slosh down the pepper!

It was a weekend of eating!

It started with Saturday afternoon where I met up with the girls at Manpuku@Tampines One to celebrate G's & my birthday. Somehow, our appetites got smaller as we grow older. Between the 4 of us, we shared a bowl of miso cha siew ramen with extra corn topping, a plate of mushroom curry rice, a plate of omu rice accompanied with a slice of pork katsu, an okonomiyaki with prawn fillings, one banana caramel tart, one strawberry tart, one grapefruit tart, and 4 glasses of drinks. The bill came up to only about $90, much less than what I would expect to pay for a birthday treat.

I still remembered our first treat held in Marche. That already in itself was $70-$90. At a time when we were all poor university students, it was quite a meal, at least in cost. The birthday girl will get a gift in return. I can't recall how we had this idea of celebrating birthdays. And the birthday girl is actually the one giving the treat, in contrary to most friends' of which we heard.

10 years down the road, this practice developed into something simpler. I think it started with me asking for angpow instead of a gift. Rather than taxing on the girls' brain power to guess and think of what I really wanted, I gave them an easier time by getting the money instead. Initially, they objected strongly to the idea and insisted on giving stuff like clothes, bags etc. But gradually they ran out of ideas of what to get for me, and relented. :-p

Next, I travelled to Boon Tong Kee situated next to Boon Keng MRT to meet up my parents for a Father Day cum my birthday celebration. Even more amazingly, 5 of us (3 females and 2 males) eating only half a white chicken, one small plate of stir fried kailan, one small plate of deep-fried golden bean curd, and a bowl of rice/porridge each! The entire bill was only $40! Super cheap.

I took the porridge since I was already full from the Manpuku lunch. It was awfully bland and watery. Not nice at all. I ought have taken the rice if I knew they served chicken rice. The stir fried kailan was surprisingly crunchy and green. And the beancurd is quite tasty, with a really crispy crust holding within it soft smooth cube of curd. The chilli dip and dark soya sauce are also thick and not the watery stuff you get in most hawker centres.

I got a feeling that everybody else wasn't entirely full due to the minimized portion. Yet my brother didn't want to order when asked to. Too bad Tempest had to attend a wedding, dinner else we could have dared to order more varieties or bigger portions.

This place is still worth a second visit since there are so many other dishes that I haven't tried. And most of the dishes are quite reasonably priced. Overall pretty satisfying.



The next day, I managed to pull Tempest out of his bed to go jogging at the gym. Though it was only a half an hour jog (maybe less), we assured ourselves that we had done enough to deserve a buffet. Afterall, we hit our target weight for the week, and it was my birthday, and Tempest got a new job...

We called up S & GZ about the durian buffet they kept inducing us to go. Yet unfortunately they can't make it. Therefore we ended up at Hanabi at Katong Mall.

The anticipation we had were far greater than our appetite. Not that the food was lousy, some were quite tasty, like the yaki niku (stir fried beef in some sauce), salmon sashimi, prawn fritters with wasabi mayo.. I also gotta give special mention to the tako sashimi - it was coiled around lemon slices so that when you bite into the thinly-sliced chewy meat, it had a refreshing zest to it! It's quite sad when they didn't do the same with the other sashimi, not even placing lemon slices by the plate they serve in.

What surprises me as an after-thought was that Tempest only took 2 tempura prawns! Usually during buffets, this guy would chiong for the prawns, mussels and anything that swim in the sea. We had a total of 3 rounds - serving size for the first 2 rounds were alright, but the 3rd round's appeared slightly larger, especially the prawn fritters maki. We were told that there would be only 3 pieces, but each piece is as good as 2 pieces! The tiny prawn was surrounded by a thick layer of sushi rice! Tempest was reminded of the same thing happening when he had the buffet at Tung Lok. We therefore concluded that it must be a ploy of the restaurant to stop us from eating further by packing larger servings and making it saltier.

Comparing this to the times we had kuishin-bo buffet, this was probably only 50% of our usual food intake. No more the "shiok-ness" of eating mounds of food! Not a bad idea actually, when we were trying hard to shed the extra fats and flesh hugging tightly onto us!!