Christmas overload

This past festive season was as much hectic as it was merry, which is probably in sync with the rapid and giddy growth that is driving Singapore of late. The 10 days all went by in a blur, with little time for reflection.


Christmas Eve dinner: A turkey the size of Australia, a leg of ham of comparable modesty, another (a tad smaller) roll of ham, 12 mince pies, a fruit cake, a log cake, a couple of chocolate Santas and some other dessert stuff – all for the 5 of us... Yes, you read that right – FIVE.


We had a salad, though…


… washed down with some champagne.


Breakfast: The next morning saw us mark another recent family tradition – breakfast cooked by B, who served us a sausage casserole (with ciabatta, cheese and eggs) with a side of grits (made with two cheeses), accompanied by Peet’s Major Dickason’s Blend, a nostalgic reminder of Berkeley, California. We held off on the salad this time – that would have been a touch too excessive, don’t you think?

Two years ago, B attempted a Christmas morn breakfast, but she short-circuited the oven, and when she put the hot glass casserole pan onto a cool surface, it cracked, and glass pieces got mixed in with the food. She cried. I went out and bought mee pok, instead.

Gifts: This year, without a proper Christmas tree, we placed the presents...


… under the television set, which seemed somehow appropriate.

We caught up with different parts of our extended family through six separate gut-expanding lunches/teas/dinners. We also met friends here and there, including a Boxing Day party thrown in a futile attempt to make a dent on the turkey/ham/cakes leftovers – friends just brought along more chocolate cakes.

In between all that were endless rounds of Christmas shopping amidst listening to taxi drivers complain endlessly about how it took 45 minutes to negotiate the gridlock when attempting to drive from the taxi stand of one Orchard Road mall to another, merely half a kilometer away.


One meal offered a respite from the feeding frenzy… a leisurely dinner, at Mushroom Park, consisting mainly of mushrooms, vegetables and tofu cooked in a light herbal broth.

What was missing throughout it all was any meaningful contemplation and appreciation for the reason why Christians celebrate Christmas in the first place – to mark the moment God became man so as to bridge that unbridgeable gap between them; to mark, in effect, the birth of the faith. For this oversight, it would be easy for us to blame capitalism, or society, or consumerism, or even the Singapore Tourism Board. But the fault was all mine and J’s, I fear; all a matter of wilful, personal choice.

So, here’s to next Christmas, then.


Cheers?

Courier service in Singapore...

Shipping made easy around the world? Indeed!

Bowled over

I was going to pen some original thoughts about a recent trip to Restoran LYJ in Sungai Buloh to have poon choy, a riot of foods cooked in one (huge) bowl, usually served during festive occasions. But I broke one of my cardinal rules of blogging – I googled the term before I started writing. And as expected, the torrent of information that flowed made my stillborn creative attempt small, old and superfluous.

However, all is not lost. Beaten BUT NOT broken, I present to you The Best of the Rest, a plagiari… I mean, aggregate hodge podge (much like the dish itself, actually) of what you will find when you type “poon choy” into Blackle.

But first, a picture, which at least I can claim authorship (Pictureship? Imageship? Okay, ownership) of…

What, then, is poon choi or poon choy? According to the Internet’s most reliable source of information (one that is constantly and only policed by experts in their fields who despite their busy workload spend their precious free time updating, without payment, public-access information for the benefit of mankind while being bombarded with requests to donate to that very same site), the dish is a layered kalaidescope of “pork, beef, lamb, chicken, duck, abalone, ginseng, shark’s fin, fish maw, prawn, crab, dried mushroom, fishballs, squid, dried eel, dried shrimp, pigskin, beancurd and Chinese radish”, served in one gigantouraus basin or bowl.

[You know how those Buffet Buffoons scurry around and cut queue so that they can pile their plates high with all the best stuff on view, then stagger back to their seats while performing a world-class balancing act? Well, this is like someone’s done the scurrying, stacking and carrying for them!]

It seems the dish came about when the Cantonese served it to the retreating Song Emperor, who was then fleeing the Mongol expansion. Putting all the goodies together could have been a form of tribute, or maybe they just ran out of plates [J and J, take note: this last reference comes from a New York Chinatown restaurant blurb – look for the A&B Lobster King House on the page]. Or it could have been that the wily pro-democracy southerners were sending a subtle message to their northern overlord, forcing him to experience eating cheek by jowl with his underlings from one bowl.

A blogger, who I take at face value is a Babe and lives in the city with her boiboi, gives a detailed description of the make-up of this restaurant’s version. But if you're the type that learns best visually (or you're just plain lazy to read more text), here's another view of the dish, taken from another angle, which gives you a different picture because it is truly huge!

