Palate Sensations – Take 2

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I swear I’m not a cheapskate but where there’s free wine tasting, I’ll be there 🙂 Palate Sensations, the cooking school, was holding a free wine tasting event tonight so I thought it’d be fun to go and have a nice way to relax. A few of my coworkers ended up joining in too so it was nice to hang out with them more outside of work.

The wine maker from Cheverny Winery in France flew in especially for the event to present his wines. They served three whites and 1 red. I’m still very slow in acquiring the taste for red wines so the whites were my favorite. Especially the first and the last.

So to let you know what we tried… First up, the Sauvignon Blanc:

It was very aromatic, wonderfully fruity taste, sweet, and very easy to drink. I would love it as a before, during, and after dinner drink but then that’s probably because I really like sweet wines. It was surprisingly though because I’m usually not a fan of Sauvingnon Blanc because they’re usually tarty and hard to swallow. This was the opposite of that.

The second wine, not sure on the name except the wine maker called it by it’s winery’s name “Cheverny”:

Most people seemed to enjoy this one more. It was less sweet but still very easy to drink. There was very little aroma to me so maybe that’s why I preferred the first. It was still enjoyable but if I had the choice, I’d pick #1.

The third wine was a gamay:

It was quite tart for me and not to my liking. It’s sort of like a very light red wine, almost pink.

The fourth and last wine:

I believe they said it was a late harvest wine. I think this would be an excellent dessert wine for me. They serve these wines at the French restaurant here called Au Petit Salut (where we ate for Ron’s BD on Oct 8th) so I’m sure we’ll go back there sometime to have these wines.

It was a great evening but after four portions of wine tastes and very little food, we were ready to go have a real dinner. We’d only had some bread & crackers with quince paste, cheeses, and caviar (all very nice incidentally!) so we decided to go to Holland Village for dinner, it’s very close by.

And I made it down those treacherous steps without slipping down half a flight, like I did the last time I visited Palate Sensations. Maybe that’s why I haven’t been back 😛 just kidding, I’ve just been too busy, but I did sign up for a 6-hour Petit Four course which I hope hasn’t filled up yet.

Anyways, at Holland Village, we ate at Kelong Seafood & BBQ. The chicken wings are yummy and the hor fun was pretty decent. I could eat more of those chicken wings though 🙂

It was a good evening. Life is so much better without having to worry about exams. Ron has finals coming up though we we won’t be having this much fun for much longer.

VivoCity and Sun with Moon Japanese Cuisine

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I went out to celebrate my free Sunday with shopping at VivoCity. After being so stressed out at least for the last two weeks, I needed some retail therapy so I headed out to VivoCity to meet up with Joyce for a shopping spree. We went to mostly clothing stores.

I found this one called Nichii Fashion City that sold a nice mix of clothes from work, play, and formal. It was pretty reasonable for most things, under $50 and when on sale, even better, under $20. I think I’d like to pay a visit again, not something I can say with most clothing stores I’ve been to lately.

Joyce and I decided to visit Forever 21 and relive our pharmacy school days… it was a great place to get decent work clothes for very cheap. It’s not so cheap anymore and in Singapore, it’s even more expensive. But it was so weird, they were playing Christmas music in the store and it almost felt like we were in San Francisco shopping at their Forever 21. It was nice but also kind of sad, it made us miss being home.

After our marathon shopping, we headed to Orchard Rd to meet up with Alex and Siew Woon. Both had just found out they passed a major exam (the BCOP) so we met up with them to celebrate.

A funny ad in the MRT station that I had to take a picture of:

What exactly is “bread face”?!? The picture of it is hilarious…

We met up with them at Starbucks at Wheelock Place and headed upstairs to a restaurant called Sun With Moon. They specialize in Kamameshi which is a Japanese rice dish cooked in an iron pot. I had beef and foie gras… so good.

Slideshow here (or click here):


I’ve had Japanese food for dinner three nights in a row… but then, like my friend Alex says, there’s so many varieties of Japanese cuisine that it’s hard to get tired of it.

Exams are over so this may be a long update…

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I am so glad to be finished with the Singapore Pharmacy Forensic (Law) exam and also with the NUH Pharmacist yearly competency exam… but I am exhausted as well. I think you don’t realize how tired you really are until you finally get a minute to sit down and rest.

