bloody marvellous

POP QUIZ
What's worse than having a blog and not updating it?
Spending 30 minutes updating your blog and blogger.com giving you an upload failure message of sorts and losing everything you've typed.

very nice.

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you know it's been a bloody marvellous day when your stomach's full, your legs are tired and you want nothing more than to simply kick back and finish up Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down.

first up, i met up with a friend to look for Granny cookies in Orchard. some weeks back, she gave these cookies out as Thank-You-For-The-Birthday-Dinner gifts. three cookies in a red box with an oil-painted logo of an old lady at the front. very clever marketing tactic. it makes you feel like some Granny Anne in a little french cottage slaved for hours at her kitchen making those perfect droolicious chocolate fudge cookies, when the truth is, these cookies were probably mass produced at some rusty old factory tended by disgruntled facial mask-wearing french workers forgetting to pronounce the last letters of every curse word they belch. too much chocolate fudge air can't be good for the digestive system.

the chocasmic experience of having one of these cookies, like a good fuck, leaves you breathless for more. we walked more than 1.5km through Orchard Road and the blistering heat just to get to the shop, need i say more?

the chocolate fudge cookies are powdery to the touch, but they do not crumble. putting it on the tip of your tongue is only the beginning of an unforgettable cookie experience. the cookie bloody MELTS, i tell yer, it melts on your tongue. Granny cookies crumble on your tongue at first bite, liquefying into chocolate fudge and coating your tongue with thousands of unimaginable oral explosions. you try to prolong the ecstacy, to delay swallowing the entire cookie, but you can't. you'll finish all three cookies in 5 minutes, i guarantee that.

then it's like a love lost and you're kickin' yourself cos you don't have any left for lunch, tea, dinner, breakfast, for a long time.

we entered the shop, relieved to be swept over by air-con. with my first step into the shop, i immediately knew this was no regular supermarket. everything was going to cost 2x, 3x more than local supermarkets. behold this, for i have stepped into a boutique supermarket. i was prepared to burn a hole in my wallet. it does not even have regular carrots, it sells SPECIAL mini, slender carrots with the leaves still attached to the slender tuberous bodies. i didn't dare touch it, i was afraid of the pricetag, it said $34/kg. that's insane, i could buy a million raw steaks for $34. all kinds of cheeses, dips, wines, biscuits, teas - it was a supermarket adventure of the poseur kind.

to our disappointment, they were out of Granny cookies and have not shipped them in for quite some time. apparently due to bad customer reviews. WHAT KIND OF CUSTOMERS DO THEY HAVE? they probably have dead tastebuds or had their tongues cruelly snapped out of their mouths.

"they didn't like the chocolate chip cookies, mostly."
"no, the choc chip ones were not that good. but the choc fudge ones were fantastic."
"we're shipping them in again, perhaps in June, can you wait?"

do we really have a choice?

now that we were in that shop, surrounded by beautiful food for beautiful stomachs in beautiful people, we just had to buy something. i looked at an array of teas delightfully tinned and exorbitantly priced at $19 each. my friend tells me the little buds BLOSSOM when you pour hot water over them. do i really want to spend $19 for some special visual effects tea when i can stick to my reliable Ahmad or Lipton tea?

and then, i set eyes on this.


could God be any kinder to this foie gras loving poseur? methinks not. i'd sleep with anyone to inherit a duck/goose farm where i'll tenderly overfeed ducks/geese to fatten em up.

and then we spotted these. MILK CHOCOLATE SARDINES. i bought them.


while you're gagging, let me slowly explain that these marketing howorthy milk chocolate sardines are not chocolate coated/covered sardines. i am not that desperate to fit in with the richoes who hang out at this boutique supermarket. these are chocolates shaped like sardines, wrapped in foil to look like sardines and packaged like an opened tin of sardines. it was too cute to pass up. but at $8 for 5 pieces of chocolates, they better be bloody good or i'd have wished i did indeed buy chocolate coated/covered sardines.

and then i saw a mini keg of whisky COMPLETE WITH A MINI TAP. i shook my head and said, motherfucking luck. i'll never buy it but i so want it. it was beautiful. for beautiful throats and beautiful, fat wallets.

we escaped immediately before i made a rash and foolish purchase. the organic foods supermart next door was our next stop. people confuse health foods with organic foods all the time. organic foods are food from plants and animals that have been grown without the use of synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, and without antibiotics, growth hormones, and feed additives. this does NOT mean that cookies are ALLOWED, in this world, to be made without yeast, dairy items and NATURAL flavourings. i sampled some cookies and had to control myself from spitting them out. the fresh foods though, my God, that's what all of us should be eating. i've never seen such healthy-looking fresh foods in my life. they looked like they popped out of some still life exhibition. the red onions were HUGE, shiny and firm. the apples were robust and a deep red. the pears looked visually crunchy. organic food IS God's food. we should all convert if it were not so bloody expensive. i went away buying an expensive piece of chocolate, dark chocolate laced with orange. i couldn't bear to sink my teeth into beautiful apples and pears, and of course, not the onions.


we ran off to Little India, to Iniavan's, my favourite place. Ravi and i used to come here on a weekly basis, but i can't bear to go there without him these days. a bowl of mutton masala, a serving of fried chicken and several curries later, i am thankful i have not helped myself to their free flow tea, i would have never been able to fit all that food in.

we then adjourned to Upper Dickson Road to quickly drop my saree off at Umy's for some tailoring before Ravi's brother's wedding in two weeks, and a cool respite at the Kulfi Bar opposite. i cannot apologise for the poor quality of this image, i was too excited to dig in and my hands were shaking from the very anticipation of having smooth, milky kulfi laced with rose syrup and pistachios sliding down my warm throat on a hot day. this kulfi came with vermicelli and jelly too. i wanted to tilt the glass into my mouth, but alas, my mouth is not big enough, and my teeth are just too sensitive to the cold.


my friend has never been to the (in)famous Mustafa Centre, and so we jostled and hustled through the streets so she could have a taste. i told her it's a giant supermarket filled with almost everything you could think of (except foie gras which can never be halal or Granny's cookies which won't appeal to the targeted crowd at Mustafa's). imagine my delight when i find the hair conditioner suited for my hair there, when it's sold out everywhere else. it's the ONLY hair conditioner suited for my hair. i've stocked up enough to keep an entire African nation follicly moisturised.

note by amateur amateur photographer: not all the tubes are shown in this picture for maximum effect of rows and rows beyond the picture

Mustafa's is air-conditioned, but with the amount of human traffic there, you're left gasping for air like a goldfish and wishing you have a 1L bottle of Vittel with you. we head to the drinks section and look what we found!



look at the logo closely, remember the hot weekends your mother made ice-cold rose syrup? or the seasons she'd make bandung (rose syrup with milk) with this particular brand of rose syrup? old skool's gone modern. it now comes canned in a sleek, smooth tin. the tag phrases don't appeal to me at all, but hell, i know what it tastes like. no more bulky glass bottles of syrup, just grab a can of Rose Rush from the fridge on any given hot day!

so now, i go, fantasise the many ways to savour my foie gras while sipping on Rose Rush, and trying not to feel too sad that i'll be leaving all these behind in a matter of days.