A month of eating dangerously

Last Sunday was the eighth anniversary of our moving to Singapore.  We celebrated this auspicious occasion with a traditional Singapore dinner of  sausage and potato pie, washed down with a nice bottle of Valpolicella.  This was indubitably tasty, and had the benefit of being inhaled unquestioningly by the kids, but it just confirmed for me a feeling that has been growing for a while, that although we have lived in Asia a long time, we are still only really dipping our toes in the exotic waters of our adopted homeland.  And that it is time that changed.

I discussed this with Mr Hooker over another very Asian dinner of steak frites a few days later.  "I'm thinking", I said, "of experimenting on myself.  Gastronomically I mean.  I think it would be really interesting to eat in a hawker centre every day for a month.  A different food every day.  And, you know, push the boat out - try the weird stuff."  Mr H, fork suspended mid-air and wearing an expression that fell somewhere between concern and horror, diligently reminded me that (a) I am a huge control freak, particularly where culinary matters are concerned; (b) being truly omnivorous in Asia is not for the faint-hearted; and (c) when unfed, I am unsafe to approach without protective gear.  I told him that I had taken those matters into consideration (I had not), that I thought it would be funny (it may be, but probably not for me), and that in any event item (c) was other people's problem, not mine.  "Well", he said.  "You seem to have made your mind up.  But if you're going to do this, you really should do it properly.  No chickening out of the really gruesome stuff."

Well, that sure got me thinking: what are the local delights that I am most terrified of eating?  After much reflection, and in no particular order (other than noting that chicken feet cannot come anywhere other than first, and by some quite significant margin), I have honed a top ten hit parade of scariness, and I solemnly swear to do all I can to sample every one of the below over the course of the next four weeks:

Food?  Not food?

(1) Chicken feet.  I'm not sure that I need to elaborate on this.  Honestly what I'm struggling with most is the conceptual problem of how to ingest something that my brain (surely correctly) files firmly in the category of "not food".  That said, Monseiur Mangetout once ate an entire aeroplane and used to snack on lightbulbs, so I am sure I will muddle through.


(2) Frog porridge.  I've never eaten frog, and I don't like porridge.  Porridge in this context is not even the oatmeal version, but congee (rice boiled in water until it disintegrates), which would, in the absence of frogs, have its own place on this list - I have a peculiar horror of food that has no texture, and to me, anything capable of being described as "gruel" just conjures up images of Dickensian workhouses.  Apparently there are restaurants in Singapore that keep live frogs so you can pick your dinner before it goes to frog slaughter and ends up on your plate, which just goes to show that even if you think something can't get any worse, there's a good chance you are wrong.  I am willing to test my boundaries to meet this challenge but even I draw the line at having to catch my own lunch.

(3) Fish ball soup.  I know this doesn't sound that bad, but you should smell the stuff.  Seriously, it's like Oscar the Grouch's trash can filled with mackerel and left in the sun for a week.  And I have a lingering fear that the balls may be eyeballs.... or other balls.   *Shudders*.

Public bathroom floor optional

(4) Durian.  Ah, the King of Fruits, the partaking of which has been described as "like eating strawberry ice cream off the floor of a public toilet".  I ate a durian mooncake once (it was a work dinner, I didn't have a choice), and it was all I could taste for three days afterwards.  Come to think of it though, bearing in mind some of the other things I'm going to have to eat over the next four weeks, that may actually not be a bad thing.

(5) Fried carrot cake.  Don't let the name fool you.  Chai tow kway is not the carrot cake you are familiar with.  In fact, it has no carrot in it at all.  It is radish cake (I can't imagine what even that actually is, radish not jumping to mind as an optimal cake ingredient), fried with pickled radishes and turnips, eggs, and fish sauce.  Sometimes when I eat a really good piece of bread, I marvel at the fact that anyone ever had the idea to grind wheat, add yeast, and bake the result.  I have the same level of astonishment about the existence of chai tow kway, but for very different reasons.

