Snippets

Okay I am officially the world's worst blogger because I have no coordination whatsoever over my pictures and sequence of experiences.

Not that I really care anyway. Hurr hurr.

But now, every single day I say goodbye to at least one person, local or Erasmus-stamped like me; and every farewell dinner I attend draws me closer to my own departure date, I do feel a little more urgency to chronicle my little life in this town I've called home the past 5 months.

So here goes nothing; snippets of Leuven over the past 2 days. I smell a series coming along.

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A noise outside my door led to the discovery of a crumpled note and a can of Mae's. Ruben thought it would be too difficult to say goodbye face-to-face, but when I eventually ran down the street just in time to catch the boy and his backpack, he had tears in his eyes.

My favourite Belgian and second boyfriend he will always be.

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And a dagschotel with Uncle Bob is never dull, especially when it involves ritzy vegetarian food.

Probably the best bread in the world!

Eh do you think I can ask for more?

If my girlfriend ate as much bread as you, I, errr, I... ...

Grilled seitan gratin.

Eh can I scrape your dish? I like the charred bits.

One for the book, neighbour!

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A happy Nath sparklers on a chocolate cake maketh.

Did you know that when Nath was born, it was the longest day of the year? 20 hours!

So said her mother to the rest of us.

Singaporeans unfamiliar with the concept of Midsummer are quite prone to misunderstanding that that means it was quite difficult to give birth to her.

No I didn't speak that thought out loud. Thank heavens!

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Post-Cecemel and pre-dinner afternoon walks home, seem to bode for quirky finds.

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Origin O' Leuven; why did I not discover you sooner? Organic and vegan are right up my alley; I know I ain't both things, but I sure as hell can try. I am more than fascinated with seitan and hummus, and if you can make quiche taste kickass for half the calories, I'm sold.

What is this?

And what is this?

What about this?

What's in this?

Chocoladeknapper? Yes, this one!

Origins, you really shouldn't put your yummies behind a glass casing. Because I can see them. And I can ask questions. And I tend to enquire what ingredients you used to make them look so yummy. And I can't read Dutch so I need you to translate for me. And my indecisiveness increases the more delectable food porn is.

Oh god Celest, stawwwpp.

Mom, Dad, Celest, and a thousand different words

Well-thumbed, my sidekick, well-thumbed.

Mommy takes a bite of Belgium!

Back in Leuven, Rossi's nondescript interiors pack a mighty fine punch,

and if you don't believe me, you have to believe my pasta. The thinnest tagliatale ever known to man and black truffles, y'all!

and if you still don't believe me, you have to believe Roberto Benigni; he of La Bella Vita fame. He whose famous face is tacked up on the wall behind that of my famous father.

Hell, if Rossi's is good enough for Benigni, it's good enough for me.

But okay, there's always a rotten apple in every basket. Here, my mother's dinner demonstrates that fact quite well. All that glistens is not gold; and in this case, it's oil.

Besides that little glitch and the mad scramble all day, I sit here feeling on top of the world :)

The tin, not just the packet!

It's 0215 in the morning. My textbook is more wide-open than my eyes are.

But all I can think about is


Why Umami, why!

Alloyed stomach

No I don't have an iron stomach; I have an alloyed stomach. Which is much stronger and which contains more room and depth than its iron counterpart.

Ok ok, this alloyed stomach does not do innards or anything that comes from under the meaty body of any animal.

No lard and cracklings either.

And nothing spicy.

And preferably, nothing with whipped cream either.

That said, there still exists a whole WORLD of food that doth not fall into these unfortunate categories. And alloyed stomach takes them all!

I conquered PIEROGI. But yes, I cheated. I had the vegetarian version with cabbage and mushrooms because I really didn't want to have barmy mystery meat (or innards! Burrrrr) swimming in my mouth.

And cabbage rolls stuffed with gruel and potato. Ukrainian food is a newfound friend that I intend to keep very close to my heart/tummy.

And oh, this one is a definite sinker for any set of sculptured abs. Placki, or very deep-fried discs of julienned potatoes, onions and what tasted like a lot of starch. Good shite, but please, go easy on this, lest you end up stumbling back half-groaning and holding your aching belly like we did.

With claims that it really is a Georgian restaurant, what the Chimera should actually do is put up a bigass signboard that shouts FREAKING CHEAP FOOD: A'LA CARTE QUALITY PAIRED WITH BUFFET QUANTITY AT STREET PRICES!
My dibs, clockwise from top left: broccoli tart, wild mushroom salad, potato and cream cheese mash in filo pastry, grilled eggplant with stewed tomato puree, sour boiled egg salad, spinach fritata. Burp.

And seeing so many pictures of various creamy concoctions that I merrily saw fit to partake in is now making my belly swell in horror. Oh mercy, woe is me for I have sinned.

