To market, to market, to buy...

Strawberries! I love berries, can't wait for the rest of the berries to appear.

FRESH onions, not spring onions. Tender onions without the papery skins. I'm intrigued.

Spring means lots of salad greens, including special ones like tatsoi.

I, as an Asian, am ashamed to say I have no idea what it is.

Fresh peas! In a completely different league from frozen peas.

Beautiful pillowy heads of lettuce

Radishes blushing pink and prettily

Free range eggs. My kitchen staple.

And some other photos of beautiful food:

Artichokes. I heard they're a pain to prepare, but oh they are gorgeous.

Spider crab. Ugliest creature I've ever seen but I heard it's delicious.

The skinny new carrots of spring

Goat's cheese. Don't ask me why there's an orange one.

Saag Aloo Pie. I got some tips on how to make it (: Time to get creative with my saag aloo?

Enough said.

I love working at Pimlico farmer's market. And gosh, I love spring.

This is part of Simple Lives Thursday.

How to survive on real food on a student budget

Baked beans--The sad symbol of student life?

I posted a salmon dish earlier, but it's not a fish I have often just because I am a student living on a budget and yet still opts for free-range eggs and meat and fish that's not farm raised and fed antibiotics. Yes, it is possible and I think I even spend less than the average student here actually.

Tip 1: Cut out your processed, packaged foods. They not only do nothing for your health, they rack up quite a sum of money in your grocery bill.

Tip 2: Get your groceries from the farmers' market. You get locally grown vegetables and fruits and happily raised animals, at pretty reasonable prices. Most of the stalls that aren't certified organic still keep to very good farming standards, just that they can't afford the organic certification.

Tip 3: Opt for the lesser cuts. I love using offal. They're actually richer in vitamins than the rest of the animal and so so cheap. I also love using the less popular cuts like the pork trotters and belly, which are so much more flavourful and become so meltingly tender when you slow-cook them.

Tip 4: Similar to tip 3, buy the less popular fishes. You not only help to prevent over-fishing so it's a more ethical choice, you get your dose of seafood and their omega3 fatty acids goodness for a much cheaper price! And there is nothing wrong with using canned fish, especially since you get extra calcium from eating the soft bones.

Tip 5: Look for what's on offer at the supermarkets. Most of what I cook is based on what's currently in season (and hence, on offer). That's fun also, because it forces me to get creative with what I have!

This is part of Real Food Wednesday, Simple Lives Thursday, Pennywise Platter Thursday.

My Windowsill Garden

It’s officially spring! I was rudely reminded of the fact when I woke up on Sunday to find that I had ‘lost’ one hour. I still don’t get daylight saving, isn’t it just a lie to yourself, but on a larger scale? Anyway. It’s spring! And spring is the time to get planting! You can’t get more cheap and local and organic than planting your own.

I wish I could do that Jamie Oliver/ Nigel Slater thing of popping out of their kitchen into the garden and picking all the herbs and vegetables and fruits they need and throwing them into their food. I can’t, of course, because I live on the 6^th floor, in a London flat half the size of my mum’s bedroom in Singapore. But also because I have the opposite of green fingers, or at least, I’ve never tried growing anything other than mung bean sprouts for primary school science.

But I have a brilliant gardener of a flatmate (: Who says there’s no reason why we can’t try that out with smaller plants which take very little space to grow and require little attention, most herbs for instance.

Those are the little pots on my windowsill. That’s purple basil, coriander, mint and chilli (of course).

Look at the coriander which was sown a bit earlier!

It’s a lot of fun rotating them so they face the sun and watching them grow from nothing to a little something to a bigger something. Go get planting too!

This is part of Simple Lives Thursday.

Reflections and Blog Self-Challenge

I have been blogging for 3 months now. Wow is it really only 3 months? I feel like I've shared and learnt so much since I started. Sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time blogging to an audience that just isn't there, but most times, I'm just really happy to be in the kitchen and then share my foodie adventures. And occasionally, I get really really happy when I see a stranger from the other side of the world commenting that they liked my post.

Still, I feel like my blog is lacking something that makes it really special. There are lots of real food bloggers out there, but mostly based on western recipes, and that's what I've been doing too, probably because it just seems easier to share them with the real food community.

I've been thinking of my background, the food that I grew up with, and how special that in itself is! Food in Singapore is full of colours and flavours and mouthwatering spices and comforting aromas. There are blogs about Malaysian/Singaporean cooking, but not with a real food focus. So it works out brilliantly! I hope to make use of my blog to be more in touch with the fabulous food culture back home, and for anyone who reads/follows my blog, I think you can find recipes for real food that's different and exciting.

