Had several mini birthday celebrations this year.
First was at Melissa's place where we had our usual pig out session. Sherrie was the dearest who baked me a super rich chocolate cake with chocolate honey icing. Yummy! This poor girl tried the recipe 7 times just to get it right for me! Some Nigella's recipe. Ha! Maybe I should try it one day! Love the icing!
Unflattering pic taken by hubz
Second was at Shinobu (
http://www.singaporemirror.com.sg/co_shinobu.htm), a japanese restaurent at PSA building which my colleagues and I occasionally goes to. We love the kani toufu there! Its toufu with crabstick meat filling, poured over with century egg yolk sauce and topped with chopped up century egg white. They have reasonably good set lunches from $16 above. My lovely colleagues gave me and another march baby colleague a treat. Free meal! Wee!
Next was at Smoochies (
http://www.smoochiesbistro.com/), a good friend cum colleague, Wendy, gave me a treat there! ANother free meal! They have lunch set meals at $9.99, which comes with a soup and a main. But there are no choices for the soup and main. Fixed.
Wendy told me the pumkin soup was heavenly. Unfortunately, they only had tomato soup that day. The tomato soup was sheer awful! It basically tasted like diluted tomato ketchup. Very sweet and makes our throat feel uneasy. We only took a few spoons and rejected it. The kind waitress told us they will get the cook to recook the soup but..there was no difference from the soup. We told the lady it was fine. Perhaps both of us are just not used to the taste.
The main on the other hand was pretty good. Fish cutlet and spagetti. Small as it looks, it was really filling! I love the breaded crust of the fish cutlet! Crispy and fragrant! The fish meat was nice and moist too!
We order a lava cake to share as dessert! Such a pretty presentation! Love the warm chocolate oozing out of the cake. Only complain.. the cake taste kinda airy to me. Hard to explain the texture but i prefer something more moist.
The ambience of the place was quiet and cosy. The service is good. I dun mind going back there again.. provided they are not serving me that tomato soup anymore.
On the actual day of my birthday, I requested to dine at Aburiya. It is a place I always wanted to go back to after I first tried it. I remembered the "xinfu" feeling I had and wanted to relive that moment! I think it was somewhere in 2005. How time flies. Anyway, the branch in holland V died so we went to the one at robertson quay.
I already knew which set I wanted to order. Was already browsing the website way before my birthday. But we saw a new set there which was the waygu beef set, 10 bucks more than the beef set we wanted to order. Greedy us naturally ended up with the wagyu beef set. O! and a plate of pork belly.
The food was pretty good but sad to say.. I could not get back that xinfu feeling anymore. No more "Wow" factor left. I guess its because we have pampered our taste buds too much recently. The pork belly is normal. BC can season pork belly and bbq them crispy and heavenly easily. Beef wise, recently, we discovered that The Butchery sells Angus and Wagyu beef at such resonable price. For around 80-90 bucks, we can get 5 steaks of Angus and 3 steaks of wagyu (around 100g per steak). Season with a pepper and salt, and bbq with really good fire and you have such heavenly tasting tender beef!
Well.. at least I satisfied my craving for Aburiya and the craving will probably stop here. I am not saying they are not good. They are still good. But if I ever have craving for japanese BBQ again, I guess it will be more affordable and reasonable to bbq them myself. We can then spend our marnee on yakitori joints instead! which both of us EXTREMELY enjoys!
