The Grand Aussie Tour

With some (okay, a lot) of time on our hands, Ed and I thought we would take a not-so-short trip to unwind, recharge and reflect. We contemplated numerous options - we ruled out Europe since we'll be heading in that direction next year for some work; we considered Alaska but got freaked out when we read that we'd have difficulty booking accommodation and especially renting a car if we hadn't already done so at least three months in advance; and we would have done a Grand South-East Asia trip if our friends did not remind us that we could always visit various parts of our neighbouring countries over many short trips given how accessible they were from Singapore. 

After much contemplation, and fighting our inner desire to go to the less travelled path, we chose Australia. Neither of us had been there much in our adult years. We thought we had plenty of time, but it turns out the two months was just enough to scrape the surface of the huge and beautiful country. We went there with certain expectations but had them surpassed and lapped, and achieved more than what we thought we would.

There are plenty of guide books and internet resources for places to spend the night in, things to see and food to eat in Australia. We found ourselves visiting Urbanspoon very often when deciding where to eat (nearby) for crowd-sourced reviews and ratings, and were recommended Beanhunter for the coffee-joint equivalent. They gave more up-to-date information such as the opening/closing hours or whether the standard of the food dropped. 

There were still a few things that really stood out to us. These were places we would certain return to in future when we visit Australia again. 

Perth - City

Eat: The Mushroom Pesto Papardelle at Cantina 663 (663 Beaufort Street) was sublime. It was packed full of flavour from the generous serving of mushrooms and pesto, which had plenty of flat-leaf parsley (one of my favourite herbs). I licked the plate clean. It helped that the restaurant had a really cool, laid-back vibe. We saw lots of pate going to other tables, which we would probably have ordered if the portion was not so gigantic. But what a happy problem.

Adelaide - Kangaroo Island and Barossa Valley

Clockwise from top left: Koala at Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park, Snake skin and Kookaburra at Radical Raptors, and Seals at Seal Bay Conservation Park

See: Kangaroo Island isn't teaming with kangaroos but there are plenty of wildlife to occupy your time. Just a short 45 minute ferry ride away from a jetty south of the city, it was definitely worth a journey down. 

Eat: There's something particularly gamey about the pork in Australia that made us avoid it. But when we were told that the pork belly at Cafe Y (Barossa Valley) was wood-fired and cooked over two days, Ed was intrigued and ordered it. I'm so glad he did because it was divinely tender with a delicately sweet glaze, and none of that gaminess. The manager, Elias, was also beyond hospitable and entertained us with stories of the resident geese and chicken. He also recommended getting some of the 20 year-old muscat from the Yaldara Estate just next door. We couldn't be happier with our purchase.

Melbourne - Phillip Island

See and Eat: Having had very little luck in previous fishing trips, we were slightly hesitant about going fishing for trout albeit at a farm (Rhyll Trout and Bush Tucker Farm). But they couldn't have made it easier with their indoor pond. We succumbed to the indoor experience after braving the winds (since this was in winter) for about half an hour with nary a bite. They helped with everything, even casting the line which was easier said than done. We couldn't even hook the live bait of earthworms! Overall, the experience was seamless, and the fish tasted incredibly sweet. But I couldn't help thinking how unlucky those two specific trout were that morning. 

Tasmania - Hobart and Launceston

Eat: On our first night in Tasmania, we decided to treat ourselves to a meal at Garagistes. We were incredibly fortunate to have entered early as the restaurant was almost fully booked. Sitting at the bar, we had a great view of the entire food preparation area. We could fully appreciate the precision required in the plating of each dish, and the effort put into ensuring the flavour of each component of the dish was exactly as intended. The service staff were also particularly attentive and hospitable.

See: The photo says it all. Just a short car ride away from the town, a breathtaking view awaits. If you're lucky, you may even see snow!

Stay: Relbia Lodge was a lucky find. While we usually stayed in the heart of town, I decided to take a risk with Relbia Lodge after seeing the stunning photos on their website. It turned out to be just a relaxing 15 minute relaxing drive away from town and a really stunning piece of property. The interior was very tastefully done and more importantly, had an incredibly well-equipped kitchenette. Our hosts, who stayed just up the road, also made sure we were comfortable while still respecting our privacy. 

