Chick with guts would like to apologise.....

For the lack of posting!!! The Chick was wandering the mean streets of New York's lower east side (LES to those in the know) for a month eating and eating and eating some of New York's finest grub and has been in the pit of despair since coming home. Not conducive to long expressive posts about food. But to keep you in the loop I will post up a guest blog that a good mate wrote about our trip to Per Se, Thomas Keller's 3 Michelin starred restaurant in the Time Warner Centre overlooking Central Park!!!!

Singapore!!!!

Director Chick, me and small fry one and two have just been to Singapore for Christmas - God it was good, apart from the hideous cold I picked up that turned into bronchitis and sinusitis - I mean you know it's good when you spend $4 and eat aMAZINGLY yummy hainanese chicken rice, or 90 cents and get a great cup of tea/coffee :-) :-) Also loved that whenever i broke a note in Singers i ended up with loads of $2 notes, so felt richer than when we began....such good foodcourts/hawkers centres in Singers - they put western foodcourts with their hideous greasiness to shame!!! So good that i took hardly any photos, too busy eating and coughing all round Singapore.

I did get photos of some Char Siew rice dumlings down in the basement of Carrefour in Suntec City - like a gigantic Kmart with a massive grocery store underneath.. and the choice! I thought we had choice in Australia, but we really don't. I was paralysed by the range of stuff you could buy and fascinated by the different signage - in particular the "adult diaper" sign.

Good and GREAT food places we found - the foodcourt stall on level 3 under the Swissotel the Stamford where they carved off the noodles by hand, Din Tai Fung at Raffles City (amazing dumplings and you can stand there and have a cup of green tea offered by the staff and watch as the chefs make your dumplings by hand and then cook them), J Co Doughnuts (those coffee cream filled ones were a killer!!! I ate like 10 of them!!!) downstairs at Raffles City, carrot cake at Newton Hawker Centre - and not the carrot cake we know and love, a savoury version made of radishes and eggs and such - Ananda Bhavan in Little India, the best vego food I ate, Thunder Tea Rice, a freaky combination of brown rice, yummy mixed veges, peanuts, dried shrimp and tea broth, Hainanese chicken rice everywhere was pretty good, i got obsessed with teh tarik - pulled milk tea with condensed milk - and dipping roti prata into it. I tried some of those fried savoury donutty looking things - they were ok with tea!!!

Not so good food - i adventurously tried a kaya toast set - two half boiled eggs (yuk! they're all boogery and you crack them into a bowl and then mix them with soy sauce and pepper), kaya toast (thick slabs of butter and kaya jam made from coconut milk between two slices of toast) and a cup of teh or kopi (tea or coffee) - eek!!! it was weird. But just to make sure it wasn't my starvation clouding my judgement i went again another time - and it was just as bad :-(

Highlights? Being whisked thru immigration as soon as they spotted our tired grrl sitting on her bag, our hotel, spending Xmas Day at Singapore Zoo breakfasting with the Orangutans, the beyond family-friendly vibe of Singapore...

Did I love Singapore? Why yes I did - it was the ideal first overseas trip with two little ones :-) yeah yeah can't wait to go back and finish our list of things to do!!!

today i ate a lentil

today is the day i start my blog.. *chanting*....today i made my way to martins a geeky nerdy warm vego cafe hidden away in a place called coconut grove. can i just say that finding a vego cafe in darwin is a pretty rare thing ( and something about hens teeth).

Swinging by Martin's has made me late for work twice in the last week.. the dude cooks awesome vego food and is planning on opening up adjacent to the yoga skool there... (so you can eat after all those asanas).. today he made me try a cake made of chickpeas no less. yeah. so far i've eaten his dhal and his quinoa which he stews with fruit and spices and serves up with creamy natural yoghurt and walnuts (i'm loving this in a dirty way alright) and now my workmate wants me to pick her up some too after she spotted me hunched protectively over my bowl at lunch.

hmmmmmmmmm should give you some details i guess, but i dont have them - martins cafe. coconut grove, darwin. if it stays a secret thats ok by me!!! would post a pic of his food but i ate it.