Durian – spikey football-shaped
fruit with big white-slime-covered knuckles inside, tastes like sweet snot,
repeats on you. Hard to stomach.
Chiku – small kiwi-sized
fruit, pear-like texture, sweet.
Dragon fruit – very dramatic
on the outside, bright red w/ green scaly things sorta like an artichoke, only
not. Under the skin it's subtle sweet flavor, white flesh w/ black seeds all
over, sorta like the crunchy seediness texture of the kiwi. Size of a large
mango.
Soursop – big globular-shaped scaley-skinned fruit, with flesh that tastes like a pineapple, kind of, only squishy-spongier. White flesh with black small-almond-sized seeds.
Custard apple – related
to the soursop, but smaller & not as juicy, and a larger proportion of seeds
to flesh, so you end up sucking on the seeds to get the flesh off. Sounds like
more fun than it really is.
Jackfruit – looks like
a gigantic durian (bigger than a large watermelon), with the same knuckles inside,
but this time covered with a firm, smooth orange flesh that tastes really good
but sometimes saps out a sticky gooey white slime.
Mangosteen – a smallish
dark plum colored fruit with a thick bitter skin, underneath is a yummy small
white fruit. Not related to the mango at all. Like ambrosia. Heavenly.
Rose apple – can be either
red or green. Refreshing, juicy. Delicious, but doesn’t really taste like
a tropical fruit.
Rambutan – hairy on the outside, juicy on the inside. Yummy flavor, entertaining package.
Longan – similar to the
rambutan and lychee in form--there's a hardish skin to peel and then a firm
white fruit underneath--but they all have their special flavors. This one is
used in beverages sometimes.
Silak – fruit or animal?
Has skin like a snake, which you peel for a pale yellowish fruit. Doesn’t
taste that good, but looks impressive.
Easter egg mango
– tiny little mango, you pop the whole thing in your mouth & eat the
skin & all (not the pit though). Mango, for sure, but almost reminiscent
of persimmon. This is one of at least 5 different varieties of mango.
Bubor cha cha
– dessert with chunks of tapioca and yam and taro root, covered in shaved
ice and coconut milk.
Other cold desserts
– usually like glorified sno-cones, but with interesting tropical fruits
like sea coconut, longan, and some sort of jelly.
Agar-agar – jello made out of seaweed, much firmer than the kind you get in hospitals.
Sesame soup, red bean soup, green
bean soup – these are all hot desserts, things that you would expect
to be spicy, but instead they're sweet. Disconcerting, perhaps, but not bad.
Buah Mo Far Kor – prepackaged
& sold along with candies & other snacks, this comes in a plastic vial
like a medicine container & has a picture of some retro-50s looking Chinese
guy on the cover. Ingredients are sugar, salt, liquorice, acid, preservative
fruit. The contents look like shriveled up little scabs. They taste like salty-sweet
(but mostly salty) bits of soft leather. I suspect that this is a local replacement
for chewing gum.
Rojak – kind of a salad
made of chunks of jicama (I think), pineapple, cucumber, and crouton-like things,
with bean sprouts, mixed in a sauce that's spicy-sweet of chili/peanut paste,
covered in chopped peanuts. Cultural note: because this is a mixture
of many things, Singaporeans of mixed ethnicity are sometimes called rojak.
Popiah - cooked diced turnip, crab meat, hardboiled egg, chili paste, some chopped peanuts, wrapped in a springroll wrapper.
Kueh pie tee – like popiah, but put in little fried cups rather than in a springroll wrapper.
Otah or Otak or Otah-Otah
or Otak-Otak – can't they make up their mind? Well, whatever
it's called, it's always a spicy fish paste spread inside a little envelope
made out of a leaf & secured with toothpicks & then grilled.
Waffle w/ syrup
– doesn’t sound too weird, eh? But it was a green waffle (dunno why)
with kaya syrup (mixture of coconut and egg, supposedly, but it’s green,
& thick honey textured & doesn’t taste like coconut) from a street
vendor.