Sydney

See: The Queen Victoria Building (QVB) is hard to miss amidst all the tall and cold buildings. It was such a great respite from the noise and rush of the streets; and a treasure trove of cafes and boutiques to browse at your own pace. The detail in the architecture is also worth a few moments of awe.  

Eat: With an incredibly high rating on Urbanspoon, and just a hop and a skip away from where we stayed, Buffalo Dining Club was an easy decision to make. We ordered their gnocchi and cacio e pepe. Both were flawless and left us both full but wanting more. This was definitely a place I would return to, despite the slightly curt service. 
We definitely enjoyed our time in Australia thoroughly, but after two months away from home and our two lovely cats, we were eager to stop living out of a luggage. And now we're home, and I could not be happier.  

Yuw Meng in Johor

Due to some problems with my laptop, the blogposts of the last couple of months (okay, probably longer) have only been about places/food when I had taken photos of those said places/food with my iPhone. Having just gotten my laptop fixed, I am now faced with a multi-lemma - which awesome food experience should I blog about first? There's this awesome dinner that revolved around a duck stuffed with turkey and chicken - an interesting adaptation of the often attempted Turducken at Christmas celebrations, a Penang trip where I discovered the wonderful eats at Kimberly Street and an incredibly light egg white batter for fish and chips that I found in Damien Pignolet's French cookbook, among many others. After possibly too much deliberation, I decided it would be a travesty not to first blog about this amazing eatery in our neighboring country that I had the fortune to visit in April this year.

A mere 45 minute car ride from Singapore, into a rather desolated place in Johor, Malaysia, is a small town called Kulai. And within Kulai, is an even smaller coffeeshop called Yuw Meng selling your usual tze char (see Wikipedia for definition of 'tze char') fare and then some. If exotic food is not up your alley, don't let the sight of a deep-fried squirrel on its menu scare you as I assure you the rest of its menu is more... sane. Fortunately, Ed and I were accompanied by 2 regular patrons who knew exactly what to order, and who had appetites as big as (if not bigger than) Ed's. With the smallest appetite in the group, I definitely gained the most out of this arrangement as we could order for four persons what would comfortably feed 8, to have a wide sampling of their food.

To start off the meal however, we had a glass of ice cold beer each, under our companions' insistence. It was, very simply, a bottle of Heineken, poured into small frosty glasses for each of us. Not being a fan of all types of beer, except when mixed with a little ginger beer for a shandy, I was initially unimpressed. That is until I took a sip. Beneath that simple presentation and thick beer head were tiny shards of beer icicles, creating the most amazing texture and sensation when drunk. My best guess at how they managed this is by super-freezing their glasses just before serving, perhaps with nitrogen. But it is difficult to imagine this roadside coffeeshop storing a couple of canisters of nitrogen in its kitchen.

In general, the food was excellent. Every dish well-executed, with all the wok hei we had hoped for in our meal. The picture above shows Ed's and my favourite dishes of the night. The dish of scallops, lotus root, celery, carrots, snowpeas and macadamia nuts were, very surprisingly, Ed's top dish. He eats his vegetables, but they almost always seem like an afterthought in our meals and an obligatory attempt at getting some fibre into our diet amidst the copious amounts of carbohydrates and protein. So to hear that he enjoyed that particular dish the most certainly caught me by surprise. I tried recreating the dish back home, and apart from the wok hei, I also couldn't re-engineer the incredible crunch of the thin slivers of lotus root.

As for the dish that stole my heart, it is difficult to decide whether it was the spicy fried cockles or the homemade tofu with century egg. Few know that I have a love affair with all sorts of molluscs, especially cockles. Of course, Ed knows. When he has laksa, he would selflessly order more cockles despite not really liking the taste, and fish out all the cockles out for me. So you can imagine my delight when our companions at Yuw Meng ordered a plate of cockles fried with a smattering of chopped bird's eye chilli. Each cockle, extraordinarily fresh and plump, carried a little sweetness and made the long queue at the Causeway (when Malaysia introduced a new fingerprinting system for all entering visitors) a distant memory.

But the homemade tofu was perfection. Served with quarters of century egg and sweet thai chilli sauce, and garnished with chopped spring onion, homemade tofu never tasted so good. If I wasn't already so stuffed by the time the dish arrived, I would have happily ordered another serving of that tofu all for myself.

