Hector

I think it's better than that. The food you get for a small price in singapore is much better than in other cities around the world. Far more excellent than the cheap places around London or so. Eating an excellent four course dinner consisting of fired fish cakes, shark fin soup, hainan-chicken and rice, and mango pudding last summer in the hawkers around chinatown cost me 5 sg$ which is the price of a small cheap hot dog around here. With the cheapness of good food in S'pore, I think you are better off staying away from fancy places. For recommendations: I can recomend an excellent place to eat real Dim Sum in central Chinatown called "Da Dong". It mostly only caters to the local population and serves terrific freshly steamed dim sum and Beijing Yaa. Probably not as good as in Shanghai. But still really great.

Wow! that's incredible! Lots of work must be put into this. You must have a good husband.

My best and worst experiences with greek food would be some of experiences in the town and surroundings of Rethimno, Crete.. Foodwise (& otherwise); the main main restaurant streets in the touristy town of Rethimno is not to be recomended to anyone. Expensive outdoor places, serving shitty fried eggs, bacon, english sausages and french fries at lousy tourist rates. Or lobster dinners for hundreds of euros. With the greek food alternative on the ugly menu (with photos) being the ussual "Greek food plate" with a bit of burned Moussaka (bathing in steaming hot bechamel sauce) thrown with greek sallad. Some of the waiters who tried to get tourists into their restaurant even knew my native language Swedish - which hints a bit of greed and desperation to get as many swedish tourists into the lousy places (most Swedish tourists know at least english or german so when salesmen use our languages abroad it's always for charming us into buying stuff). In the begining of the trip, I thought this was what I was going to get to eat the whole week.. But after one try at the one of these lousy places which looked the best (merely out of pure hunger and tiredness). We decided to get off the beaten track and into the off beat little places that there might be. On a dead end street, we found a small local restaurant without any name or any sign. It was just an outdoor serving place, where a small old woman named Maria, served homecook genuine dishes in her house for a quite small payment. You got a beautiful threecourse dinner for practically nothing. You actually went in the old womans house and picked what you wanted to eat. The food was great. A fresh dillseasoned lamb intestine- and avgolemonosoup as a starter with a small phyllo dough pastry, roasted chicken with fresh whole grilled tomatoes, pistaccio nuts and some kind of pasta, humble roast lamb seasoned with various fresh spices and barbecued, with chunky deep fried potatoes. We were frequents at Marias restaurant all week long. The other great place in this trip was a nice modern Mezedesrestaurant were there where only greek customers. It was a beautiful and lively place on an otherwise quite street. It served barbecued fresh octopus freshly from a charcoal grill right beside the outdoor serving. They served loads of different kinds ofsellfish, mussels, barbecued fish, tarama, shrimps in various manners. Mainly with lemon and oregano. Sallad with fresh artichokes with a plate of barbecued octopus, squid and shrimp. A kind of firm taramsalata on the side. It was bliss.

I grew up in south america and we have this. We call it sopropo or in america bittermelon. I never used to like this growing up because it is a bitter vegetable but know i love it. I am able to get it in the asian grocery store near me. ← Aren't you suppose to salt it and squish out liquid to get rid ofthe bitterness. that's at least what the Malaysians do.

"when I'm in holland I eat the pannekoeken!" I just recalled that they have named one of their more punk-rocky albums "Aglio E Olio"... Man that's hardcore!

Use sticky rice.. the stuff that you get steamed in Dim Sum, and in your Moshi balls.. It will definitly stick then.. a bit more desserty than ussual rice to.

My favorite tea must be Organic Earl Grey. Preferable from the "Twinning Aromatics" type. Yup Earl Grey sounds boring.. and I wouldn't normaly go nuts about the organic part, but this time the organic produce does lots of difference flavourwhise. It makes an absolutely delicious cup of tea with a nice lemony flavour. Served with milk off course Excellent.

" what was worse over there, was their weak tasting coffee, it tasted like nothing, just brownish warm water... not very fun" That's the most ussual complain over here from Swedish people who has recently visited USA.

Beautiful, really traditional that! Mustard recipe coming up... Almond pudding is a cold gelatinous kind of pudding that is made with gelatine, sugar, cream, toasted blanched almonds, eggs (I think) It's more like the italian panna cotta (or "lemon fromage"; another Swedish dessert); than ris a la malta or rice pudding. Almond pudding is not a common dessert in Sweden but it used to be more common. It's really good! A variant of Almond pudding is replacing the almond with lingonberry.

St: John is bloody marvelous... I mean those sweetbreads they had, those sweetbreads! you could never match them with anything else!

The restaurant Bon Lloc is appearently shutting down business.. Really really bad.