Peanut pancakes – silver-dollar pancakes folded like a taco around freshly ground peanut butter mixed with sugar. You can also get these with red bean paste (sweet) or coconut filling.
Tapioca – almost never comes in the little ball form that we're used to in pudding. This usually means the actual root, cooked or prepared in some way that's sweet, a little stringy, very starchy, and pretty darn good. Almost yam like, but not.
Muah chee – gooey rice
dough cut into small pieces and coated with finely chopped peanuts and sugar.
Bubble tea – you can get this in the states, but some of you have never experienced it, and I’ve discovered new variations also. Any of a huge number of sweet drinks with milk or without (they’re all called tea no matter what), to which they add big tapioca balls, so when you suck it up in a big straw, you get these balls popping into your mouth that you can suck on like little eyeballs before you chew them. My favorite place that sells bubble tea is called “Quickly.” I like a chain that uses an adverb for its name. Once I ordered red beans & tofu tea, out of curiosity. It was still a sweet beverage, and through the straw I sucked red beans (used for desserts here) & bits of silken tofu. A very bizarre complete meal.
Lime juice – really, they should call this limeade. It's the most common beverage at every hawker center.
Kopi – strong local coffee with condensed milk
Kopi-o – black coffee. Also the name of a local soap opera.
Yong Tau Foo – tofu & variations thereof, including fried tofu, tofu skin, stuffed tofu, imitation crab meat, unidentifiable flower-shaped vegetable stuffed w/ tofu, random other veggies, h-b eggs, fish balls, unidentifiable meatball-looking things. You pick what you like & they cook it for you with noodles either dry, in broth, or w/ laksa (spicy coconut broth).
Fish balls – kinda like the gefilte fish of Asia, these things are bland & unidentifiable. They have a bouncy texture. They're in everything – soup, on noodles, rice, fried on sticks (fishballcicles), you name it. They're very popular & I can't understand why.
Eggs – they're in everything,
sometime scrambled as an essential part of a recipe, but more often hard boiled.
Special variations include salt eggs, which when raw are packed in a
black salt/ash powder, & when you brush off the black casing & hard
boil them, you get really salty eggs with incredibly bright yolks. There's also
century eggs, which are packed in something brown – might be dirt
or might be horse manure, I haven't been able to verify which – and when
they're cooked, the white turns almost black & the yolk is green. They're
strangely tasty.
Char kway teow – it involves
cockles. I'd never had a cockle, only knew about them from the song (cockles
& mussles, alive, alive-oh). This was like gloppy fried noodles with mysterious
things in it, some of which were bristley & got stuck in my teeth. What
I think were the cockles were rather yucky tasting.
Mee goreng – means fried
noodles. but gloppier, in a chili sauce. A Malaysian dish, very common everywhere
in S'pore.
Nonya dumplings
– sticky rice dumplings wrapped in leaves, stuffed with unidentifiable
tasty things. Sold in the same places that sell bao. There are other kinds of
rice dumplings too, like with peanuts in them or century egg.
Nasi lemak –fish head
& chicken wing & many tiny whole fishies (called ikan bilis)
w/ supposedly coconut rice but just tasted like normal rice to me (but then
again, I am smell deficient) wrapped in a leaf. Not too tasty, nor appetizing.
Chicken rice – the national
dish of Singapore, it’s exactly what the name implies, but the chicken
is incredibly tender (probably because no one here would ever dream of removing
the skin) and the rice is incredibly aromatic. Too many bones & too much
fat to contend with.
Fried Bee Hoon (no bees were
harmed in the making of this food) – thin vermicelli-like rice noodles,
fried w/ dark sweet soy sauce. Common for breakfast with a fried egg on top.
Carrot cake (no carrots were
harmed in the making of this food) – very confusing yet tasty dish, as
this involves no carrots, nor is it cake. Rather, it’s sort of like noodles
made out of turnip (also called carrots sometimes, I’m told), chopped up
& fried with egg & green onions & spicy things.
