Anyway, week 4 begins with a skive as it's my birthday and I have taken a day of leave. I get up late, I go for a run, then I take Smaller Child out to lunch and fill my face with insanely expensive sushi, every mouthful tasting all the better for being eaten in the knowledge of what I am missing out on. But when I wake on Tuesday, I have some pangs of guilt about having abandoned my post the previous day, and at lunchtime I man up and order....
Day 12: sheep stomach soup, ice kacang
So, it turns out that I do in fact have a limit, and today is the day that The Challenge breaks me. Last week I had clocked a stall selling various unloved bits of the sheep, and today, without even giving common sense a look-in, I head straight there and order myself a bowl of their foulest-looking offering. The vendor dips her ladle in a small vat filled with a murky brown liquid swimming with strips of something grey and spongy. Oh. Mygod. I want to get a photo of it but I am paralysed, though with what I'm not sure: is it fear? disbelief? an uncontrollable urge to throw up/run as fast as possible in the opposite direction? all of the above? It's like rubbernecking a road accident: I don't want to look, but I can't help myself. I actually think I would rather eat chicken feet at this point. On autopilot, I take the tray and sit down, staring blankly at the bowl and trying not to breathe through my nose. The vendor follows me and I wonder whether she is waiting to see whether I eat it until I realise that I was in such a state of shock that I hadn't paid. Oops!
I try the broth. It's deeply, almost unbearably, meaty, even for a standard-bearer in the meat-eating army like me. It has the over-ripe fleshy tang of offal, which to me often tastes like it shouldn't really be eaten. It's just... too much of itself. It's oddly reminiscent of durian, actually. Taking a deep breath, I pluck a piece of the stomach from the soup. The surface is honeycombed, glistening with a slick of broth, strangely beautiful (if you don't have to eat it, at least). It doesn't look like food, and as it registers that thought my brain makes a one-way conceptual jump from seeing this as lunch to seeing it as what it used to be, an organ for digesting grass... and that's it. I can't eat it. I can't even try to eat it. A life as a vegetarian flashes before my eyes. I shudder and push the bowl away.
Sheep stomach soup is an epic fail. Although it is no great surprise that it was inedible, I am nevertheless shocked at the visceral depth of my response to it: there was a moment when I thought that the whole structure of my ability to eat meat, which is (and I am really not exaggerating here) a fundamental pillar of my happiness, might be tumbling down around my ears. That would be an interesting epitaph: sheep stomach ruined my life. Fortunately though, it has only ruined Tuesday lunch. I will survive to eat another sheep - just not its stomach, please.
I have somehow to make up for my pathetic lily-livered pseudo-veggie refusal at the sheep stomach fence; and those of you who have been reading this blog regularly will be thrilled to hear that after some exploring of the nether regions of the food court I have finally found a dessert shop that is open, and so finally I get to share with you the delights of Asian afters. I can't quite figure out whether the sheep stomach has left me more hungry (owing to near zero food intake) or less (loss of appetite caused by nausea at offal related dining disaster) but I guess that's not the point, as there's a very high likelihood that I will not make a significant dent in what I am about to order either: ice kacang.
Ice kacang is the most popular hawker centre dessert in Singapore. I use the word "dessert" in the loosest sense here, as anything involving sweetcorn and beans is not, to me, a pudding, but rather some kind of fucked-up salad masquerading as one. At first glance what I am looking at is a pile of ice shavings drizzled in a variety of unidentifiable technicolour syrups, and wearing a hat of seagull vomit.
But I have lived here long enough to know that there is More to ice kacang, so I delve deeper. Oh my god. There's grass jelly under here! For those who missed the chicken/chilli confusion of Week One, grass jelly is firmly on the Never Try Again list, so this seems unduly cruel luck. There's also the obligatory red beans, more sweetcorn, and attap seeds, which I haven't eaten in years but remember now that I actually don't mind, despite having a deeply weird texture. All in all, it's not horrible. Don't get me wrong - it's not dessert, for sure, but it's not completely horrible. But then I guess I am comparing it to sheep's stomach so....
The menu at the dessert stand is... let's just say interesting, and it seems there is huge potential here for gastronomic disaster. Tadpole and sea coconut anyone? I'm going to have to try that one. Maybe, just maybe, I could even count it as eating frog (she says more in hope than expectation...).
Day 13 (is it really only Day 13????): cockle kway teow, dumplings
Yeah yeah. I go lite today. I have no excuse other than that I am in the middle of the second week of marathon training and I am seriously rungry, as a friend describes it (although in my case it seems to have graduated from 'rungry' to 'hangry'). I Need Carbs! So I get myself a plate of noodles. The queue is enormous and once again I make the automatic assumption that this is a good thing. Surely I should know better by now? Am I learning nothing from this experience?!
