Nasi lemak

Best breakfast there is: nasi lemak (rice cooked in coconut milk and served with a bit of egg, cucumber, tiny fried anchovies and peanuts, and a generous dollop of sweet-hot sambal goreng, wrapped in a banana leaf). Photo via Afiqqqq, whose blog, in English, was entirely devoted to nasi lemak for the few days it lasted in July 2015.

Ever since we got to Singapore, Blogger has been bothering me with this unexpected question:

Well, I guess it's mainly because all I'd be able to post would be food orders (and coffee) and "Happy Id al-Fitr!" It would not sparkle. I'm afraid that large readership would get bored.

A more pertinent question might be, "Why not blog about food?" Politics doesn't make anybody happy.

Singapore food pron

Lau Pa Sat satay. Via.

Woke up in the middle of the night with a blogger anxiety dream, I suppose engendered by the way I've neglected the site over the course of the Asian Vacasian, which is partly a function of various technical challenges, especially marshaling enough power points for sufficient time-periods to charge all our various devices and keeping track of where my reading glasses are. That and the power point issue are at least somewhat resolved at the moment.

It took a form like that of an indexing dream, where you toss and turn over an imaginary term that you might have spelled wrong, worrying that you'll lose it before you get to work: something I was determined to blog about but wouldn't have sufficient information [jump]

Only a prawn in her game

Scampi at Carbone, Thompson at Bleecker, New York Times photo.

The reviewer thought these beauties were a take on "shrimp scampi" using langoustines instead of the shrimp, but that is not quite right: what scampi originally means, in Italian, is langoustine, or Norway lobster. The Italian-American "shrimp scampi" is a recipe for shrimp, or gamberi, with a concentration of white wine, garlic, and butter pulling a certain lobstery sweetness out of it, a nostalgia dish for an America where real scampi could not—still can't easily—be found. The menu name expresses this nicely: "scampi alla scampi", i.e., scampi in scampi-style.