Roti john
(no one named John was harmed in the making of this food) – a kind of egg
sandwich, where the scrambled egg has onions and maybe bits of mutton cooked
into it & it somehow ends up a beautiful shade of orange. This is then put
on submarine bread & then you dip the whole thing in spicy sweet chili sauce.
Papaya salad (no papaya was
harmed in the making of this food) – well, maybe there was papaya, but
not like the fruit we all know & love. This is some crunchy shredded vegetable
mixed up in a very spicy salad dressing with chopped peanuts mixed in. Fun to
watch the person making it, as they mix & pound it all in a big wooden mortar
& pestle bowl.
Mee rebus – thick noodles with sliced hard boiled egg & shrimp on top, in a thick spicy gravy.
Mee siam – similar to
mee rebus, but with thin noodles (bee hoon) & a slightly different sauce.
Chili crab/pepper crab –
some of the signature dishes of S’pore. Whole crab cooked in really spicy
chili or pepper, that you shell & eat with your fingers. Very messy and
delicious. Served with rice & sweet donut-like bread to sop up the sauce.
Prawn rolls – glorified
fish sticks. Everyone seemed to like these a lot, but I didn’t think they
were very special.
Steamed peanuts – served
as an appetizer, they get big & almost waxy in texture. You pick them up
w/ chopsticks & dip in chili sauce.
Chapati
– a Muslim version of the tortilla.
Prata – an Indian version
of the tortilla, but very greasy and delicious.
Roti prata (also called roti
canai) – some prata bread with a really delicious spicy curry sauce.
Murtabak – minced mutton
& chopped onion cooked & scrambled in a little egg, then wrapped in
a prata like a crepe & served w/ that yummy spicy curry gravy.
Masala dosai – dosai is a big pancake-like thing, made out of lentils & rice, I’ve been led to believe. (Rawa dosai is the same thing but made out of semolina with spices baked into it.) Not unlike injira in some ways, but crispier. It’s wrapped around some bright yellow mashed potatoes w/ a little onion & some seeds mixed in. Dipping sauces include lentil dahl & other spicy unidentifiable but vegetarian pastes. To be eaten with the fingers* (but they give utensils to Ang Mo’s*).
Idli – Indian pancake-like bread made out of rice flour, served with the same condiments as masala dosai.
Bhatura – a big puffed up fried Indian bread. Too greasy to be as scrumptious as it should be. Served with channa (spicy chick peas.)
Poori – smaller puffed
up Indian bread, not as greasy.
Vidai – Indian spicy doughnuts, to be dipped into lentil dahl and other condiments with the fingers.
Indian desserts—all
of these taste like what I end up making when I don’t follow a recipe:
Things they got plenty of that we
know from the U.S. but are still kinda exotic: star fruit, papaya, guava, mango,
coconut, pineapple, lychees, dim sum (bao, chicken feet, chiew mai, etc), dumplings.
Things they don't have that you might expect: chow mein, lo mein. They have fried rice, but it's different.
*Note on eating habits—people
here use the spoon a lot, either with chopsticks or a fork, much in the same
way Europeans use a knife & fork in both hands & don’t bother switching
hands like Americans do. S’poreans will use their chopsticks or fork in
the right hand and place food bits (including long noodles, which is really
tricky) neatly into the spoon in the left hand, & then eat out of that.
They’ll also use the spoon to cut things, even things that really might
be better off cut with a knife. However, they do not use any utensils with some
Indian food, which is meant to be eaten w/ the fingers. There’s a technique
to this that I have not mastered.
*Note on the term “Ang Mo.”
I think it means white or maybe foreigner. I was told white, but there’s
a neighborhood called Ang Mo Kio, and I asked what Kio meant, thinking it would
be a white whatever, and was told that the whole phrase Ang Mo Kio means tomato.
Very confusing. Then I read that Ang Mo Kio means “red haired devil’s
bridge.” The plot thickens.
*Follies = “Far East” when spoken w/ Chinese accent. Someone actually told me to go to “Follies Plaza,” which I repeated and everything, & when I got there I realized it was actually “Far East Plaza.”