Three meals from Spencer Village
Lunch
When I have a hainan chicken rice craving, I usually have Penang Cuisine’s chicken rice. On this occasion I decided to give the Straits Cuisine stall’s hainan chicken rice a go. The verdict? Not bad at all!
The rice wasn’t as garlicky as Penang Cuisine’s (I love really garlicky chicken rice!), but it had a good flavour. The chicken was smooth, tender and succulent. The chilli sauce was that fantastic garlicky/gingery chilli sauce that is a must for chicken rice.
The broth was lovely, not overly salty / msg-laden as chicken broth can sometimes be. Jac always ends up drinking half my chicken soup (she’s lucky I love her, or she wouldn’t be allowed to keep reaching for the soup spoon! :)) – she really enjoyed this broth.
Jac ordered two dishes for her lunch, both from Fook Kee. First, a bowl of century egg porridge. You can’t really see the century egg, but once she stirred it through, the little flecks of finely chopped blue-grey egg appeared. I’ve mentioned before that I quite like century egg porridge – I’m a big fan of rice porridge in general – but I don’t really like the taste of century egg itself. It’s too over-the-top smelly / eggy for my liking!
She also ordered one of her all-time favourites: popiah, no chilli.
Dinner
I bought some food for later too, from Fook Kee. For my dinner that night, I had chee cheong fun, one of my favourites.
Work lunch the next day
For lunch at work the next day, I’d bought a loh mai kai (glutinous chicken rice) and a char siu pow (barbecue pork steamed bun).
The glutinous chicken rice has pieces of saucy chicken and pork piled on top of the rice. The chicken is always succulent thigh meat, and utterly delicious.
The trick to re-heating char siew pow in the microwave is to wet it a little on the surface before zapping, so it won’t dry out on the outside. Char siu pow is one my favourites – I love the sweet flavour of Chinese barbecue pork, and the bun itself is so pleasurably chewy (unless zapped for too long or at too high a temperature, in which case it turns surprisingly leathery – eeww!).