Happy Meals.

To the kids, it means eating tasty comfort junk food. To me, it means quick and easy meals!

Currently on the menu, we have 2 types of “Happy Meals”:

• Chicken nuggets & fries (so typically Mac) – oven baked to crispy perfection with zero oil in 15 mins!
  Sometimes served with buttered “cup corn” or mixed vegetable (peas, carrots, corn) should they be so inclined to have it.
• Sausages (not hotdogs) with baked beans and eggs (served sunny side up, scrambled or omelette style).

The boys are like their father – they enjoy baked beans even straight out of the can – and it’s something Hubs gladly serves up because it’s so fuss-free. Me? I don’t feel a thing for baked beans at all.

So far we’ve been rotating these 2 Happy Meal selections, once a week. It usually happens mid-week so I get an easy day in kitchen and don’t get burnt out.

Oh, the boys also enjoy instant noodles for reasons unknown. But that’s another story…

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Random rumblings from a PMSy soul.

Craving since 48 hours ago… (in ranking order)

Lightly toasted club sandwiches with ham, bacon, cheese and lots of lettuce. Please, none of that chicken/turkey ham/bacon crap.
Lobster bisque, served in those amazing “bowls” that are carved out from toasted buns.
Smoked salmon caesar salad. With croutons, if possible.
Hot mocha; necessary to have the perfect balance of coffee and chocolate.

That’s pretty much nicely one meal from appetizer to main. Except I can’t ever fit that much food into myself at one sitting.

Gahhhhhh I hate PMS food cravings.

Eating crab.

It makes me wonder: Who was the first person ever to crack open the hard shell of a crab, and be adventurous (or desperate) enough to eat it?

“Crab, group of water creatures characterised by their hard, round, flat shells. Several of the larger kinds are very good to eat, but ancient sources do not suggest they were eaten enthusiastically. The various classical names cannot be confidently attached to individual species; they varied in their reference across the ancient world and through time.”

Food in the Ancient World from A to Z, Andrew Dalby [Routledge:London] 2003 (p. 105)

 

A lot has changed through the generations, I guess, judging from the sheer number of “I want to eat chilli crab!!” declarations I see on my Twitter timeline everyday.

Yet alas, I am not a crab enthusiast (much). Too much hard work to peel and crack (and often cut my fingers due to carelessness) just for that few slivers of flesh. BEEF FOR THE WIN!

 

The Sweet Tooth beckons!

• Marmalade Pantry’s Elvis cupcake (to be eaten with a large glass of milk!)
• Mrs Field’s cookies (to be eaten with a large glass of milk!)
• Beard Papa Choc Eclair Puff
• Peach Italian Soda
• Mini donuts from Central basement 1
• Créme Brulee, but not too charred please.
• Anything that’s a blend of chocolate & banana
• Green tea ice cream cake from The Pasta Shop
• Pints & pints of Haagen Dazs ice cream!

You know what would constitute as a field day for me? A trip to Haagen Dazs for sinfully good chocolate ice cream sundaes!

Oooh, it wouldn’t be too bad a time to finally go visit (and eat) at Canelé Pâtisserie as well!

Oh oh, and maybe I should buy chocolate ice cream and bananas then use that new blender that Hubs got for me to make milkshakes!!

Can’t you just SEE those gluttony devil’s horns emerging from my head?!

I had this for supper.

Creamed spinach, spiced fries and ribeye steak marinated in salt and spices.

I am glad to announce my appetite is somewhat coming back, but it only seems to strike after sundown.

My cravings also hardly last longer than an hour, which makes it super duper hard for me to satisfy it due to the short time frame. Before I get anywhere near, the craving is gone and replaced with something else instead. Dammit!

Now after the steak, I am craving for liang teh from Geylang. But I can already feel the craving waning as the minutes tick by on the clock…

Carpetbag steak @ Jack’s Place

I am glad to announce that my tummy – and possibly Keegan’s as well – is very very happy after having the carpetbag steak offered on the April promotional menu at Jack’s Place.

[Disclaimer: This is a relatively photo-free post because I am not your typical food blogger. Plus, I was hungry for the first time in a long while, so please understand. By the time the steak arrived, I was drooling so much I couldn’t be arsed to take pics!]

For $26 (before tax), my main course of carpetbag steak came with a soup of the day, dessert and choice of coffee or tea. I topped up $2 and “upgraded” the soup to their famous Lobster Bisque.

I’ve never had a high regard for their steaks because the hot plates they are served on tends to turn my medium steak into a well-done one instead. Often, the surface of the steak also gets charred and dry after sitting on the hot plate for a while.

However, this carpetbag steak I had at their Marina Square outlet was one of the most succulent I’ve tasted in a while! While the oyster was somewhat small in size, there was no fishy taste or smell that often accompanies a badly done carpetbag steak.

