Sunset @ Lower Peirce Reservoir

"Lower Peirce Reservoir - 贝雅士蓄水池下段" is one of the oldest reservoirs in Singapore. It is located near the MacRitchie Reservoir and the Upper Peirce Reservoir which is some where near Upper Thomson Road.

The Lower Peirce Reservoir is Singapore's second oldest reservoir. It was built by impounding the upper reaches of the Kallang River and comissioned in 1912. The forest that lines its banks is considered a mature secondary rainforest and evenly until today you still can find numerous rubber trees and oil palms scatter around the park.

The park not only provides a peace and relax environment for stressed-out individuals, the dense forests surrounding the reservoir also serve as an important refuge for many rare animal and plant species finding shelter. During weekends or public holiday, the park will be filled with family bring kids or love one to set up picnics and to enjoy the scenery or enjoying the trails through the rainforest to have exciting encounters with Singapore's amazing wildlife. From what we have saw and heard from friends, most of the people like to come to this place to catch little shrimps, crabs or fish which is another way of family bonding time with the kids.

If you choose to visit the park or stay around evening time, you might able to catch up with the beautiful sunset that you might not have a chance to see often during your daily working life. Sometime life will be more meaningful if you can spare some time, stop your pace and lift up your head and enjoy this beautiful sunset that is created by God.

If you are staying around Upper Thomson Road, I am sure you have visited this place and enjoy the natural goodness far long before us. But if you have not come to know this place before, maybe you can arrange for one of the weekend and give it a visit and enjoy your breakfast or evening sunset along the coaster or the green patches. I am sure that will be a most wonderful day for you......

Dian Xiao Er @ AMK Hub

Dian Xiao Er has about 9 branches located through out all parts of Singapore Major Shopping Mall. From the name "Dian Xiao Er - 店小二", you will know that this is a Traditional Chinese Food restaurants that serves Asian delights. Today, we will share with you two of their signature dish at one of their branch at Ang Mo Kio Hub.

When you ask around about this place, most of the customers will relate the restaurant as an ancient China teahouse. This is because almost all their furniture and layout are made of wood. As you can see, they even have their own unique menu book that look like those "Secret Manual Menu".

From the list of items in the menu, we select this Dang Gui Roasted Duck, the flavour of the herbs is pleasant and not overpowering for those who don't take Chinese herbs. According to their write-up, duck meat has a nutritional that surprises most people. Lean Duck has 25% more protein than other poultry, high in vitamin B and Vitamin E. Mum was surprised to find the gravy in this dish as she comments that the gravy will actually soften the crispness of the roast duck skin. But after all, if you order rice and other side dishes, this herbal gravy goes well with rice.

Actually my aim was to try out their new dish "Claypot Bee Hoon With Chinese Wine". I was attracted by the advertisement and write-up shown outside the restaurant as so compare to the usual Vermicelli Crab/Been Hoon Crab, this dish actually use Frog legs and River King Prawns to enhance the sweetness and flavour of this dish. According to the description, they also add in some top grade rice wine to obtain a flavourful golden broth. Overall, the flavour of the broth was great as you can taste the light and fragrant sweetness from the prawn and rice wine.

But when it comes to dessert time, we are a bit of disappointed with the choice that we ordered. We have this "Double-boiled Ginseng Hashima" which is serve in a normal plastic bowl which I thought was a wrong order. It was kind of diluted and with some Hashima(or maybe mashed jelly), two slices of ginseng and 1 red date which cost S$5+. I guess this is not a suitable place for after meal dessert............ :p

Loong Fatt Tau Sar Piah

Along the extreme right end of Balestier Road at the junction of Thomson Road, there is this famous Tau Sar Piah stall known as LOONG FATT that known to be “The Original, The Only Outlet Specialist in Sweet & Salty Tau Sar Piah”

Look at the crowd at queuing to get their favourite Tau Sar Piahs. This shop really live for it name on serving their products. No wonder there are so many Press and TV interview on them. They have a open bakery concept at the back of this coffee shop where about 10 stuffs are rolling, filling up the dough as well as baking to sever the customers their freshly bake products. So let's wait no more. but hope over to join the queue and get a some mixture of their Tau Sar Piah to try as well as send as gift.