So let me see where I left off… I don’t have pictures to post for Thanksgiving so I’ll move on first to other days.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2007

Twice yearly, INSEAD throws a big dinner and dance party. Tonight’s was held on the Sentosa Spa & Resort and called the “Monsoon Ball”. The student govt chartered buses to take us to the island so we wouldn’t have to worry about hailing taxis and wrinkling or dirtying our nice clothes. I rushed home from work and only had about 40 minutes to get ready before the bus was go come pick us up at 7:15pm.

It was so nice to see everyone dressed up in their evening attire, all the guys in suits and the ladies in beautiful gowns and shoes! They had a lovely champagne pre-party on the patio before serving dinner. The service for dinner was a bit slow and not quite enough food… someone at our table doesn’t eat fish and dinner was a salmon appetizer and seabass main course. The food was pretty tasty but for some reason, we were all craving for more.

After dinner they had a little performance since the theme of the party was “007” like James Bond… but instead it was “Zero Coupon Bond“, a business term the students had learned recently.

There was also a Fashion Show by the graduating class and dancing. We skipped out on the after-party party at Zouk because I was already tired from a long day at work and I had meet up with my friend Joyce to study the next day.

Here are some photos to share with you (or click here):

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2007

It was time for another International Week at INSEAD, this week was Desi Week, meaning something like South Asian people. The plan for the week included a dinner on Tuesday and Bar of the Week at the Rupee Room. Because of studying, Ron and I only went to have dinner on Tuesday.

The dinner was located close by, on Science Park Drive, at Khansama Tandoori Restaurant. This dinner was supported by Merrill Lynch so for $10 per person, we had this large buffet and one alcoholic drink per person.

The menu consisted of:
Vegetable Pakoras
Samosas
Chicken Tikka
Daal Makhani
Palak Paneer
Alu Gobi
Butter Chicken
Mutton Rogan Josh
Mix Raita

They had interesting serving dishes and the food overall was pretty good. The only thing I did not like was the paneer, it was very “tough” for cheese.

Some photos to share (or click here):


FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2007

At my workplace, they have a yearly gathering for a “Secret Santa”-like gift exchange. About 2 weeks ago, we were each asked to write down 3 wishes on a piece of paper and these wishes were distributed so that we were to purchase as many on the list as we could. We didn’t know who we were buying for as everyone was given a number only so it was a “double blind” gift exchange. Only one person knew who was giving to who.

So my 3 wishes were: a handphone strap, a handphone pouch, and handphone accessories (cute! cute!) as written by the wisher. Oh, handphone or HP is what they call cellular or mobile phones here in Singapore. So of course I thought the gift was for one of the girls so I picked really cute looking ones and wrapped it up really prettily.

To my surprise and to everyone else’s, it really ended up being for a guy!! It was wrapped in a Hello Kitty bag too 😛 But everyone got a good laugh. We were at Sakura International Buffet at Orchard Shopping Center and being really loud. It’s too bad I was kind of stressed so couldn’t enjoy it as much since my law exam was the next afternoon.

The food was decent though, I wouldn’t say spectacular or anything. The salmon sashimi was the best and the mini Oreo-like mousse cake was yummy.

For some pictures see below or click here:


SATURDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2007

The exam was from 1-3:30pm held at the Ministry of Health College of Medicine Building. Joyce and I were both taking the exam so we’ve been motivating each other this week to study hard and to stay up all night to study. We both stayed up till around 3am and woke up early to study more. Yes, a bit crazy but we were stressed. I’m glad we did stay up and cram though because for this type of exam, it’s necessary. It’s mainly memorization and writing down all you remember from the law. My hand was cramping from all the writing and because the AC was on really high. It was such a relief to be over.

I went home to nap then we started our celebration. First thing was dinner at Tonkichi at Takashimaya. It’s this restaurant that always has a long line (because they don’t take reservations) but they have all types of pork cutlets and other fried foods. It was REALLY good 😛 See the pictures! 🙂

We walked around a bit to enjoy the holiday decorations although it was a bit weird walking around in a summer clothes with the Christmas season around the corner.