A geoduck clam.  Scary, Mary.

(6) Geoduck clams.  This one deserves a picture.  These things are grotesque.  I could draw some comparisons but this is a family blog (kind of).  I don't think I need to go into details of why I have hitherto shrunk from eating this monstrosity.

(7) Pig organ soup.  I don't know what the organs are.  I don't want to know.  I am hoping beyond hope that they will be visually unidentifiable and I can just hold my nose, chew, swallow, and chalk this one up to experience.


(8) Century eggs.  I'm not a big fan of regular eggs, to be honest, so why anyone would bury one for several months before eating it is beyond me. Wikipedia's comment that "the yolk is a dark green to grey colour, with... an odour of sulphur and ammonia, while the white becomes a dark brown, translucent jelly with salty or little flavour" does not in any way dispel my lack of understanding, or mitigate my absolute lack of enthusiasm at the prospect of eating this.  Having looked again at the pictures, I think this one may take the silver medal for gruesomeness, behind the chicken feet.

(9) Fish head curry.  This is a big Singapore speciality which I've actually eaten before, but the difference this time round is that Mr Hooker's exhortation not to be a pussy about this exercise means that I am going to have to man up and eat the eyeballs.  Or one of them, at least.  Ick!

(10) Black chicken.  I'm sure (at least I hope) that it tastes like regular chicken, but those skinny little goosebumpy blue bodies in the chiller at the supermarket have always totally freaked me out - they look like they belong in a sci-fi movie.  Just ugh, frankly.

So, those are the stars of the show, but I'm sure there are other equivalently titillating delights to be discovered.  The venue I have chosen for this challenge, the Chinatown Complex hawker centre, is a truly terrifying place, heaving with people, cacophonous with the noise of delivering and chopping and cooking and serving and eating and living.  To the untrained eye it also looks absolutely filthy but this is Singapore, The Cleanest Place in the World (TM), so I know, by act of faith, that it cannot be.  It had better not be, or this will be a very short-lived experience.  Though on second thoughts, maybe that would not be such a bad thing.

So, it's going to be a big dinner for me tonight.  And a big breakfast tomorrow, come to that.  I will post my adventures on here on a weekly basis, and hopefully by the end of September I will have opened my eyes, tested my tastebuds (and gag reflex), and maybe even established some new local favourites. And if all else fails, bearing in mind the list above, it does at least seem possible that I will have lost a bit of weight!  Silver linings...

I heart Harare

This week I took a very, very short work trip to Africa, spending two days in Zimbabwe and one in South Africa.  It was my first trip to the continent this year after having spent a lot of time there in 2014, hopping between South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and even Djibouti, and I had really missed it.

Completely contrary to my expectations, I fell in love with Harare, Zimbabwe's capital city, the moment I first arrived there over a year ago.  From what I understood of the country's recent history and current economic situation, I had prepared myself for a dirty sprawl of tin-roofed shacks ensnarled in a knot of dusty, noisy, traffic jams.  So I was hugely surprised to find Harare stunning: immaculately clean, manicured, secure, and apparently prosperous.

Harare is a strangely and uniquely beautiful city.  Investment in the city dried up some time ago, meaning that there are very few new buildings in the city centre, and no modern skyscrapers.  Instead, the centre of the city is full of (mostly) immaculately preserved examples of 1970s and 1980s architecture, and walking around it you have the strange feeling of being transported back in time.

It also has a wonderful climate and is full of jacaranda trees which on my first visit were covered in beautiful purple blooms.

I was incredibly lucky on this trip that my only scheduled meeting went fantastically well and I was out the door with a bag full of signed documents long before lunchtime, which gave me plenty of time to take advantage of another reason I love to travel to Harare, which is (of course!) to shop.  As you would imagine, it's not exactly Bond Street, but what I was after was not shoes and handbags (for once), but African wax printed fabrics.  It's a super-fun experience, although the agony of choice can be a little overwhelming, as you can probably tell from the below!