Clearly not. The noodles look unprepossessing, and taste worse. They are an overcooked, underseasoned, mushy, gastronomic trainwreck. Normally I love kway teow - carby, greasy, salty, meaty: what's not to like? - but this really has me questioning that love, which I had always assumed was unconditional. The cockles don't help; for the second time this week, watching my food prepared has been actively damaging to my ability to eat it, and seeing those sad little shell-less fleshy nuggets spooned out of an ice-cream carton of opaque slime and into the giant wok of noodles was not an inspiring moment. And for the second time this month, I am looking at something that resembles a bucket of eels rather more than I would ideally like. It's not good.
A couple of days later, Smaller Child is flicking through the photos on my phone and comes across the picture of the kway teow. "Ooh", she says, with grim relish. "Yucky." I couldn't agree more.
Fortunately I have a side order of dumplings, so my hunger is abated sufficiently that I don't actually kill anyone in the afternoon. It occurs to me that it is little short of a miracle that nobody has been harmed in the making of this blog. Nobody except me, at least. Yet.
Thursday is a public holiday. On Friday I have an appointment over my lunch hour and this time, unlike last week, I can't summon up the will to drag myself to the Chinatown Complex. Instead, I sit at my desk and go hungry. It doesn't even occur to me to eat my recycling pile. The Challenge has, it appears, finally killed my appetite.
Next week I will have the finish line in sight, with only three days left to eat my way through the List of Doom. I am determined that I will use those days bravely if not wisely, but am concerned that I still have frogs, geoduck clam, and black chicken to check off the list, none of which appears to be available in the Chinatown Complex, and that I may have to spill this over into October in order to try everything I promised. For the sharp-eyed among you, I am awarding myself a tick for pig organ soup on the basis that I tried its ovine sister this week, and have no desire to challenge further my carnivorous instincts. So maybe, just maybe, I have learned something, at least...
But I have lived here long enough to know that there is More to ice kacang, so I delve deeper. Oh my god. There's grass jelly under here! For those who missed the chicken/chilli confusion of Week One, grass jelly is firmly on the Never Try Again list, so this seems unduly cruel luck. There's also the obligatory red beans, more sweetcorn, and attap seeds, which I haven't eaten in years but remember now that I actually don't mind, despite having a deeply weird texture. All in all, it's not horrible. Don't get me wrong - it's not dessert, for sure, but it's not completely horrible. But then I guess I am comparing it to sheep's stomach so....
The menu at the dessert stand is... let's just say interesting, and it seems there is huge potential here for gastronomic disaster. Tadpole and sea coconut anyone? I'm going to have to try that one. Maybe, just maybe, I could even count it as eating frog (she says more in hope than expectation...).
Day 13 (is it really only Day 13????): cockle kway teow, dumplings
Yeah yeah. I go lite today. I have no excuse other than that I am in the middle of the second week of marathon training and I am seriously rungry, as a friend describes it (although in my case it seems to have graduated from 'rungry' to 'hangry'). I Need Carbs! So I get myself a plate of noodles. The queue is enormous and once again I make the automatic assumption that this is a good thing. Surely I should know better by now? Am I learning nothing from this experience?!
Clearly not. The noodles look unprepossessing, and taste worse. They are an overcooked, underseasoned, mushy, gastronomic trainwreck. Normally I love kway teow - carby, greasy, salty, meaty: what's not to like? - but this really has me questioning that love, which I had always assumed was unconditional. The cockles don't help; for the second time this week, watching my food prepared has been actively damaging to my ability to eat it, and seeing those sad little shell-less fleshy nuggets spooned out of an ice-cream carton of opaque slime and into the giant wok of noodles was not an inspiring moment. And for the second time this month, I am looking at something that resembles a bucket of eels rather more than I would ideally like. It's not good. A couple of days later, Smaller Child is flicking through the photos on my phone and comes across the picture of the kway teow. "Ooh", she says, with grim relish. "Yucky." I couldn't agree more.
Fortunately I have a side order of dumplings, so my hunger is abated sufficiently that I don't actually kill anyone in the afternoon. It occurs to me that it is little short of a miracle that nobody has been harmed in the making of this blog. Nobody except me, at least. Yet.
Thursday is a public holiday. On Friday I have an appointment over my lunch hour and this time, unlike last week, I can't summon up the will to drag myself to the Chinatown Complex. Instead, I sit at my desk and go hungry. It doesn't even occur to me to eat my recycling pile. The Challenge has, it appears, finally killed my appetite.
Next week I will have the finish line in sight, with only three days left to eat my way through the List of Doom. I am determined that I will use those days bravely if not wisely, but am concerned that I still have frogs, geoduck clam, and black chicken to check off the list, none of which appears to be available in the Chinatown Complex, and that I may have to spill this over into October in order to try everything I promised. For the sharp-eyed among you, I am awarding myself a tick for pig organ soup on the basis that I tried its ovine sister this week, and have no desire to challenge further my carnivorous instincts. So maybe, just maybe, I have learned something, at least...
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