Yeah, this is really not a food blog. Mostly I just share strange text on menus and food packages.
This is the advertisement on the back of the JetStar inflight magazine.
Some people would never drink instant coffee at any time, but I am fairly confident that even people who really like instant coffee would never drink it while inline skating.
Congratulations, nameless graphic designer. The ad is certainly eye-catching. Baffling, but also definitely eye-catching.
This is a box of longan fruit. The longan is a kind of fruit related to lychee and rambutan. The text on the box says:
Fresh Longan
Longing for longans… grab a handful of this sweet, fleshy fruit and enjoy it’s exotic taste!
The box contains some truly tasty fruit, but it’s a shame that its punctuation is rotten.
The red paper band in the photo says “Xinjiang Specialty”. The part of the red paper band that you can’t see in this photo says “Selected Hami Melon”. Wikipedia informs me that this is a type of muskmelon named after a city in—you guessed it—Xinjiang, China.
It’s like a cantaloupe (cantaloupes are also muskmelons), but a bit more oblong like a foo—like an American football, that is. Footballs generally being spheres. I think rugby balls are this shape? Whatever. Here’s another photo.
It seemed crunchier than cantaloupes are, in my experience; the texture was more like that of a honeydew melon. This could just have been a particularly unripe one, though. I mean, hey, what do I know? On the other hand, according to the internet, it’s supposed to be crunchy. Anyhow, it tasted good! That’s what’s important here.
These things are apparently also called ‘snow melons’. I guess it gets cold in Xinjiang.
So, what’s a ‘rock melon’? The orange melon sold everywhere in Singapore at fruit juice stalls is invariably called rock melon. As far as I can tell, ‘rock melon’ is just another name for cantaloupe/cantalope, and whatever you want to call it, it tastes great with prosciutto.
If you think you’ve learned enough about melons for one day, think again. Botanically, they’re vegetables. (They’re related to cucumbers, squash and gourds.) So that whole “what is a tomato, really” debate… you can have it about melons, too.
Also, in case you haven’t stumbled into the parts of the internet that explain how humans have for centuries interfered with the genetics of food crops to make food more delicious, have a look at this article about the watermelon in an oil still life painting from the 17th century.
Loop sop. Thai marzipan? We saw these colorful thingies on the dessert page of the menu at Diandin Leluk and had to try them.
Via smartphone, the internet told us what they’re made of (bean paste) and what they’re usually called (luk chup), and confirmed our intuition that they’re relatively rare among Thai dessert offerings (mango sticky rice ftw). Despite several trips to Bangkok, we couldn’t remember having seen them. If we had seen them, we would definitely remember!
I see eggplants in two shapes, watermelons, chilies, and rose apples. (We called rose apples ‘nose fruits’ before we knew what they were supposed to be called.) I think the orange things are papayas. The yellow things look like onions. Not sure about the pink or green ones. And no, they don’t taste different.
My salt’s got a Chinese pagoda on it now. And some Arabic, for good measure.
I walked down Orchard Road and took photos when I got to a bit of sidewalk that featured matching repeating pairs of these seven tropical fruits.
Did you think that first one was a durian because of the texture and because durians are so famous in Singapore? That bean shape seems wrong for a durian, though, as do the attached leaves. I’m betting it’s actually a mango.
The pineapple has leaves on both ends, even though canonical representations only have leaves at the top, but let’s assume this is realistic. In fact, some pineapples are reddish on the outside like the paper ones people hang up during Chinese New Year!
I have eaten all of these, though I may never have peeled a rambutan myself. (I like to think of rambutans as velcro fruit.) They are internally similar to lychees and longans, which I also like.
I think the mangosteens are the strangest of these seven.
I love hand-carved traditional signs like the one over Ah Chew Desserts on Liang Seah Street.
And the desserts themselves are nothing to sneeze at.
Yeah, okay, so I’m not the first one to make that joke. But give me some credit… I’m pretty sure I thought of it all by myself.
Just like Schindler Lifts.
When I spotted this Korean drink called baekseju (百歲酒) on the menu at the very excellent and formerly close to my house Jang Won Korean Restaurant, I thought it might be a version of the famous Chinese alcohol called , which is sometimes called ‘white wine’—though not by anybody who’s ever had any.
Nope. The Chinese word
Silly ang moh, those are obviously two totally different words.
Wait, hang on, that text on the Korean menu looks, um, rather similar to what’s currently on Wikipedia…
I didn’t photograph the whole menu page, though, so it’s not clear whether those prices are subjected to service charge and tax.
This amazing set meal at Ryoshi Sushi Ikeikemaru at Westgate was so good that I forgave them for including fish in my tempura.
Next time I’ll avoid the fish and it’ll be perfect.
