Monday, November 17, 2008

What's for dinner?

It's just too tempting to eat out in this city. Unless you're at a pretty nice restaurant, it's just so inexpensive and the food is really good. Add the great exchange rate from US to Singapore dollars and it costs about half of the price it does in the US to "run out and grab dinner".

Melissa has never been someone who's enjoyed cooking. While I like to cook, I don't get home until almost 7:00pm every night; too late for a 6 year old's dinner. What this adds up to is a lot of meals out of the house.

We've got a few favorites we've started to frequent, but Jack would go to the same place every night if he could.



"Chicken Rice" is pretty much the national dish of Singapore. It tastes just like it sounds. There's chicken and rice. That's pretty much it.


In most hawker stands, you can get a plate like this for about 3 SingDollars. That's about $2 in the US. Loy Kee is a bit more because it's a sit-down restaurant but you can't beat the price for what you get.

Traditionally, the chicken is boiled. The rice is then made from the "chicken water". Makes for good rice, but the boiled chicken skin can be a bit hard to get past for some. Most places will sell roasted chicken too though.

It usually comes with 2 condiments on the side: dark soy sauce and chili sauce. Local Singaporeans will get into arguments about the proper way to use the sauces. It's kind of like people in the US fighting about mustard or ketchup on hot dogs. Jack pretty much likes to drown everything in dark soy sauce. It's salty and sweet and stains his mouth brown until we can bring him home and hose him down. He'd eat it every day if he could.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You traveled all the way to Singapore to eat chicken & rice? Where are the fried bugs and snakes? You'd better step it up for company; I want to see a picture of Mom eating some eel-heads.

Anonymous said...

I can't wait to visit and Jack can show us all the things he's grown to love in Singapore. Winter '09!