They are two flavors available which is either “Sweet or Salty”. The sweet tau sar piah is marked by the sprinkling of sesame seeds on its crust and you might notice that the shape is flatter than the usual ones sell in other stalls. At first when we taste the Tau Sar Piah we are rather confused by the taste as it seems to be the same, both have that bit of salty taste. But when you have another bite on it, you will get the differences of one is much saltier than the other.

The pastry of these tau sar piahs soft, flaky and buttery which have so much generous of filling in between pastry what I packed without any hollow. I am those who prefer Salty flavour of Tau Sar Piah whenever I get them in the stall, but for this case, I prefer Loong Fatt's Sweet Tau Sar Piah over their Salty type. But if you are those type of dislike flaky and buttery pastry then this Tau Sar Piah might not be up to your liking.

[Updated on 01 June 2011]

During my recent visit to Loong Fatt for some Tau Sar Piah craving I was surprised to notice that they are also having those traditional sliced cake which we used to eat during our childhood time. So without hesitate I bought a few slices of different flavour and this is one of the Blueberry flavour which cost S$1.20 each slice.

Longhouse Food Centre - Thomson

LongHouse located at the busy street of Upper Thomson Road where it is very hard to find a park lot during lunch/dinner peak hours. Recently, they have an open air car park that one street before the food centre which can accommodate more parking spaces for foodies to enjoy their favourite food.

There are about more than 10 stalls in the Longhouse food center, ranging from Chinese, Korean, Malay and etc. Most of the people are attracted to the famous Bugis Chicken Rice, Char Kway Teow and Pisang Goreng. And you can hardly find a place during the lunch crowd timing.

There are too many choices of food to be choose from. So after much discussion, we settle for these few dishes below. While ordering the Fried Oyster Omelette - 蚝煎 and Char Kway Teow, Mum happen to spot one of her friend helping around at the stall. In this case, we have extra ingredients in our orders :p Look at the fat and juicy oysters that are being wrapped in layers of omelette, isn't this taste great despite of all the fats content :) We all love this dish ad it is not as oily compare to some other stalls and the omelette is nicely done with a golden and crispy texture.

The Char Kway Teow is of average standard, as we find that it is still lack of something which brings out that special flavour which compare to some of those famous Char Kway Teow stalls around Singapore. From the photo, you can see that the rice noodles is being fried together with some dark sauce, with the adding of beansprouts, spring onion, egg and some cockles. While some of other stalls, might have prawns, fish cakes, choy sum or Chinese sausage and etc....

Apart from the oily stuffs, we also ordered one pot of the double-boiled soup which is the "Du Zhong Ji Tang - 杜仲炖鸡汤" because I was attracted by the stunning soup photos on the menu. But to our disappointment, this soup does not taste as what we expected before of the ingredients they add. Mum and I both feel that the soup taste kind of odd with the adding of pepper and Chinese parsley. As these two ingredients actually mask up the herbal taste of the soup.

Lastly, after a nice and comfort meal. We decided to order a few of these to settle our sweet tooth. Since this is my favourite snacks/finger food, I cannot resists the temperation and buy more than half a dozen of different items on the shell. As you can see, the outer skin is so nicely fried with a golden and crispy layer which makes you crave for more after your first bite.

The Prata Place

The Prata Place located at the end of a stretch of shophouses at Thong Soon Avenue near Thomson. This shop is also Halal certified and they make the prata only after you place your order so the prata will remains hot and crispy when served at your table.

We arrived at the venue around 6.30pm on a Saturday evening and there are already a lot of people dinning inside the shop. So in order not to wait for seats inside, we choose a table outside the shop and starts looking at the menu on what we want.