I still want this blog to be about my adventures in the kitchen, trying out new recipes, new techniques, and I believe it still can be. Food in Singapore is full of flavours from different cultures- Indian Malay Chinese Eurasian, and more interestingly, the mix of these cultures e.g. Peranakan to come up with very distinctive yumminess. Of course, being in London, I'm heavily influenced by the seasonal produce around me, the British celebrity chefs haha, and those free recipe leaflets or newspaper cutouts. I'm not going to stop myself from trying those out. I'm going to try them out AND THEN challenge myself to inject a little bit of asia (especially southeast asia) or just be inspired, but I'm not going to force it.

So, what does this mean? Nothing really, I still stand strong in my real food beliefs, and I'm still going to do soups with celeriac and other "odd" British vegetables, but I'm just going to be sharing a lot more Chinese (real Chinese home-cooking is quite different from those deep fried spring rolls in takeaways), more Indian, Malay, Peranakan, and quite possibly a bit of Indonesian, Filipino, Thai, Korean etc. Oh I'm suddenly missing home again!

Would you rather have worms or chemicals on your vegetables?

Just a random question. Which brings me back to a random day at the start of winter, when I came back home happily from a new farmers' market, with very very cheap organic kale. Suspicious? No, really, these exist, and you support your local farmer at the same time.

HOWEVER.

This bag of kale had hidden surprises.

So, once I got home I happily announced my prized find, opened it, to discover--worms! And not just one, but I saw at least five. Everyone who knows me know I have a phobia of such creepy crawlies-- spiders, worms, ants even, and butterflies are just caterpillars in disguise. I scream, hide under the blanket and come close to tears. So, imagine my horror! Good thing for me, my lovely flatmate bravely came to my rescue and washed these creatures off the kale in the sink, then tossed the "drowned" worms into the bin.

Then we both happily went out, each on her own business. I came home first, and started chopping vegetables for dinner, and then turned round to toss the odds and ends into the bin-- and saw a fat green monster right at the bin. ?! They didn't drown?! At a loss, I just turned back to my vegetables, praying that monster stays put till my flatmate returns. 5 min later, I turned round to check--phew still there-- then almost screamed when I saw a fat black one the size of of my finger on the floor. I did the bravest thing I could do without coming too close to it-- I threw a box over it. There. At least it's caged up. And I went back to my vegetables (I know I'm weird, but the worm was also directly blocking my way out of the kitchen. And chopping vegetables is calming.) 5 min later, I turned round to check again, and saw the wretched creature outside the box, crawling all over it actually. That was it. I hopped past it (yes.), found the insecticide and sprayed the 2 worms so much that another little one I didn't notice near the bin also curled up and died. (I didn't breathe until I opened the windows.) My flatmate came home and was very proud of me.

And that was it. The day I overcame my fear.

And despite still shuddering when I just think about that day (not exaggerating), I'm glad I know my vegetables weren't smothered in that same scary chemical I used to kill those worms.

I CAN NOW PUREE AND CHOP!

I still don't want to splash out on a food processor, but...

The Philips hr1363 hand blender with beaker and chopper accessory!

Working at a farmer's market!

I've been looking for a part-time job for the longest time, and I've mainly applied as a waiting staff at all the famous restaurants, so that I can learn more about good food, and of course, there's always staff perks ;) I haven't been very successful though, it just isn't that easy to find a job in London. Then recently I got a reply from London Farmers' Market, about a job as market manager! Oh it's the best job ever, I never even thought I would get this job out of all the jobs I applied for.

I firmly believe the secret behind great food lies in the care and ingredients that go into the food. I love spending that extra time and effort on real food, I love picking out fresh, local produce and daydreaming about the food I'll make with them. Now I get to take it one step further and get to know the farmers and producers even better. I had a lovely chat with the milk lady who told me how cute buffalos actually are, and the apple guy about how lousy my shoes are, and the pork man about cheap trotters. Makes waking up at 5am on a cold blustery rainy Saturday worth it (:

Also makes me more determined to get my shopping done at the Farmers' Market instead. It's so much better knowing where your food comes from. Would you rather go for conventional, local, seasonal produce from a producer you know, or organic, imported producer you hear about on the label? I used to fall in the latter group. I think I'm a convert. No more oven-dried cherry tomatoes in winter.. but it doesn't mean I can't enjoy them still, it's just that I'm going to put more emphasis on what nature has offered us this season.

Anyway, it's not only about eating real foods, but food that's right for you as an individual, and that changes according to the season too. (I've been reading up a bit about Traditional Chinese Medicine, it's worth looking into for anyone interested in how our food relates to our body, because TCM believes in nutrition as the first line of rescue/defence, not medicine. How true is that!) So, while we're still in the midst of winter, I'm going to prepare more warming stews and leave the cold salads for summer!