The other also stellar dishes we had included fried hokkien mee, fried mee sua, steamed fish head, sharks' fin soup, black pepper crab, and fried pork spare ribs. (See below.) Without belabouring the point, the food was excellent and worth many return trips. We recently met up with one of our travel companions at that time, and my heart jumped with joy when he suggested organising another such trip soon.

Yuw Meng
44 Jalan Serulin 2
Taman Seri Kulai
81000 Kulai
Johor, Malaysia

For directions, click here.

Bali Eats

In preparation for an upcoming wedding (of mine that is) I decided to take leave from work for almost 1 month leading up to the wedding. To be clear however, my preparatory work involves mainly nursing those dark eye bags back where they came from, smoothening out the fine lines that have been creeping out of the corners of my eyes and, if heaven permits, banishing those scars left behind from zits that popped out as a form of protest against a combination of irregular/too little sleep and poor diet.

What better way to start off the break than a trip to Bali with some of my best buds, and of course my best friend and husband-to-be? Courtesy of recommendations from friends, we had pretty awesome meals at Metis (a french restaurant with mind-blowing foie gras), Made Warung (a restaurant whose Nasi Campur is delicious), Kolega (a local institution serving Nasi Padang and a beef soup that must not be missed), Ibu Oka (serving roast pig aka Babi Guling that runs out so fast we wished we set out for lunch earlier) and Naughty Nuri's (whose finger-lickin good ribs and insanely powerful Martini make for great games or conversations around the table).

I'm such a late bloomer and only realized the trove of good eats that is Bali. And even though many say it is slowly losing it's charm with greater commercialization of it's streets, increasingly jammed roads, and more polluted beaches, I don't think that's the last of Bali Ed and I will see.

Till then, perhaps I should try to recreate those crazy ribs from Naughty Nuri's! If anyone has a good roasted pork rib recipe, please share!

The unexpected find in Turkey

Ever since I joined my current organisation, I had been working primarily on just one. big. project. I would say that 80% of my time was dedicated to writing papers, setting up meetings, attending meetings, writing notes of meetings, clearing those notes or papers, rinsing and repeating the whole process just for this project. There was hardly any time to sleep at times, let alone take a vacation.

So when I discovered that I would have a sliver of a breather right after one of the larger milestones in the project, Ed and I promptly took leave and started plotting. We were still undecided about where we would go, right up to 1 month before we took leave but we (or rather Ed) knew we wanted to go to somewhere exciting like the Middle East. So we found a couple of other travel companions, DS and XM, and finally decided on Beirut (Lebanon), with the hope that we would be able to get a Syrian visa there to cross the border into Syria.

Well, we tried to get the visa on the 2nd day and promptly failed. What happened next unfolded very gradually and almost rather unexcitingly, though upon hindsight it seems quite the adventure. We chanced upon a travel agency and decided to pop in to explore our options. We looked at places nearby that didn't require a visa and deliberated over stretching our itinerary in Lebanon across another 4-5 days - possibly even going to the mountains for some skiing that Ed had suggested while we were in Singapore but which the rest of us had vetoed. But scanning through the Lonely Planet guidebook, the latter option of spending the entire 10-11 days in Lebanon didn't look promising - yes, this was quite the Asian mindset we had. So we decided we would go to Istanbul (Turkey)!

Looking back, I'm glad we did. Who knows how our Jordan trip would have turned out, but being in Istanbul was exactly how I had expected a trip to Middle East to be. It was full of stopovers for coffee, shisha (much to XM's and my chagrin) and absolutely colourful markets that were a tad touristy. I put my bargaining skills to much good use and got relatively good deals for 4 handbags (that Ed bought for his grandma, mum and 2 sisters, awww), travel totes, a large handmade ceramic salad bowl, a matching trivet, an adorable pomegranate inspired vase and a handmade rose quartz statement ring.

Naturally, when Ed and I spotted 'Istanbul Eats', we jumped at it. Well, almost. We spotted it in a souvenir shop within the Blue Mosque compound and thought it was surely overpriced in the shop. So we left it there and went hunting for it elsewhere only to realise it was much more expensive everywhere else. While beating ourselves up about it over coffee in a quirky cafe cum jewellery shop (where we bought the rose quartz ring for me), we spotted the book at a lower price to boot and grabbed it with much aplomb.

