Monday, August 31, 2009

it's been a while... but i'm still here...



as recommended by channel u and what a letdown it was. after the upsetting news that our regular claypot chicken rice stall had moved to clementi, e mom and i decided to chance it and head to abc market to try one of e two stalls selling said meal. unfortunately, despite coming highly recommended, the meal was uninspiring and left fond memories of after dinner chats with e mom just slightly tainted. :(

and to add insult to e injury, e mom lied to me. she coerced me into eating pohpiah with her. she said only one roll, but she came back with two! liar! bra on fire. old man please come back soon, my stomach is not expand-able as yours...


post-blog update: transfered this from my main blog to here.. since it's food.

just to elaborate on the meal, the rice was not as fragrant as my fav stall. the chicken was 'overcooked' in the sense that it was as tender. the chicken from my fav stall has that kind of 'you-can-suck-the-meat-off-the-bones' quality. it is that tender! i guess it's the period where it goes from slightly raw to cooked. and that in itself is an art/skill to be mastered.

also, the above stall doesn't let you mix your rice up (i'm sure they will let you if you ask...) but i like the fact that my fav stall lets you choose whether to mix it up yourself or not right off the bat. when our pot came, the black sauce and oil was already added inside! and did i mention that they gave too much chicken breast? in line with all the unhealthiness that goes into the pot, i figured that if it's already that bad for health, might as well go all the way and just heap us with the fattier parts of the chicken. that way, not only will the pot be more flavourful, people eating will also feel more shiok (
denoting extreme pleasure towards things/food etc).

there weren't too much kiam hu
that didn't give the salty tinge to the rice as i have come to think of as synonymous with claypot chicken rice.

(digressing - and as i was trying to google the hokkien spelling for fish, i learnt something new! i initially thought that fish in hokkien was spelt something like herh. don't ask me why. wahhaha but it's hu with the 5th tone [mandarin only has four tones] - amazing right? in the 5 - 8 mins of 'researching' i learnt more about my dialect than the last 26yrs of trying to sound at least authentic)

the mom and i came to a conclusion that the ingredients were pre cooked such that they could serve up the claypots at a relatively fast rate. usually, at my fav stall, we call in advance (at least 20 mins) and by the time we head down, it'll be ready for us. even if it's not, we'll only have to wait for about 5 - 10 mins for the pot. but over at this stall, we only had to wait less than 10 mins for our pot. i think that in itself is the key factor why this stall CANNOT beat my fav stall (which i'm not going to tell you the name)!

we also ordered a soup to go along with our pot, and the watercress soup was bland. there wasn't too much flavour in it. disappointing. esp when i'm so used to have the black chicken feet with black beans and pork ribs soup (that actually have taste!). now that's one uber yums soup!

time to try the other stall at abc market. i hope it doesn't let me down as much as this stall. but hey! different strokes for different folks, and while the mom and i might not have found it delicious, i'm pretty sure there are people out there who likes this stall. :)

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