Now, logic tells us that it would be impossible for all the stuff in the poon choy to be uniformly excellent. Every dish is unique and needs careful and different preparation from other types of food for it to sing when it touches our palates. And so it was with this poon choy – most of the components were good, as befitting the excellent kitchen – but not all hit a home run.

But as legitimate as this observation was (by the fastidious J), I felt the point of this dish was more social than gastronomic. You need to bring together 14 other people you enjoy being with, so that tucking into this Feast In A Bowl becomes an uproarious special occasion. Eating poon choy is a shared culinary adventure as a whole table picks through a communal basin, the wonderment of discovery heightened by a generous amount of beer or wine. There was a lot of “Oooh, look, I found this,” and “Here, you on the other side of the continent, you gotta have that” going on that night.

Of course, the food itself has to be good to make the merriment worthwhile – and it was. We know, since we ordered a roast suckling pig and a braised claypot fish off their a la carte menu as well!!

Yeah , yeah, there wasn’t enough food already, huh? We were as happy as stuffed little emperors that night. Anyway, we’ll be back there next weekend, to feast on their other wonderful non-poon choy stuff.

I should leave the final word to Miss Babe, who helpfully gives the address of the restaurant, on a napkin!

Silence, and then it begins again…

In this dog eat dog world of a zillion voices and opinions struggling to be heard and to be different online, one quickly becomes irrelevant unless one adheres to the three cardinal rules of blogging – update, update and update. Every day, at the very least, or, if you fancy yourself as citizen journalist, every hour or with every new development in a big story.

So, my 20 days of silence has been an eternity. But, you know, I haven’t been lying on the beach, sun tan lotion on my side, Corona in hand, admiring the sunset.

Life trotted along and things (though rarely, thankfully, shit) happened – some of them personally significant, others of social, political and national interest that touched me in unexpected ways.

Two developments have been gobbling up the hours and minutes of the day – getting into the groove work-wise, and making a concerted effort to get some exercise into my life by joining a gym and embarking on a programme. The second new thing required an initial boost to get over procrastination (one needs to just do it and stop making %&*&%$^ excuses), but the payback has been almost immediate – better energy levels, better sleeping patterns.

Getting into a work groove was as much a relief as it was necessary, since in the months before, I have alternated between being distracted (family, travelling, friends, this and that stuff) and depressed (not getting significant work done).

But now, it’s all good, it’s all chillin’.

First up (or down, since you have to read below), is the Bearded Warrior of Kelantan, and below that, getting crabby and Lucky.

Is there such a thing as an objective past?

Today, for benefit of its readers who might want to stretch their legs a little, The Star, featured the historic Tok Janggut Trail in Kelantan, a state in northeastern peninsula Malaysia. Tok Janggut (which the writer of the article translates as ‘The Bearded One’, although One seems a pale version of Tok, an honorific accorded to those of who are particularly wise and respected, and who are no longer young punk warriors) was a local warlord who led a rebellion against the British colonizers around the turn of the 20th century.

The meaning and significance of his act is shrouded is some controversy, as the title of the book written by an expert (who is quoted in the article) shows: Tok Janggut: Revolutionary or Traitor?

A monument to
remember Tok Janggut by.
(Picture copyright: The Star.)

But what struck me about the article was the way in which history is again being spun in the service of the present. Here’s how the writer, reflecting the State-determined standard accounts of history of today, puts it:

“Arguably the first person to revolt against the British in the Malay Peninsula back in the early 1900s, Tok Janggut did in a way anticipate Aug 31, 1957.”

But a close inspection of the details suggests that linking together Tok Janggut’s rebellion to Malaysia’s independence from Britain requires some suspension of critical thinking.

Tok Janggut’s beef was as much against the British as it was against the Sultan of the day, and rested on local issues like taxes and local autonomy. His rebellion could be seen as part of a long tradition of maintaining a balance of power between the ruler and the local lords. The ruler, rarely all-powerful unless he was especially charismatic, won the support of local chiefs by promising them titles and legitimacy, while extracting taxes (in goods and manpower) from them. Levy too high a tax, and the chiefs revolted.

So the jury is still out on whether he is a modern anti-colonialist hero, or a local warlord seeking to exploit a weak Sultan.

Also, the Malaysian (or more accurately, Malayan) parties involved in the negotiation for independence, hardly resembled the violent and radical Tok Janggut. The British identified and chose to negotiate with a group of conservative elites (quite a few of them who had studied in England), and who were amenable to the Queen’s interest after the Union Jack had been lowered.

Ah, the devil is in the details…