TODAY: Food so good you’ll write home about it

… or at least write about it from the com­fort of home, as Sin­ga­pore­ans get gas­tro­nom­i­cal in their blogs

DON’T know where to dine? Check blog­gers’ reviews.

I recently came across a guide to Sin­ga­pore food in the Aus­tralian news­pa­per, The Age (www.theage.com.au) which asserted: “Sin­ga­pore­ans love eat­ing. Any­thing, at any time.

“To get the best from Sin­ga­pore eat­ing, it’s advis­able to break all the Aus­tralian rules. Head for shop­ping cen­tres. Go to lux­ury hotels. Indulge in fast food. Look for buf­fets. And eat some­thing strange.”

Read more at TODAY­on­line.

Tech­no­rati Tags: blog, food, TODAY

We know we eat any­thing, at any time, and you could say that all Sin­ga­pore­ans are food­ies. So there are def­i­nitely going to be at least a cou­ple of food-related entries in almost every local blog.

There are even sev­eral ded­i­cated food-slash-lifestyle blogs, but — such is the life-span of the aver­age blog — many are cre­ated but stall just a few months later, with the most recent entries almost a few months old.

Makan Sin­ga­pore (www.makansingapore.com), a web­site cre­ated by Sin­ga­porean Lisa Lim, is one such. When I last took a peek, the last entry was dated Sep­tem­ber, and its edi­tors were tak­ing a break. Still, Makan Sin­ga­pore is an inter­est­ing read, with the occa­sional spe­cial fea­ture (the last one was on the his­tory of moon­cakes), tried and tested recipes, and a blog sec­tion where Lisa and the other edi­tors post snip­pets of food-related arti­cles from other blogs.

It is a poten­tially rich repos­i­tory of food-related writ­ing and anec­dotes, and I cer­tainly hope this project is kept alive (hint: Please go there and contribute).

Aro­ma­Cook­ery (aromacookery.com) has been around for a lit­tle over a year and is still going strong. If you’re look­ing for hon­est reviews about eat­ing places, this is the place to go. A review of one restau­rant chain reads: “On Visit 3, my fish and chips took ages to appear and were *gasp* half-cooked; they had to be sent back to the kitchen. Visit 4 left me feel­ing cold. *pause* Very cold.”

Apart from hon­est reviews, Aro­ma­Cook­ery, whose tagline reads “a chron­i­cle of holis­tic food ther­apy”, is lov­ingly main­tained and illus­trated with well-taken photographs.

Then, there are some peo­ple who seem to have all the time in the world to blog, and to blog about food in par­tic­u­lar. Ivan of Recent Runes (recentrunes.typepad.com) has even been told he’s been blog­ging too fre­quently, and read­ers are find­ing it hard to fin­ish read­ing his daily dose of three to eight posts a day.

“I will now do two or three (some­times four) posts a day — if I can endure the feel­ing of not shar­ing some­thing funny with peo­ple — so that you can catch up,” he wrote in response.

Shar­ing a meal with Ivan would have to be dra­matic, I imag­ine. There’s a line in the 30-something-year-old’s blog that goes: “and when the dish was served, the room fell silent”.

You’d expect Ivan to be slightly tech­ni­cal, even clin­i­cal, about food, and with instruc­tions that are so pre­cise it makes you slightly embar­rassed about wolf­ing down that last plate of char kway teow. He is, after all, a mem­ber of the Slow Food Con­vivium Soci­ety (www.slowfood.org.sg), a group which organ­ises monthly lun­cheons at which “you’ll enjoy a unique gas­tro­nomic expe­ri­ence where your palate and senses will be seduced with fab­u­lous food, match­ing wines, and scin­til­lat­ing conversation”.

If you think par­tak­ing of alco­holic bev­er­ages can’t be too com­pli­cated, read Ivan’s instruc­tions on Grappa, a form of Ital­ian brandy: “The trick to imbib­ing Grappa is to allow the alco­hol (take a small sip) to evap­o­rate slightly on your tongue, fill­ing the mouth with the heady vapours of the good things that went into the dis­til­late, and finally slowly let­ting the fluid slide down your throat.”

He also warns: “Shoot­ing it down will curl the hairs on your chest and most likely sear your throat badly, if not kill you —it’s 35–40% alcohol.

“And yes, doing that sucking-to-the-back-of-your-throat thing (for wines) with this baby will melt your den­tures and remove your tonsils.”

Just when you thought it was safe to eat out.

Mr Miyagi aka Ben­jamin Lee has been enter­tain­ing read­ers at miyagi.sg for over a year, and would blog more about food if he could remem­ber to take pic­tures of the dishes before eat­ing them.