a huge fan of udon so yeah. They had a good texture to them though. The curry was a bit spicy but bearable, perhaps a result of our Singapore food training ;) It was a pretty filling dish. However, that being said, I could probably get filled up on water alone as well. Just. Not. Enough. Meat. For $20 ish SGD, I expect at least double of what I received. Kind of ridiculous.

so happy haha

Mine was just a huge plate with rice, salad and Katsu, with watermelon on the side. The curry was served on the side in a shallow dish with a cut up boiled egg. It kinda looked like something to dip my katsu in rather than an actual curry. The taste was similar to the curry from You Japanese Dining, so vaguely spicy but not enough to really bother you. It was very mild but it seemed like packet curry, I guess? Was a bit bland to what I was expecting I suppose.

It was definitely filling but didn't seem worth the $21 I paid. Maybe it's just in comparison with hawker centre food prices. Essentially spent almost $50 on 2 dishes though, and that kinda irks me somehow. However I will also consider the fact it was in Takashimaya which seems to up the prices of everything, presumably just because of the cost of being in such an area. So the food is alright and the price is alright if you think about the area, but it's probably not somewhere I would go specially, just on a whim. From this post alone you can probably tell how the eating scene is in Singapore. To eat local food, which to us is exotic, worth it, and satisfying, is cheap because, it's local. Almost every small area of Singapore will serve similar things. However, go to a more modern setting, such as places on Orchard, and you'll find prices soaring and food becoming really similar to what we see in New Zealand. It's great to break the monotony of local food and to rub shoulders with the more wealthy but other than that, I don't think it's worth anything more than an experience.

Cheers,
The Lambs 

SINGAPORE: Artease and Bun Master (This is a food review don't worry!)

Greetings Ladles and Jellyspoons!

Song here, just reassuring readers who may be slightly confused  both Artease and Bun Master are real food places. The latter is not some strange exercise machine. Anyways..

So last evening we got a call saying that we'd be by ourselves for dinner that night (we're usually taken out by our brother and co.) and to be honest, making a choice wasn't something we'd done in a while. After thinking about it for a while we realized, there was simply too much choice and then we decided that we were probably too lazy to go anywhere spectacu... I'm sorry, did I say lazy? I meant that for you wonderful readers, we decided to show you some of the less local stuff that you can try, because we know that even though Char Siew and Fish ball soup may be great, it starts becoming less great if you have it everyday for a month. So let's get started!

For those who have gotten the hang of the train system you can take the Green line to reach Tanjong Plaza and follow the signs for exit A to Tanjong Pagar Plaza which is near to where both places are found.

Artease is a little shop located near the outside Tanjong Pagar Plaza. I suppose they were going for a small cafe/eatery but to be honest it pretty much looks like an upgraded hawker centre stall. From what we saw of their menu they serve two things; drinks and sandwiches. However when I looked at their website they had a range of pastries as well. For more info you can just head over to here for the complete menu.

It's useful to note that they close at 8:30pm on the day we went (Friday) which, is kind of surprising seeing as most Singapore shops don't close till about 10 onwards. But the staff there were real troopers even when we arrived at 8:20pm and didn't complain as we placed our order (yes I know we sound like bad customers but we did order to takeaway!) We only managed to try the honey mustard chicken sandwich, as we both felt like the same one, but to be honest it felt like it was the only one worth getting although the egg sandwich might have been a contender if they didn't make the honey mustard chicken one look so tempting. Actually the rest looked so overly simple like cheese and ham or tuna so the chicken was really the only viable option.

When we got our food, they came in a paper bag, so it really felt like a packed lunch, nice touch. When I opened mine though, I kind of thought that they might have given me the wrong order because it certainly looked nothing like the picture, nor did it look anything like chicken. It resembled a tuna sandwich and was about to complain but my sister had the exact same thing. So false-ish advertising but to be fair it probably wouldn't have fit in the sandwich if it was a whole piece of chicken, and they'd probably have to use more to fill the sandwich so.. smart move Artease. The taste was, nice, can't really taste the honey or the mustard, more like a slightly bland mix of the two. Don't get me wrong, it's not like the sandwich had NO flavor it just wasn't what I thought it would be like. The texture of the sandwich was well, pretty much like tuna. The grilled sandwich toast was nice though, albeit kind of oily but that just added to the experience.

We also ordered a strawberry green tea milk tea (that's a mouthful I know), a standard milk tea, and a hazelnut ice chocolate (starting to sound like a Starbucks yet?). The prep time was pretty standard so nothing special to comment about it (so why I'm still typing about this I have no idea). Another interesting thing about this place is that you can choose the percentage of sugar, from 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and then 100%. I'm not sure how you'd manage to make a caramel milk tea 0% sweet but maybe I'll find out one day. The hazelnut ice chocolate was a tad bit disappointing, you could taste a real subtle hint of hazelnut but when I buy something that has hazelnut IN the name, I expect it to be able to taste it in at least 75% of the product. Basically tasted like a Milo with a dash of hazelnut thrown in.

The strawberry milk tea was confusing to the tastebuds, to say the least. On one hand it had the bitter flavour of green tea that was quite strong, and yet at the same time there was the taste of strawberry milk in the background that you had a better impression of with the aftertaste. Also there were little strawberry seeds at the bottom, that was yum. Also, there's a 2 hour time limit to drink it, presumably so the flavour stays the same.

Moving onto the Bun Master.

Didn't get to try it :(

Aside from it's weird name this place is actually really decent. They only have a few products to sell but most of them, if not all, are notable. So if you ever get a chance to try this place out I would recommend it. From what I see on their Facebook page, they have two stores. One, in Tanjong Pagar, the other in Toa Payoh, but if anyone knows of any others or realizes that I didn't read it properly, feel free to let me know in the comments below. We'll just review the really notable ones because well, they're the ones you definitely have to try, but at about 0.90 cents a bun, you can pretty much grab one of everything without feeling the burn in your wallet.

One of the buns you absolutely HAVE to try is the HK style Polo Bun. They make it so the top is crispy, and this combined with the soft bun and the warm char siew inside makes for a pretty darn good bun for 90 cents.

The next one would have to be the Golden sand bun. I know this sounds super weird but hey, you're buying from a store called the Bun Master so surely you didn't expect it to be normal. It's not sand, but custard inside. Though I can't really explain it, it's similar to the Crystal Jade steamed egg custard bun, so its a more liquid-like custard. Either way it's delicious when warm (and note I do say when warm because when it gets cold it becomes kinda weird to eat. You could always reheat it if you wanted to bring it home though). They supposedly have this amazing bun called the magical milk bun but we didn't see it that day but if we do get to try it we'll update this, or someone can, again, leave us a comment on how it was. Do NOT confuse  with the standard polo bun and come after me with pitchforks and torches saying I didn't warn you. (I'm totally not saying this from experience or anything..ha...ha.. it's not like I ordered 6 of them only realizing when we got home that they were the wrong ones)

So these two stores are something to add a little variety to your Singapore experience. I would probably just recommend Artease for it's friendly staff, I think it's products still need a fair bit more work but if you're craving a sandwich then head over to there (After typing about sandwiches, that's exactly what I'm craving right now, so you'll be sure to see a post about sandwiches soon) but I think there'd be a ton of other places to have a sandwich that would probably open till a later time too. I definitely recommend heading over to Bun Master to check out the buns I talked about, it would be well worth the trip.

Cheers,
The Lambs