Pancakes with Polish jam. Which really is syrup preserve with the thickness of industrial strength white-glue. Belch.

Tagliatale with tenderloin (which wasn't tender) in a (veryveryvery) creamy champignon sauce. Double belch.

Panga fillet in a creamy sauce of shrimps and mushrooms. Triple belch, plus it was as unappetizing as the picture looks.

But this little Ukrainian baby saved the cream-filled family from going down permanently into my book of death. White borsch with hard-boiled eggs. Sheer genius. Thick with just the right amount of tiny bumps to let you know the food processor didn't kill every single bit of fresh produce these good Ukrainian grannies put into their borsch. Tart, without being cloying. And smashed against the firmness of boiled egg-white is a soup that only a loving granny can conjure.

It's official, I'm obsessed. Oh white borsch, would you marry me?

It's all about the crust, dahh-ling!

(In the tiniest, tiniest voice humanly possible),

I want to eat Godma's cheesecake squares.

Now, that wasn't very subtle, was it?

(Meep!)

Love in my tummy

So much for getting motivation from Daddy's sorbet-resolve. Yours truly went trooping into the land of desserts and sweet nothings once again; but this time, I baked! :)

Ok I had to finish the bottle of peanut butter I bought on a whim a month-and-a-half ago to make the fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches which made Elvis' arteries pop too, but there's never a bad reason to bake right? That, and my craving for soft cookies which has never been fulfilled since visiting Jie in Milan and gobbling down her Sains' cookies meant that soft peanut butter cookies were the way to go!

What I didn't count on was the fact that I had to mix everything by hand and brown sugar doesn't seem to like butter very much. But after all that arm-work,

First batch!

The cookies were softer than I'd have liked them to be. Ah well, nothing a little refrigeration can't solve :)

Mini Dolce e Salato cookies I made after getting tired of big cookies. These are topped with nutella butter icing. I think I hold a torch for things that are sweet and salty at the same time. Think Reese's.

Baking makes a lazy Saturday afternoon in Leuven even more a-okay than it already is. Big chocolate smiles. And hands that smell of cookie dough. Who's complaining? :)

Tubby in Roma

Chapalang entry on food in Rome. Chapalang because we ate according to whim, according to guidebooks, according to budget, and according to convenience. In a nutshell, we ate everywhere and nowhere.

We were cramped into a tiny restaurant where table met table only because we wanted to watch the Roma-Man U game on TV after failing to get tickets. But this find yielded something very close to my heart- SATAY!

...Ok not really! This was grilled beef on skewers but don't you think it looks like the real McCoy? Taste-wise it was really tender and had just the right amount of fat on it to be juicy. Would have preferred it served in the form of a whole steak, but I suppose that would have exploded our holey pockets.

A cheaper option is naturally street food, though not necessarily a better choice. My penchant for glazed confectionary (think KK original glazed) led me to purchase one of these hefty babies. Glazed sweetish bread (which I mistook for puff pastry) filled with a nutty paste which tasted more like sugar than nuts.

I look happy, but I ain't.

It proved too cloyingly sweet and too doughy. And way too expensive for its price tag, especially since I could only stomach three-quarters of it with help from Denise.

And of course, we couldn't have forgiven ourselves if we didn't have a proper pasta meal in Italy. I had myself a dish called Egg Pasta Complete. Which essentially was egg pasta with Italian sausage, porcini mushrooms, microscopic bits of black truffle, some cream and the quintessential parmesan shavings.

It was good, but not superior to the Fettucine Carbonara Weiming had. Unknown to us, carbonara is the sauce that Rome is known for, so I didn't have that on my plate. It was so good we all chewed in silence at the mouthful WM gave us to try, and then burst into an "Oh my Gawd, this is DAMN good!" The egg was so skilfully blended into the cream that it found itself in the perfect place between smooth and lumpy.

But he lapped it up so quickly I didn't take pictures :(

And equally Italian would be pizza so we found ourselves at a pizzeria renowned throughout Rome for its hugeass pizzas and hugeass crowds. In true Ah Gay style, he ordered starters and shared them with us.

Breaded risotto balls with porcini mushrooms. Individually, I like croquettes, adore mushrooms and love risotto, but put them together and it causes quite a disaster for me. It was too sticky and the crisp-then-creamy combination wasn't achieved in this version.

The potato croquettes were better, but not outstanding.

The pizzas were WAY. TOO. BIG. I had their namesake pizza as did Ah Gay and Dee and it demolished my stomach, forcing me to scrape off the topping on a quarter of the crust I could not stomach anymore. Look at the size of these monsters; they don't even fit on the plates they're served on.

On a paper-thin crust that sadly could not take the weight of the generous topping, my pizza was filled with Italian sausage, porcini mushrooms (good combi I say!), mozarella cheese and a fried egg in the centre. WM's pizza had olives on it so I didn't try any. Suppose it was good because he managed to finish everything.

