frog porridge and other delights

First, as promised, here is a review of a tropical fruit.....the dragon fruit. Not available in the US, this fruit tastes melonish with a bit of an herbal backdrop.

I’m sure that if it was available in the US, the dragon fruit would be ridiculously expensive, like the star fruit (here, star fruit is cheap). I’m not sure that dragon fruit would present any sort of exciting new flavor if you could get it.....it's good, but maybe we in the US already have enough orthogonal fruit flavors to form a robust basis set of taste (the dragon fruit is beautiful, however).

I also had some soursop juice. Soursop looks like a small green spiky melon, but tastes very much like pineapple. Not bad.

I found my chili crab yesterday. This is a dish that I need to learn how to make…..it was so great.

And I ate some frog porridge. Note that you can not see the frog legs in the following photo, but they’re there, sitting below the surface of the superheated rice porridge flavored with green onion and ginger. The taste was OK; not too strong. Frog legs are often compared to chicken, but I think they’re better described as a cross between chicken and shrimp.




Here’s the stall where I bought the frog porridge from; note the cages in the lower corner containing live frogs awaiting their fate (I brightened the image so that you could make out the frog cages more easily).


Another dish that I ate was fried bee hoon; bee hoon is just vermicelli noodles. This was by far the cheapest meal I’ve eaten yet, coming in at about US$1.25. This morning I has fish ball noodles for breakfast. They weren’t too bad.

Last night I went down to Clark’s Quay for the New Years Celebration down there. From what I gather, this place has undergone some serious development recently. There were several thousand people down there, apparently waiting for fireworks. I thought I saw a schedule that said there’d be fireworks down there, but nothing happened. There were just dancers and plenty of westerners buying expensive drinks. I had two Tiger beers (each was US$10); not great but drinkable. Here’s a photo from last night:

On my way back to the hotel, I stopped by a food stall and bought some chicken curry. But I ended up with this sack of curry…not really too edible without rice, which they were out of (there was a piece of chicken floating around in there, which I chowed down on).



Finally, a sign from the local MRT station bathroom. Not the best image quality, but I wasn’t going to stand there too long trying to get a better photo….



And some miscellaneous pictures of Singapore:


Today’s plan: go to see the monkeys at MacRitchie Reservoir Park. There was an article in the paper yesterday about how people keep feeding them, even with a $200 fine. Maybe I’ll get a good shot of some monkey shenanigans.