Singapore Food Festival

Last month Singapore hosted one of the most popular festivals that brought crowds to one of the city’s busiest spots, the Clarke Quay. It has become one of the key cultural events on the island as it profiles Singapore’s culinary offerings of the local and international food, and as some of you may know by now, food is one of the first and most common subjects in Asia! Every year the festival highlights different gastronomic flavor, this year’s Singapore Food Festival celebrated versatile Chinese cuisine!

The Clarke Quay food stalls offered so many different types of dishes that I wasn’t sure what to try first… We went around first to get a better idea what a ‘Chinese cuisine’ is. I am here for about 2 months now and I still cannot tell difference between many Asian dishes… Chinese, Malay, Indian, Indonesian, Philippine...there's too many of them here... We bought a festival card that allowed us to purchase smaller portions from many food stalls; after all we were there to sample different things!

While going around I realized how diverse Chinese cuisine really is! After all China is an enormous country with many provinces, climate types, various regional products, seasoning, culinary traditions and cooking techniques. The most traditional Chinese dishes you might know are chicken-rice, Kung Pao chicken, various stir fry’s, steamed/fried/boiled dumplings, hot soup pots, fish ball noodles, steamed egg (this is very interesting! You add egg to broth/soup in a small pot and steam it until it gets solid; very particular in taste, but yummy), roast goose, shark fin soup (this is really different too, but tasty), popiah (like a spring roll, thin paper-like crepe with filling – different combinations of vegetables, meat, seafood, but not fried like the spring roll, it is served fresh). Most popularized Chinese cuisine types in Europe are Cantonese and Sichuan, that’s the only two I heard of before moving to Asia anyway, so it was real feast for us to try new dishes during the Food Festival!

We tried popiah, chicken pau (steamed Chinese buns, like Polish ‘papmuchy’), vegetable and meat filled dumplings, Chinese rolls with meat and seafood filling, and for dessert Durian pancake (Indonesian/Malay origin fruit with a very particular odor; you probably saw FB pictures when I eat the Durian pancake and make funny faces… It is really very special taste, apparently it is a local favorite… I’m not a big fan, Herve, on the other hand, ate the whole thing without making faces, that’s progress! Becoming Singaporean already...) and a variety of rice cakes, very popular here. I noticed that rice is a base ingredient for many foods and drinks in Asia, even pastries or alcohol!

Apart from the Chinese cuisine you could get any local Singaporean food, such as Indian, Malay, Indonesian, Western, including the signature Singaporean Chili Crab! I tried the sauce served with the crab, it’s hoooooot!!!! Another thing I learned about food here, hot dishes are really really hot! So if you think you know 'hot' you should try original Asian food... I still cannot eat hot dishes here, whenever I have lunch that is a little hot, I end up lobster red... But I'm getting used to spicy Asian buds.

Overall, the event was really great, it gave the Island of Singapore another occasion to showcase their gastronomic diversity and share it with all hungry tourists and locals. I cannot wait for the next year’s one… Hmmm, feeling a little hungry writing about all the food… What do I have in the fridge? Talk to you later!

Durian fruit



The durian is the fruit widely known in Southeast Asia as the "king of fruits", the durian is distinctive for its large size, unique odor, and formidable thorn-covered husk. The fruit can grow as large as 30 centimeters (12 in) long and 15 centimeters (6 in) in diameter, and it typically weighs one to three kilograms (2 to 7 lb). The edible portion of the fruit, known as the aril and usually referred to as the "flesh" or "pulp", only accounts for about 15-30% of the mass of the entire fruit.

The edible flesh emits a distinctive odor, strong and penetrating even when the husk is intact. Some people regard the durian as fragrant; others find the aroma overpowering and offensive. The smell evokes reactions from deep appreciation to intense disgust and has been described variously as almonds, rotten onions, turpentine and gym socks. The odor has led to the fruit's banishment from certain hotels and public transportation in Southeast Asia.