And being so Chinkaporean, we just had to have Chinese food. The first decent Chinese I've had since my trip to London. And my first time having prawns here, in a dish that's not dimsum-related! I really liked it served on a hotplate with a starchy egg-white sauce, mushrooms and spring onions.

And ahhh, the piece de resistance of the entire trip: GELATO! Old Bridge Gelateria near Vat City serves 3 scoops for 1.50Euro; the cheapest in the whole city. I loved the nutella flavour most, but I also really liked stratciatella and baci too.

I think in this picture I was having Old Bridge for the third time in ONE day. Crikey! :/

I. is. fat. Rome made me fat. Howhowhow?

Madness in High Street

I'm back in Leuven weeping my eyes out at leaving English-speaking soil.



Not.

It's good to be back, it really is. I'm turning out to be pretty good at setting up life here: being domesticated by picking out a duvet that matches my bedspread, at coordinating my wardrobe to maximize space, at shopping for groceries at the cheapest supermarkets and being delighted at buying tofu for 10cents cheaper than the last time. I'm being careful not to make my room too homely or settle in too well though, because I don't want to make it too hard to leave all this behind 6 months later.

But I digress, because I really should talk about my time in London and York.

Hey Lulu, look who this is.

We were talking quite innocently like people who meet each other for the first time. Then insert Dunman High, Lulu and Teo Nanzun... and then we spoke like we knew each other for years! Peppering our conversation with "Yah I know, she's so crazy" and "He's always like that one la!" and lots of laughter and jabbing, of course.

Oh how I miss my Lulu.

No trip to London is completely without a visit to Camden. I was quite surprised that there weren't any shops openly selling magic mushrooms and medicine cabinets full of hallucinogens of varied strengths like I saw the last time I was there. The colourful jagged streets and even more colourful inhabitants are still there though. The Harajuku of London, I would call it.

And of course I visited Oxford Street with much glee. High Street fashion is not just an English thing; it's a everybody-everyday thing, and it's my thing. Case in point: Topshop is a whopping FOUR floors packed to the brim with everything you can think of.

And the good people at Topshop know they have a numbing effect on women's legs because us ladies seem to be able to walk on forever, but they also know that for men every single step is an eternity within the shopping mecca; and hence this.

(Better than a shoe shop, don't you think?)

Two years ago I was spellbound while watching Saturday Night Fever at The Apollo Victoria in South Kent. Two years later, I was completely held hostage by the cast of Wicked at the same theatre. Wicked is decidely, deliciously wicked! If you happen to be in London, this musical is worth your last 20 quid, I am not kidding you.

Dorothy is a stupid farm girl, you will find. She is completely inconsequential to the well-loved story. Now I'm a believer.

And yes, I did go nutso over the food. I see you shaking your head already Daddy! Don't read this part! It speaks much about my poor sense of control in the culinary department.

Borough Market's spoils.

This is Eleena with her monstrous chicken burger. She wasn't smiling very much after this picture was taken, and neither was her tummy.

Dimsum at Chinatown. There were too many baskets and plates of dimsum to cram into a single picture, so we shall make do with a picture of shiny happy (full) people after the thorough satisfaction of their chinese food craving. I think the waitress had quite a different idea of aiming centrally than what we expected. Sorry Kudus.

It was good fun to be in London for Chinese New Year. That saved me from getting all mopey about missing my grandparents and all the hustle and bustle back home. We had people all decked out in red too (I was inauspiciously clad in white, sadly neglecting to bring an article of red clothing along)

This is London's Chinatown, people. Packed to the brim in a way I have never seen even Singapore's Chinatown packed with people. Of course, if you compare the percentage of wide-eyed Angmohs to I'm-here-because-I-desperately-want-some-CNY-spirit Chinese like yours truly, you get a ratio of about 10:1.

And this picture, I like to call it IRONY.

I was quite tickled when I saw a blonde head emerge from underneath a particularly enthusiastic liondance costume.

And after much fanfare in London, York was a quiet stop before I headed back to Belgium. In particular we ate quite a lot, shopped quite a lot for accesories (right, Eleena?) and did painfully little sight-seeing and touristy things.

Eleena: That's the city wall. Don't bother, it's not much.

Eleena: There are gardens in the outskirts of York. But at this time they are all grey and flowerless. Don't bother, it's not much.

So okay, I don't bother. I just eat :)

I ate everything from train food

to traditional Sunday roast and Yorkshire pudding.

From handmade fudge that burnt an absolute hole in my pocket

to bangers and mash. Who doesn't like pub grub, every now and then?

England disappoints only in the World Cup, but they sure didn't disappoint me. I dragged 22 cartons of Muller yogurt back to Leuven and threw in a couple of tabloid mags to finish the leftover stray Pounds. All this English decadence, it is all very fine by me.