Pizza

 

I've been to La Pizzaiola twice this week with different friends. It's convenient to have a place in the neighbourhood which is pretty good and reasonable. Though a word of warning on the appetisers and desserts - I've tried two and they're small. The chocolate cake that M and I shared yesterday was one of those cakes that you inhale and it disappears! I baked lemon lime cupcakes from a King Arthur's Flour recipe which I messed with a little. I also made sticky date pudding because I haven't had that in a while.

Little India

 

Simian and I found this wood store, thanks to M's Father-in-Law. It's in this row of shop houses that includes weirdly enough, a Reebok Crossfit gym. Across the road is the Worker's Party Headquarters. We joked that the wood store is Singapore's Home Depot - Simian loves it. We love this strange sign too!

Food and Baking

 

Simian and I had dinner with an old classmate at Masala Art. It's been years since we've seen him and it was lovely to catch up. I have also been obsessed with making strawberry biscuits after reading this post. It's June and peak strawberry season. The thought of squishy, ripe, sweet strawberries in a biscuit made me drool. Unfortunately, Deb is right - you really need farmer's market strawberries for this - the ones that are sold in supermarkets are picked to travel well so they don't give you that nice, melty look.

Balzac Brasserie

I had dinner with M, J and D at Balzac Brasserie last night. The company as always was great and D gave me some heirloom tomato seeds to try and grow. She's started hers and she already has Black Krim big enough to eat. She also sent me her protoccol on how to grow heirlooms here. Apparently it's significantly more difficult than in the US - for example, she fertilises her tomatoes whereas we just kind of got good soil and once they were big enough, we transplanted them, and then tada, two months later, tomatoes! D says the rain here makes it much harder and the growing time is longer. She also gave me some wonderful bags to pop the tomatoes in so you don't need a pot and there is better drainage!

The restaurant was packed. My gnocchi was pretty good as was my salted caramel home made ice cream. However, we all thought serving sardines out of the can they came in wasn't rustic - the others said the sardines tasted fine, but we might as well have walked to a supermarket and bought them. I forgot to take a photo of J's lemon tart but there was no tart base. It was basically lemon filling on a wafer. I know that some chef's deconstruct dessert, but this just seemed strange.