May 15, 2009 By cheryl

Dinner (And a Show)

Anyone tailing me over the past few days might come to this conclusion: That Cheryl, she’s just a big whore.

It’s these red-light districts. I just can’t stay away from them.

Not that I’m dissing the world’s oldest profession, but it’s actually other afternoon delights that have been the draw for me in these neighborhoods.

In yesterday’s case, it was Kok Sen Coffee Shop‘s crispy harjeong gai, a Singaporean dish of chicken marinated in prawn paste and then deep fried. (A particularly apropos lure considering “gai,” or chicken, is local slang for “prostitute.” As is “fishball girl” in some corners, for that matter. I’m not even going to speculate why.)

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May 13, 2009 By cheryl

A Fried Chicken Habit

I have been on a fried chicken bender.

It began with the ladies-of-the-night Thai chicken wings and continued the next day with bright-red Indian fried chicken for lunch and then a dinner of Indonesian nasi ayam penyet, a dish of rice and gloriously crunchy cumin/coriander/lemongrass-seasoned fried chicken that I’m still hoping will make its way across the ocean to New York City.

By the time I sat down to my next meal and saw the Malay fried chicken wings on the table, I knew it was time to admit: I have a problem.

Everyone has a comfort food and mine, somehow, is fried chicken.

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May 11, 2009 By cheryl

Where The Girls Eat

Perhaps it was the yellowing fluorescent lighting. Or the sticky plastic chairs. Or the fleshy young girl in the black fishnets, scuffed-up heels and too-short shorts sashaying in for her nightly order of chicken wings.

But I had the distinct feeling: I’ve been here before.

Not here, at Cafe Supunsa in Singapore, specifically. But at a saucy place of ill-repute, enduring the mental undressings of men wondering if I’m one of the crowd, all in the name of searching for a good meal.

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May 11, 2009 By cheryl

The Heart of Things

They say that you can’t go home again.

Over a snack of mutton murtabak and Malay ginger tea, scalding hot and satisfyingly milky, the phrase suddenly popped into my head. And my mind immediately banished the logic.

I had been bemoaning my rudimentary photography skills to my friend KF Seetoh, a Singapore TV food host (the Saint Anthony of Southeast Asia, really), when I confessed, “I just learned how to focus.”

The camera, that is. And this would be, oh, after four years of owning the darned thing.

In fact, I’m the only person I know who can take a picture of a perfectly delicious specimen of food and somehow produce a vision that is capable of inspiring nausea and thoughts of never lifting morsel to mouth ever again.

My problem, always, has been the hunger.

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May 8, 2009 By cheryl

A View From The Road: Spam Fries in Singapore

Best. Discovery. Ever.

“Luncheon Meat Fries” at Wild Oats in Singapore — an amazing bar food that consists of Spam sliced into thin strips and then deep fried.

Surely, this must be the reason God invented pigs.