Yep, it's time for a little more time travel (aka catching up on old news) as I go back to talking about Singapore for a while. I've been back in Shanghai for a couple weeks, but I promised a post on food heaven... I just didn't say when!
Singapore tends to be known for a handful of things -- to people who don't travel much, laws about chewing gum and caning come to mind. Otherwise, the two words most frequently mentioned are "food" and "shopping."
I don't care that much about the shopping (suffice it to say there's plenty), so let's talk a little about the food. There's another post about food variety and quality in the works, but right now I'm going to focus on a couple local favorites. They're two of the dishes most closely identified with Singapore, and they're mmm, mmm, good.
First up is poh piah. It resembles a fresh spring roll, but the ingredients are usually somewhat different than what you'd find in the Vietnamese version. My aunt decided to do a poh piah night for the family, which was very self-sacrificing of her, as it basically meant that she spent an entire day preparing the ingredients.
Pretty much everything has to be sliced or shredded, and the main filling has to be cooked. Everyone can choose the ingredients they prefer, but these were the (pretty standard) ones on offer at our dinner: from bottom right, cooked shrimp, cooked fish meat, bean sprouts, egg, a kind of dried sliced sausage, spring onions, and shredded lettuce. If you look closely on the left side, you can see a jar of chili paste (red), minced garlic (yellow), and a dark sweet sauce, similar to plum sauce, though I don't know what it's actually made of. The big white bowl behind the lettuce contains the main poh piah filling, made primarily of shredded cooked white radish/turnip and carrots.
The rest is pretty simple: you take a wrapper -- kind of like a tortilla, but about as thin as a crepe, and it's not heated -- and arrange the ingredients of your choosing as you please. This particular assembly (not mine) was derided somewhat by other family members for being ridiculously skimpy. On the opposite end of the spectrum, one of my uncles likes to pile his filling so high that he actually needs two wrappers to contain it; it comes out about the diameter of a Chipotle burrito (but shorter). To each his or her own. Roll it up like a burrito, and voila, fresh crunchy cool sweet goodness. You can slice them if you like, for sharing (or as in the top photo, how it would be served in a restaurant), but since we were all having them, we chowed down two-handed. I don't mind saying that I had three (think of all the vegetable servings!). In fact, I could kinda go for one right now...
Part two coming some other day, since this post is ridiculously long already.
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