Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Soup matters

The 'Campbell Soup' bowls we use are a little bit misleading. We used to get the supplies from them during the Nanyang Girls School days (before we came here) so they gifted us these bowls.

Not anymore though. Can't remember why that happened. Either we lose contact with the supplier or we find the soup we made better than their supplies.

I'm sure everyone tried Campbell soup before. Just wondering is the soup we are offering better, or the original Campbell soup. If it is the latter, we might consider searching for their supplies again...

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Scotch Egg

During a trip in Perth, we came across a homely cottage-like supermarket by a petrol kiosk one freezing afternoon. I kept staring curiously at a product on the counter. Of course it was a scotch egg.

Back in Singapore,

"What's this?" asked Canteen Auntie.

"Scotch Egg," came the reply.

"Huh?"

"Yeah."

So it became an item on the menu today. We are still trying to improve it week by week.
Problems include:

- Eggs shells are difficult to peel. Seriously. Try peeling 40 eggs! Delicate care has to be taken to make sure no shell fragments remain where they are not supposed to be as well.
- We can't find sage supplies(yet), the herb that really make scotch eggs delicious. So we have to use rosemary as a stand-in herb as for now.
- As the meat patties are thick, very careful cooking required, there was 1 case of meat not 100% cooked. We urge diners to voice it out by bringing it back and we promise to return it completedly cooked. However we are confident these cases will cease by now as we are very committed in giving no-nonsense, well prepared meals to customers.
- It is rather difficult to wrap the whole thing up without things falling apart.
- It looks small although we use more meat than a usual pork chop would have. Hopefully that wouldn't be a minus in the presentation area.
- It requires so much more time to prepare compared to a regular chicken chop, sometimes we wondered if we are asking for trouble.

Hope to get some feedbacks on this.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Cheese Pork

We toyed with the idea of embedding cheese into meat ages ago, only to find a way to do it properly in our 3rd of operation. Thought that it would be good to list down the problems we faced in the process of learning how to prepare this item.

Initial problems:
-The cheese melt and leak during cooking.
-Difficult to mass produce, it is probably easy to make 1 or 2 but really tough to make 40 of them.
-Inconsistent meat size/shape from suppliers.
-Which type of meat should be used.
-The embedding requires relatively thick meat but as a result inner sides of meat can turn out uncooked and cooking it longer will burn the crumb outside.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Just a thought here...

2008 is our 5th year of operation. It hasn't been easy through these years and we would like to thank everyone for their feedback and support. There were a lot of ups and downs (more downs than ups) and we probably would have given up if not for the support. So all these couldn't have happen without you.

Well, nothing last forever. Just like all students who will be here for 4-6 years, it may be inevitable that we may, though reluctantly, cease operation in this lovely place one day. Personally we think it is a pity to part ways like that.

We wondered before if we should start(continue) this little stall outside the school so that students and ex students can get to enjoy occasional good old days together.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Why we enjoy our work in HCI

-The place is reasonably near home
-The environment is lovely
-The customers are honest, good boys and girls
-The boss is rather nice
-We have a sentiment attachment to the school