The top quality fabrics come with all sorts of stickers of authenticity and certificates, about which I am of course entirely ignorant but which appeals to the lawyer in me:

On my first trip to Harare I scoped out all the fabric shops and now only visit my favourite, where the owner, an Algerian guy, recognised me and this time asked what I actually did with these fabrics.  "Ummm...", I said... because the shameful truth is that I now have a collection of about a dozen different prints (which represents, ahem, 66 metres of fabric, oops) collected over a period of more than a year, and notwithstanding having a head full of ideas, I have done precisely nothing with any of them.   I think this is largely down to fear of screwing up and wasting something irreplaceable, but they're not doing anyone any good sitting in a cupboard so I think it's time I manned up and got my scissors out.  Well, that's what I promised the Algerian, anyway.  Watch this space... but for the time being, this is what I brought back.

The unexpectedly speedy success of our meetings also meant that I had the opportunity to visit the fabulous Wild is Life animal sanctuary, which is located just next to the airport but which feels like it is a thousand miles from anywhere, with its beautiful whitewashed farmhouse overlooking a manicured lawn which sweeps into an expanse of bush stretching as far as the eye can see.  Wild is Life was set up to rescue orphaned animals and is now home to a menagerie of lions, giraffes, ostriches, cheetahs, antelope, monkeys, and even a lone sheep.

The star of the sanctuary though is Moyo, a baby elephant who was abandoned by his mother, rescued by park rangers, and nursed back to health by Wild is Life, who intend eventually to release him back into the wild.  Moyo is now 18 months old and lives on baby formula (yes, you read that correctly, baby formula).  He is one expensive infant to maintain, requiring six tins of formula a day and round-the clock supervision from his four full-time handlers.

For me, the highlight was not "little" Moyo but the opportunity to see a pangolin, an incredibly rare type of anteater which is covered in keratin scales.  The pangolin is the most trafficked mammal in the world and has been hunted almost to extinction.

Oh, and bottle feeding a baby giraffe was quite cool...

...and did I mention I got to pet a cheetah?

It was a pretty awesome day.

Of course, the other advantage of all that travelling was that I had lots and lots of time to crochet.  Clearly my colleagues think I am insane - and maybe I am, since I am long past caring about the sideways glances that are inevitably attracted when I pull out a hook in a public place.  This time those incredulous looks may have been more justified than usual though, since I was working on a blanket that now measures over four feet square, which even I will admit is probably an unusual sight in the South African Airways lounge.  It's a good thing I have a large handbag.

This is my Around the Bases afghan, which I have the huge privilege of being a tester for and which I am loving more and more as it grows.  If you are a crocheter and you are not on the ATB train yet, then (a) I assume you must have been living under a rock for the last six weeks; and (b) get yourself to ChiChi's blog and join the (literally) hundreds (if not thousands) of others who are crocheting along simultaneously.  Week four is released today so there is plenty of time to catch up!  Mine seems already to have had a flag stuck in it by Smaller Child, so perhaps I will have to make another...

Yarn Heaven

OMG I have been SO excited about writing this post.  SO excited.  And now it's here!!! *claps hands in childish glee*.

Team HU is recently returned from a two-week jaunt to Europe, taking in the sights of Tuscany, Rome, and Istanbul.  I had been looking forward to this trip for a looooooong time - a decent spell out of the office was much overdue in any event, but specifically there was something I was longing, with the fervour of a medieval pilgrim, to see.  Was it the two-millennia old majesty of the Coliseum?  No.  The breathtaking beauty of the hilltop city of Montalcino, in the heart of Brunello country?  Nah (though the wine was very much appreciated, naturally).  The Blue Mosque?  Nope.  The sun setting over the Bosphorus, bathing Istanbul's hundreds of minarets in a rose gold glow? Er, no.

