(Golden) Kiwi Fruit / Chinese Gooseberry
Kiwi fruit (Actinidia deliciosa) are native to East Asia, perhaps China, 
but were only commercially grown in New Zealand in the 1930’s from seeds obtained in the Yangtze River Valley. Better known by their more common green variety, these “Golden” specimens spied in a Singapore grocery last weekend were a stunning yellow and the flesh sweet and less acidic tasting. They were superb. I have always liked kiwis though some are delivered to groceries really unripe and can be painfully sour. With 10 times the Vitamin C as the equivalent amount of lemons, this is a highly nutritious fruit. It also looks terrific when added to fruit salads, used as a garnish, etc. I like to slice a ripe kiwi fruit in half and just scoop out the insides with a spoon. Best when served slightly chilled.
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Following our Ultimate Fried Rice fiasco at lunch, we decided to head to the nearest Hawker Center to our hotel. The Newton Circus Hawker Center is the most “touristy” of them all and thus pricier but incredibly convenient – just a ten minute walk from our hotel. There are several of these centers throughout Singapore and you must check them out the next time you are there. Clean and safe, these centers feature the key dishes from three cuisines – Chinese, Indian and Malay – that dominate the Singaporean food scene. For five people, we ate over 7 dishes, had drinks and walked away for USD45 total compared to our USD120 lunch. This wonderful dish of kai lan with oyster sauce, fried garlic and onions and chillis was just USD3 or so. What follows here is a photo album of our dinner at the hawker center…
The restaurant was billed as having the “Ultimate Fried Rice” so how could you resist that after a morning exploring Chinatown and Clarke Quay and in bad need of carbohydrates… we sat down at this second story restaurant on Clarke Quay, ordered some wonderful dishes like chicken with dried chilli peppers, beef with black pepper sauce, baby kailan with oyster sauce, sweet and sour pork and then asked the waiter what kinds of fried rice they had. Ultimate was it… they only had one kind, duhh… Marketman. So we ordered one medium sized bowl of the Ultimate and waited hungrily. When the food arrived, all looking pretty good, the smallish medium sized bowl of rice arrived and I knew this was simply not enough for a table of five people so I asked for 3 bowls of plain rice as well…
santol juice a few weeks ago. While I had heard about the wonderful qualities of santol juice, I had never tasted the stuff and had no clue how to make it. Was it some complicated process of santol infusion into hot or warm water that was then strained? Did I have to mash the skin and pulp and mix with water and later strain out the solids? Did I need baskets full of fruit and pass it through a commercial juicer to extract some critical essence of santol? How would the astringency of the pulp do in a juice like concoction? And finally, why the heck had I never come across this before when I am such a santol fanatic? Well, as with many questions in life, the answer was amazingly simple…
large slice of this delicious dessert or snack at any time of the day. The richness and consistency of the cassava, the sweetness, coconut flavor, and saltiness of the topping is burned into my memory banks in a big way. Yet, as of last week, I had never attempted to make it for myself. Worse, I had not seen anyone else make it. Growing up it just seemed easier to buy it while on road trips or else it arrived in boxes as presents during the holidays, etc. I know this delicacy was made in our home kitchen on occasion, but I must have been at school or out hunting green spiders to incarcerate in empty match boxes whenever cassava cake was being baked. Lay a plate out of kakanins in front of me and I will hit the cassava well ahead of the rice-based goodies.
sprouts refer to newly sprouted seeds… radish sprouts, arugula sprouts, etc. Mung bean sprouts are the most common type of bean sprouts in Manila today and have been for many decades. Don’t ask me why some are really short, squat and homegrown looking and others look like they are on steroids…I don’t know and didn’t bother to check – they might even start off from different seeds. Frankly, the largest mung bean sprouts I have ever seen was in Australia – they were at least 3 to 4 times the size of the ones here and they always looked so pristine, crisp and appetizing. But I always wondered what nutrients or chemicals they were taking in to get so incredibly humongous. For all I know they were soy bean sprouts! This is all just a long introduction to an extremely simple dish of stir-fried bean sprouts that I like to do when I see fresh bean sprouts in the market.
A delicious saba banana deep fried and coated with caramelized brown sugar… gosh, this is Filipino comfort food at its best. There are few things as satisfying as sinking your teeth into a really well made banana-que which, for me, means starting with a plump (bus-ok) saba banana that is semi-ripe (too ripe and it gets limp after frying). There seems to be a surplus of saba bananas at the moment. The end of the hot summer and two months of rains usually results in saba bounty unless some typhoons mess with the trees. Saba bananas roadside in Batangas last week were just under a peso each on average if you bought a whole bunch (bulig in Cebuano). I like buying whole bunches just like I prefer to buy whole langka. A nice sized bunch can have as many as 80-90 fruit. Roadside prices were far cheaper than the ridiculous PHP2.50 they charge in manila markets and groceries.
The lemon grass and large chunks of coconut give this soup that little extra something. The original recipe is credited to Ado Escudero but I have made some adjustments for added flavor and less fuss. What I like about this soup is the depth of flavor for something so incredibly “instant.” Most good soups require some time for the broth to develop “character” but the strength of ginger, lemongrass and fish sauce shortcuts this process nicely. This is a home-style recipe at its best. And it is really simple to make. The only catch is that it needs fresh coconuts which for many of Marketmanila’s readers I gather could be an issue…