We haven’t visited a restaurant that serves beef stroganoff since the last time I wrote about it, and suggestions from readers haven’t been taken up either – too far lah, sorry.
But we did manage to fix up a dinner using Jamie Oliver’s recipe for it, which requires “a small glass of brandy”. We got some cognac instead from a really old bottle that was just sitting around in Naomi’s mum’s house. I think she’s had it since Chiang Kai Shek was Generalissimo of the Republic of China.
It wasn’t half bad, and we might have staved off the hankering for a while.
Anyone who’s been to the ToTT Store in Bukit Timah will know what a kitchen wonderland it is, chock full of appliances we can’t afford, plus an IKEA-style cafeteria that is suspiciously not as crowded as IKEA’s cafeteria.
We had been looking for an apple corer over the weekend, because one of our new projects required coring many apples at a go, and doing it the conventional way would mean at least half a dozen apples going bad before we finished a batch.
We called ToTT, and some friendly chap called Thud (but who spelled his name as “Thad”) very helpfully went around the 36,000sf store and found three types of corers in stock, and said to come down and take a look.
We did, found a Jamie Oliver Twist N Slide Apple Corer, and asked one of Thud’s colleagues for the other two types. They looked it up on their computer and said, “Sorry, it’s the only one”.
We said, “No, your colleague Thad said there were three!”
They said, “Thad? Oh. Thud. Wait, we call him and ask.”, and picked up the phone and said, “Hello? Thud? Gut one customer say you tell dem gut three kind of apple corner, but we cannut pine. Dut’s what we entered: APPLE CORNER. Don’t hub. OK, I look again”.
We bought the Jamie Oliver Twist N Slide in the end.