It was, of course, Kürkçü Han, the fabled Istanbul yarn bazaar.  Some dedicated Googling in the months leading up to our departure had suggested that, although fiendishly difficult to locate, once discovered it would prove to be a treasure trove of bargainacious yarny delights.  And boy, it didn't disappoint (on either count).

So, first things first: finding the place.  I pride myself on having an exceptional sense of direction, and my childhood years spent completing brutal 'character-building' treks in the soggy windswept Welsh mountains (everyone loves an English private school education!) have instilled in me, among other things (primarily pathological aversions to camping, cattle, and pot noodles), the ability to read pretty much any map.  But man, this place was a pig to find, even with the magic of an iPhone.  I tramped the insanely populated streets around the Grand Bazaar for what seemed like hours, watching my little blue blob circle the pin that purported to be my destination and feeling like I might as well have been trying to find Kubla Khan, or Atlantis, or the hanging gardens of Babylon.

Fortunately I am not one to give up, particularly when there is yarn at stake, so for any of you who follow in my footsteps here is a picture of the map with a pin stuck in it when I was standing in the middle of my destination...

..and here is a picture of the entrance from Mahmutpaşa, one of the main drags leading down from the Grand Bazaar (out of sight in the above map but immediately to the north of the pin) to the Eminönü ferry terminal.  The green neon sign with the arrows on it is pointing to the passageway entrance to the bazaar, but you then need to take the stairs up one flight (unless of course you are interested in 1950s style polyester nightdresses, of which there are an innumerable quantity on the ground floor in an epitomising example of one of the very many moments of "Who the hell actually buys this stuff?!?!" that a shopper in Istanbul will inevitably encounter).

Once inside, it's a completely overwhelming experience, with shelves and shelves and shelves of yarn from floor to ceiling throughout three quarters of the first floor of the building.

Turkey is the seventh largest producer of raw cotton in the world, as well as being responsible for the development of cutting-edge technology in the manufacture of synthetic yarns, and consequently a lot of the stock is either cotton or acrylic.  Amazingly though there does seem to be only limited overlap between what the different shops each carry so you do actually have to go into each one to make sure you've not missed anything!  That may not seem like a hardship at first, but after an hour of it, dealing with the total sensory overload of the choice available and the crazy haphazardness of many of the displays, being talked at in Turkish (not a soul in Kürkçü Han speaks any English, but everyone does assiduously take what I had previously thought of as being a quintessentially English approach of talking VERY LOUDLY AND SLOWLY IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE as if treating their audience like a small, slow, child would somehow remove the language barrier), and in baking heat, even I, a three-star general in the Shopaholic Army, was beginning to flag.

That said, boy oh boy it was good...

...and cheap, with unbranded yarns being priced by weight at the princely sum of 10 Turkish lire a kilo (about USD 3.50 for 2.2 pounds, for those who only speak imperial).

Needless to say, I bought as much as I could carry.  Rather more than I could carry, in fact - when I got back to the hotel I had very sore arms and so many bags I had to get the valet to bring them up to our room!!!

At this point I have a small confession to make.  After I bought everything in the picture above, I went back - ostensibly to take more pictures of Yarn Heaven - and bought more.  "Oops!".  What can I say, it's an illness.  I can't be held responsible for my actions.

Somehow I managed to get it all back to Singapore (helped by some more forward planning in the form of the purchase of two giant plastic laundry bags in Chinatown before we left, not to mention my frequent flyer extra baggage allowance), only for the realisation to dawn that I had nowhere to put it, and as a consequence a substantial part of Sunday was spent acquiring, constructing, and filling new storage units.

So there we have it.  15.5kg of yarn (plus a little pre-existing stash that was in need of a home), all neatly shelved.  I have literally zero idea of when I will ever find the time to use any of it, let alone all of it (particularly bearing in mind my recent slight deviation from the One True Path of Existing WIP Completion, rationalised (completely justifiably of course) by the 'I'm on holiday so it doesn't count' school of thinking), but that's hardly the point, right?  It looks pretty, and that's enough for me.