After walking off some of our dinner, we took the MRT to Clarke Quay to check out the bar called The Clinic. I’ve always wanted to go there for the novelty of it because they have drinks served in plastic syringes and IV infusion bags. I know, a bit nerdy, but I’m a nerd. It was funny but the drinks were not very strong.

We stopped off at one more place in Clarke Quay called The Arena since there was no cover charge. It has live music part of the time and they were playing songs from when we were in college. Reminded us of the good ol’ days but kind of old school too. The staff there also wasn’t very good in that we ordered a few types of drinks and they came back a few minutes later saying one wasn’t available. So we said fine, we don’t want that one, we’ll get another one. Then she comes back another 5 minutes later saying they didn’t have another drink so we just cancelled that one. Then she wanted us to pay the bill and the price was different than stated on the menu. She didn’t know how to explain it to us so she went to get the manager. He finally explained it by simply saying the price we say was the “happy hour” price and it was no longer “happy hour”. How simple was that? It was a rather frustrating encounter with the waitress so I was eager to get out of there and find some food. After all the sweet drinks, I wanted something salty to eat.

Alex took us to this great place called Spize World, The Makan Place on River Valley Road. “Makan” means “to eat” in Malay. We had some great drinks, available as Horlicks or Milo, as a “Dinosaur” or “Godzilla”. Dinosaur is the drink with a HUGE mound of the powder drink on top and Godzilla is the same PLUS ice cream! It was so yummy.

But after that I was ready for sleep. We’d had very little sleep the last few days and now that we’d had alcoholic drinks and a full stomach, it was time to go home.

Photos from the night (or click here):


This is happiness.

No more exams for a long long while…

Oops… behind on posting again…

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Just a quick update since my exam is next Saturday… yikes! But after that I will be a little more free and hopefully less stressed… although I think I’ll be stressed worrying about if I passed or not…

Anyways, real quick just so you have something to see, we celebrated American Thanksgiving in Singapore on Wednesday. Yeah yeah, we know it’s the wrong day and even more off because of the time difference, but we really just couldn’t do it on the traditional day.

I didn’t take any pictures of my own so here are a few to see for now until I get some from our friends.

Click here for my friend Alex’s Flickr album.

I’ll try to write more soon.

Turkey Day Is Coming

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I’m a bit sad that Thanksgiving is coming this week but we won’t be home to celebrate with out family. However, we’re going to make our own dinner here and invite our new friends to enjoy our meal with us. So we thought we’d better go out and buy our turkey so that it could defrost in the refrigerator. It may be bit strange but I think we’re having Thanksgiving on Wednesday instead of Thursday because we don’t have enough time to make the turkey on Thursday… but we’ll see, that is still TBD.

Ron has been researching our winter trip to Korea all day and I’ve been studying all day so we finally decided to take a break to head to the NTUC Fairprice grocery store nearby here on Clementi Rd. My preceptor said that this would be a good place to buy a cheap and large turkey. We’d never been to this grocery store before so thought we’d venture out today.

Our flatmate Justine came with us and we had dinner first at Sumo House. The food sounded pretty cheap, like S$2.90 for a katsudon set meal or S$4.90 for a chicken teriyaki set meal.

Their logo was especially funny:

The service was a bit weird though, when you enter there’s someone at the door kind of blocking the way. Then they direct you to sit down at a table. Then they come take your order. Then they ask you to go pay at the register first. Then you have to go get the hot tea for yourself. We couldn’t understand why you didn’t just select and pay at the counter first before sitting down.

I tried the S$2.90 katsudon which is a fried chicken fillet cooked with egg on top of rice. It was served with miso soup (a bit too salty), picked cucumber, and 2 slices of orange. The dish itself was edible although not fantastic but considering it was less than S$3, I won’t complain too much. I was just hungry.

For some humor, we read the specials of the day. They offered “shishamo” which I usually like because it is filled with fish roe, but after reading the description underneath, it doesn’t sound so appetizing anymore…

Afterwards we did our shopping at NTUC and found our turkey and other ingredients. It’s going to be a challenge to figure out how to cook it, we’re going to have to borrow some oven space from our friends. I have to wait until they get back from their weekend trips… so hopefully they’ll say ‘yes’ tomorrow. I can only cook vegetables (sweet potatoes) and dessert (?peach cobbler) in our mini convection oven.