Sour Cream

First of all, it has been a long time since the last entry.
Life's been busy - and terribly warm.
May is lurking and it'll always be rather busy until the holidays.

We hope to try out the few newer things in the holidays and implement them.

We apologise for the unavaliability of Sour Cream. We'll try to bring it back next week.

Peach Salsa (Part 2)

Tweaked a few bits, confident it is a better one than the last week.
Fresher, crunchier and prettier. Sweeter plus a dash of lemon

Peach Salsa

We encountered this during nice meal outside at an Australian Outlet.
It isn't a conservative taste so we are not sure how youngsters will like it.

We are bringing this to you anyway. We are sure you'll grow to love it.
So try it. Salsa the Australian Way.

Pop Corn Chicken - The Banned

It was crazy.

The demand was definitely more than what we can possibly supply.
Unless we buy a meat cutting machine.

Back then, the canteen lease was up for tender. We weren't sure if we would be around the following year. If a new operator won the bid then, we might or might not be able to continue our operation. With all the uncertainties back then, investing in a machine was probably the last thing on our minds.

So, it was down to hardcore manual meat slicing. We prepared the popcorn chicken by tubs (those blue Bestfood tubs). We prefered to use chicken drumstick meat rather than chicken breast.

Bad mistake.

Chicken drumstick meat was a lot more 'slippery' and difficult to cut, especially the skin. Well, it took a fast hand about 30 mins to fill 1 tub and an average helping hand 1 hour to do the same. To fill half a dozen of those requires about 3 -6 hours (depending who does it) of pure meat cutting after 'office hours'

All 6 tubs would typically be sold in 1 hour with angry customers yelling for more. Not that we were unhappy with good business, we were at a loss of what to do to meet the demands.

Unluckily for us, (and maybe the customers) this item was soon banned from the menu. Personally I am not sure what happened, but it probably doesn't matter.

If it is disallowed, it is disallowed. Case closed but it was fun while it lasts. Hope you guys and girls enjoyed it.

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...

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.

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.