Teh Tarik is always one of the drink that I would order when patronize any of the prata shop. I love the taste of that milk tea with that extra bubbles on top. The temperature of the tea is just nice, not too hot and it's very smooth and I just like that taste of it.

I guess no one can resists their wide variety of prata and their thin and crispy prata! We ordered their "Paper thin prata" and "Strawberry Prata" which is very crispy and fragrance. As you can see from the photo the strawberry prata is drizzle with some strawberry sauce and sprinkler with colourful bits and the texture of the prata are just as thin as a piece of crispy cracker.

After waiting for about 10 minutes, here comes our Chicken Murtabak which we ordered the small size serving that they cut into 6 portions. Their murtabak comes in different sizes like S, M, L, XL. We will kind of disappointed with their chicken murtabak which appears to be like some chopped chicken minced stir-fry with chopped onion and spices that wrapped between a layer of the prata skin.

Overall we still prefer the Egg and Cheese Prata which serves with a plate of their dipping curry sauce. The combination of egg and prata is so fragrance especially with the extra curry and you just can't seems to get enough of eating it.

Ban Leong Seafood Restaurant

Ban Leong Wah Hoe Seafood Restaurant (万隆华和海鲜菜馆) is situated the residential area of Casuarina Road which is near the Upper Thomson Road. They served Great "Seafood Zhe Char" at an incredibly affordable prices. As this stall is extremely occupied during weekends, it is best to call ahead to reserved a table in order to save time on waiting. Other than dine-in, they also provided take-away orders on the phone too.

We arrived at about 7.10pm and almost all the tables were occupied and each of the tables will have at least one crab order which is either their signature Chilli Crab or whatsoever. While waiting for the food to be served, Rey and I went around the restaurant to take some shots on their seafood.

As we are celebrating Mum's Birthday with some friends and relatives, we ordered quite a number of dishes which a few of it I didn't managed to take a clear shot of them due to the poor lighting late in the evening as well as our table position. So I will just leave you with these 8 dishes:-

~ 1: Stir-fry Kai Lan which is not over cook and still remain crunchy and it comes with a special fragrant seems like pepper......

~ 2: Birthday Noodles was actually a plate of Fried Mee Sua with generous amounts of squid, eggs, bean sprouts, prawns and surprised some deep-fried quail eggs(which resemble mini fishball).

~ 3: Xia Zhao(虾枣) which is similar to Wu Xiang but is deep-fried in individual pieces consists of minced meat, prawn, yam, water chestnut and spices. The Xia Zhao here is rather crisp on the outer skin and it goes well with their special sweet dipping sauce. I prefer this more than the shrimp-paste fried chicken.

~ 4: Shrimp-paste Fried Chicken is seasoned with shrimp-paste and some other ingredients then coat with fry and deep-fried until crisp on the outer skin but still the inner meat is still tender and juicy.

We ordered 3 crabs but cooked in two different methods which one is their signature Chilli Crab while the other one is in Butter flavour. Other than the crabs, we also have deep-fried fish with dark soy sauce, sweet and sour pork and hot-plate deer meat(铁板鹿肉).

~ 1. Signature Chili Crabs that served with gorgeous amount of egg sauce gravy and deep-fried mantou. As I am not a great fan of Crab, I only eat the mantou with the gravy. But overall, the taste is great.

~ 2. Butter Crab has a very unique fragrant and taste which covers with a thick layer of crispy fritters which I think is deep-fried egg. It has a very nice butter taste and most of us prefer this than the chilli crab.

~ 3. Deep-fried Fish cooked with dark soy sauce is rather salty on the sauce, but overall the fish is still fresh and not oily even though it had been deep-fried.

~ 4. Sweet & Sour Pork is one of my brother's favourite dish but then I find that their gravy is kind of sour. Maybe they have added too much plum sauce or tomato sauce.