The next couple of days were full of great, great eats. The good thing about the book is that it doesn't only review mid-range to high end restaurants. In fact, most of the reviews are of affordable holes-in-the-wall that have great, tasty something. It could be anything from liver to doner kebaps, from sheeps' heads to kofte. With the book's blessings, we were almost constantly stuffed. Thank goodness for the fact that we chose to explore the city by foot most of the times, and for the occasional times we had to walk up and down the same street looking for the elusive holes in the wall.



But the most enjoyable meal we had was probably this place we chanced upon on the last night we spent in Istanbul. We were hunting down this place that served Uighur food, but found out when we arrived that they closed at 7pm (!!). Having been looking forward to trying Uighur food, I was seriously bummed out. I tried to make the best of the situation by looking for other recommended eateries in the neighbourhood. It was already about 8pm and my companions and I had travelled relatively far to this Uighur eatery, so everyone was pretty ravenous. But perhaps because this was going to be our last meal in Istanbul, we were all game to find the other recommended eateries.

We were well on our way to a place just 2 streets down when we stumbled upon a small bustling eatery called Direkler Akasi (Sehzadebasi Cad, No. 18 Eminonu) that had platters of marinating chicken, beef and lamb tempting us through the displays. There was a small queue of locals right outside, all armed with a shot of turkish coffee or tea, and the waiters were not calling at us to go inside. The last point, we found out the difficult way, was quite a reliable indicator that the place was worth eating in. Ed and I were walking ahead of our companions, and when we turned back to look at them, their eyes said it all and we promptly joined the queue.

What happened in the next hour or two was pure heaven. We left the guys to order a smorgasbord of meats and feasted like we hadn't eaten for days. The roast chicken was so incredibly tasty and juicy, that it trumped the incredibly tender salt-baked lamb we tried just the night before. Even Ed, whose one true love after me is lamb, agreed. We liked the roast chicken so much that we order another 3 platters of it after we finished the first round of meat. It is a place I will return to in a heartbeat, and I pray that it never moves away. (Or if it does, that I will find it.)

The food we tried with the blessings of Istanbul Eats was really good. But chancing upon Direkler Arasi and having such a mind-blowing experience, really taught me that I must always keep my options open and not always stick to the path well trodden.

For insanely good roast chicken that you really have to try:
Direkler Akasi
Address: Sehzadebasi Cad, No. 18 Eminonu

For flavourful rice, homely chicken soup, chicken breast pudding and best of all, their chicken gizzards (picture above):
Kismet Muhallabecisi
Address: Kucukpazar Cad. 68, Eminonu, Istanbul
Phone: 212-513-6773


For syrian food, especially their salt-baked lamb:
Akdeniz Hatay Sofrasi
Address: Ahmediye Cad. No: 44/A, Fatih
Telephone: 212-531-3333
Web: http://www.blogger.com/www.akdenizhataysofrasi.com.tr



For crazy good kaymak - Turkish version of clotted cream:
Besiktas Kaymakci
Address: Koyici Meydani Sok., Besiktas
Telephone: 212-258-2616



For a once in a lifetime experience with sheep's head - brain, eyes and all:
Sinasi Usta’s Kelle Tandir (roasted and served hot)
Senin Ciger ve Tavuk Pazarlama
Address: Sahne Sk. 18, Balikpazari, Beyoglu
Telephone: 212 245 4312
10 TL/head
9AM-6PM



For an incredible grilled/fried fish meal:
Sultanahmet Fish House
Address: Prof Kazim Ismail Gurkan, Caddesi 14 Cagaloglu
Telephone: 212 527 4445
12PM - 11PM


Sorry for the bad photo, the lighting in the restaurant was incredibly dim.

Curry in bed

10 days in Sri Lanka, and heckofalot of curry later, I'm back in Singapore and missing the lazy mornings. Well, they were mostly lazy, except for those crazy mornings my travel companions wanted to climb Adam's Peak. (Of course, Ed and I barely started before we turned back. We blame the fried rice we had the night before.)



Sri Lanka was really great. It is an unusual holiday destination among many Singaporeans. Most of my friends I told thought I was going for work, and only few could fathom why Ed, my garang travel companions, C and F, and I were so hyped up about going. When we arrived, I had no doubt we made the right decision. Thankfully, the four of us seemed to share one common and unspoken understanding - that the holiday should be absolutely indulgent.

We slept well and ate very well. Finding food was generally not a problem, especially with a trusty lonely planet guidebook. Well, apart from that one 'budget' meal we had in a shady mafia-like setting. I'll let the photos do the talking.