Served with a lump of garlic butter, the oyster and steak combined their individual juiciness to create a wonderful explosion of fresh flavours in your mouth with each bite. The garlic butter added a nice subtle zing to the whole dish and also works to remove any possible raw or fishy taste – not that I had tasted any even without smearing my piece of meat in it.

Basically this course combines all my favourite foods into one: steak, oyster, garlic butter, baked potato, sour cream and bacon bits. That’s why carpetbag steak has always ranked high with me, seeing how I can kill multiple cravings with one dish.

If the carpetbag steak at The Ship is to be rated at 6 out of 10, this one from Jack’s Place will definitely take at least a 9.5!

We were given impeccable service by the waiting staff as well. Friendly and attentive, it was easy to get their attention to take orders, top-up the sour cream on my baked potato and to ask for our dessert and coffee to be served. A staff even came up to ask if my steak was done to my preference after I started on it.

This has to be one of the most enjoyable restaurant meals I’ve had in a long long while. Highly recommended!

ON A SCALE OF 10
Quality of food: 9
Value for money: 8
Service: 9
Ambience: 7
OVERALL RATING: 9

Joshua’s Favourite Foods

Having turned exactly 22 months old on Monday – the 6th of April – I’ve decided to list down Joshua’s various favourite nom-noms just to see how his preferences change over the years.

Favourite Cuisine – Japanese

• cha soba
• salmon sashimi
• maki – crabstick (kani) / salmon / egg (tamago)
• salmon roe (ikura)
• chawanmushi

Favourite Fastfood joint – Popeye’s

• fish fillets
• spiced fries
• mashed potatoes
• “biscuits” with strawberry jam

Favourite Angmoh Dishes

• tomato-based pastas
• creamy soups – pumpkin / mixed vegetables / chicken
• oven-baked rice
• fish & chips

Favourite Chinese Dishes

• chicken rice, without the chicken 😆
• Teochew fish porridge (aka “heer muey”)
• steamed egg
• double-boiled soups
• stir-fried Kailan
• plain white rice softened with soup (muey-style)

Favourite Fruits

• apples
• strawberries

Favourite Desserts

• ice-cream of any flavor
• jelly (made from
• Mango Fantasy from C.Nai Hong Kong Cafe

Favourite Snacks

• Farley’s teething rusks
• 小馒头 type biscuits
• bread with Skippy’s peanut butter and chocolate
• cereal bars with chocolate
• Japanese titbits – seaweed crackers, etc

Favourite Drinks

• Plain water
• Iced Milo
• Peach Ice Blended with pearls (bubble tea style)
• Peach Italian Soda
• Pokka Green Tea

Utterly hates:

• smelly beancurd
• durian
• watermelon

He will chew it for damn long, and never swallow it. Other than that, he eats almost anything and everything.

Taking my meals like medicine.

Because I had barely any appetite on most days, I’ve unwittingly skipped meals and caused myself some unnecessary problems – dizziness, borderline white-outs, lethargy and dull moods.

So Hubs has stamped his foot down and made me promise to eat regularly, regardless of whether I feel like it or not. A cereal bar, a bowl of yoghurt, or whatever I don’t mind ingesting – as long as I eat at regular intervals.

I would love to have a voracious appetite and be able to enjoy stuffing myself with yummy foods, but… I just don’t feel like it leh.

While I would like my appetite engine to kickstart, the gynae never fails to remind me during each checkup that I have enough stored fats to feed a family of three, so I really don’t need to stuff myself with food in order to let Keegan grow big and strong.

Well, but I actually want to eat lor. 😦

We’re already halfway through this pregnancy, and I’m really starting to wonder if my appetite will improve at all.

Pregnancy Cravings

It’s not that my appetite is so tremendously lousy that there is nothing that I want to eat at all. It’s just that I have had to ignore and neglect any food cravings that come up.

From the beginning of this pregnancy at 5 weeks, until today’s 19 weeks, I can count – on one single hand – the number of times my cravings were satisfied .

That includes the dinner of chicken macaroni at Balmoral Plaza for V-day, and excludes that piece of sirloin he had bought from Cold Storage when I told him I wanted steak – it just wasn’t juicy enough.

And while it would have been common to have an indulgent dinner for birthdays or anniversaries, having received the Wii for my birthday just gives me a sense of guilt if I was to have an expensive meal.

But it doesn’t mean that I don’t still feel like having a carpetbag steak, or juicy escargots in garlic butter. I just… can’t bring myself to pay for indulgence.

*sigh* The story of my life…

Hot Soup.

Oh, I’m feeling cold constantly – something I seem to feel each time I am pregnant – and my nose is running. I’d give anything to have a daily dose of hot steaming herbal soup every evening.

生鱼汤
肉骨茶
黑鸡汤

*sigh*

None of that clear broth abominations. Gimme thick dark soups chockful with “warming” herbs!