What We're Eating, part 2

Today we stopped by the house of a friend of Khir's to see their new baby, and were invited to stay for lunch. They were a very nice family, and fed us a delicious lunch of dry mee siam (rice noodles cooked with Malay spices and shrimp), a kind-of pudding made from mung bean and durian, and a delicious bread pudding for dessert, as well as a very fragrant sweat tea infused with pandan leaf. Another linguistic note: mee is the Chinese word for noodles, and Siam is, of course, the old name for Thailand. Also, one of the sons in the family is a chef at a very high-end restaurant in Singapore (also recently featured in a food magazine alongside one of Gordon Ramsey's restaurants in London), which we have reservations for on Thursday, so that will be very exciting as well.




For dinner we went to Sammy's Fish Head Curry, whose specialty is, you guessed it: fish head curry. We were each given a large banana leaf as a plate onto which several waiters immediately deposited white rice, curry sauce, sliced cucumber, and so on.


The fish head curry came in a large clay-pot style bowl.

Even though it looked a little scary, it was definitely one of the best curries I'd ever had. Khir explained that the cheek flesh of the fish is the tenderest part of the animal, and he was absolutely right.

We also had two of the largest shrimp I've ever seen. Each one was approximately the length of my hand (fingers extended), but I'd accidentally already eaten mine by the time I remembered i wanted to take a photo of it. Oops!

During the day we were on a walk to see Singapore's merlion (about which more later) and we stopped at a stand to buy some sweat corn ice cream. The vendor took out a big square block of the ice cream and cut off a large section of it to serve between two thin wafers. It tasted like delicious sweet corn. We loved it!