A very fine Swedish Meatball recipe.. after request: 1 very finely chopped onion. 2 mashed potatoes 3 tablespoon breadcrumbs 500 grams of good ground meat (cow, or calf, or a mixture of those with pork) 5 tbsp whipping cream a bunch of fresh parsley salt white pepper 1 egg 3 tbsp butter. 2 tbsp oil. Fry the onion a bit. Mix potatoes, breadcrumbs, meat, parsley, egg, fried onion, salt, pepper, cream and form round little meatballs. Put on a plate and stand cold for an hour (if you don't have time you don't have to). Then heat up oil and butter and fry them. Shake the pan instead of turning the meatballs, (it's a matter of technique.) (my family recipe, omits potatoes, and adds cinnamon and some other spices which are a well guarded "secret ingridients")

There's probably a difference in the choice of dishes of the christmas smörgåsbord in every houshold in Sweden. People ussually makes their old time favorites, traditional recipes etcetra. For example in my family, we've never had any potato sausage at christmas. We ussually have a bit different than Kanjung: brown spiced bread (vört), freshly homemade cheese, cured salmon, brown cabbage, red cabbage, red cabbage salad, cinnamon spiced meatballs (made with more than century old family recipe), big smoked leg of lamb, boiled pork sausage, pickled cucumbers many different kinds of pickled herring, herring with mustard, herring with roe and sour cream, herring with onions, herring with loads of herbs etcetra. + loads of other ways of doing herring homemade coarse sweet and strong "skånsk" mustard to go with the ham, rye bread, kale in a sauce of ham stock and cream, swedish brown beans, finnish root vegetables, "Janssons Tempation", rolled lamb side filled with herbs, kale soup with boiled meatballs, then there's the dessert things. chocolate dipped marzipan, toffee, nut toffee, saffron buns, almond pudding. rice a la malta. etcetra There's to much to eat at christmas, I know I'm forgetting much dishes.

Edsbacka Krog... a restaurant, a bit off road, outside the city. but marvelous traditional Swedish cooking! wawawee-waH! Edsbacka Krog For more cheapish treats.. try anything called husmanskost.. cheap rustique old time cooking.

ooww.. baking oysters.. what a culinary crime!

I would love a nice recipe for a dish I encountered in Arhem or anything. If anyone has a recipe like this, please tell me.. It was the most simple thing: White aspargus baked with some great quality ham, and boiled eggs. and that was it. A nice warm rustique creation. And why are the dutch so crazy about peanuts??

I would like a recipe for boiled pighead, as you do it in the Netherlands. I don't know how common this is in the Netherlands, I just saw some chef guy make it on a Dutch tv-show and it looked really cool. Would be interesting to know.

I thought the name was "Bailman Bugs".. A kind of crayfish. In many cultures crayfish has been always regarded as bugs.. and inedible. In Sweden we always thought otherwise.. and had big feast where weeat big piles of gallons of crayfish and drink aquavit every august. Thanks to the crayfish plauge we often eat imported ones from Turkey, where they are regarded as bugs, and can't understand why we will eat them.

True.. Some scholars believe that using nuts, fruits and sweetening in meat dishes comes from the old pre-islamic Persian royal court cooking. E.g there's dishes today like pinchitos morunos, fowl with pomegranate and walnuts, carucho from Venezuela, greek or turkish lamb cooked with quince, etcetra that has somehow indirectly has come from this unmistakeable oriental tradition. Some even think there's a religious connection, where the food should symbolise various things in the Zoroaster religion. But I am not sure about this.

The tap water at our summer house is bottled and sold. There's even a carbonated version. It's really great tasting sourcewater from a nearby well. It makes amazing coffee and espresso.

Well I had my share of Hing overdosing in some dishes. and those definatley tasted it. Thought recently I made a great sabzi dish with mung dhal, vegetables and tamarind. Seasoned with chillies, mehdi, hing, coriander and tumeric. Where it was really great using hing. Thank you very much for explaining the tarka stage.

1. Ok, No problems. Posted in the wrong one. 2. Just my point. Very interesting about the Amazigh/Berber having their own pasta culture.

is there by any chance a technique for drying basturma in your oven?

According to my newsource for this, the noodles where made of different kinds of grass and not millet... I doubt that it will be good posting a link to it, here. Hence it is in Swedish. And the pasta of Italy was NOT brought by the saracens.. Maybe the kind of couscous you can find in Sardinia and Sicily ("Sa fragula" and "cuscus trapanese" for example). But italian pasta as we know has other origins. Pasta originated in the ancient Roman empire, where the great chef Apicius left a recipe for "laganum" being the prototype gratine style dish for lasagna with a filling of shrimp, chicken, eggs and other ingridients. Laganum-noodles where flat dough layers, just like todays lasagna. I don't think you can get one unified origin of the pasta making. Pasta is found everywhere in the world, even my country Sweden has native pasta sorts that isn't from Italy or China. It's just a really simple technique of boiling bread dough instead of baking it.

Damn right.. You can enjoy very nice cheap country food in Bratislava, Halusky being one of the favourite.. I was there over a couple of nights this summer on a travel across eastern europe and I decided to go for these stuffs since that's often the best you'll get in these kind of places in eastern Europe. Wasn't very keen on eating at the sushi bar down at the "national square" Great favorite dishes from Bratislava: Cabasa sausage with caraway and beer, served with a huge glass of beer, big langos with garlic and cheese, nice garlic soup and garlick bread, fried carp, Halusky with sheep cheese and veal pörkölt with halusky. Then there was scary memories too. Once my friends was keen to try some cheap pizza, we ended up with pizza lots of canned vegetables and ketchup filling.