Just a thought

I’m taking a bit of a leap with this blog post. I’m not going to re-read and agonise over it before it’s published. It’s scary, but sort of liberating too. Here goes…

*

This week, I’ve been taking a break.

From what or whom, you might ask.

I’ve been taking a break…

…from myself.

And boy is it a relief. 

New things are exciting again. I let myself play with ideas that crop up in my head, unrelated to what-I-am-supposed-to-be-doing (what is that anyway?). And I feel like I can finally breathe once more. I’ve realized I’m a bit of a slave-driver. I don’t say that with any hint of pride in my voice at all. Being unkind to anyone (oneself or other people) is not nice.  And if you’re being calculating about it, it ain’t productive either. Ultimately, I suspect, you’d end up killing any connection that person has with anything beautiful in this Universe.

What does this have to do with food? Nothing. But everything. Anyone who has tried to grow anything will probably know what I’m talking about. Roses? Cucumbers? Since when did treating that thing badly get you the results you wanted? But treating it kindly and giving it the conditions it needs will usually make it achieve its potential. I’ve been thinking that the same applies to cooking. When I cook in a hurry, with no attention being paid to what I’m chopping or stirring, it turns out bland, unbalanced, shapeless. That’s no surprise, I realize when I’m eating it, because it’s unloved. Giving it time, listening to my instinct about what it needs, feeling warmth flowing through my hands, that’s when it works. Does this happen to you?

If we know this about growing food, cooking food and serving it, why are so many of us tuned into thinking that it’s ok to be unkind to our selves? ‘No pain, no gain’ ringing any bells?

(For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not endorsing, for example, letting go and eating the entire bag of chips. I suspect that over-indulging in unhealthful things, or even over-eating healthful things, is actually one of the ways of being unkind. It’s not entirely unlike self-flagellation, to punish yourself for something else that didn’t go right…)

Why are we sometimes somehow deemed more worthy when we box ourselves up (or agree to let others box us up) into situations which, if we asked the question to the voice really deep inside, we wouldn’t want to be in?

Just something that’s been going through my mind today, and I wanted to share it with all of you, because I know some really thoughtful peeps are reading this blog. I would love to know what you think.

Love

Truffle

Pizza in Tuscany, a guest post from Bibsey Mama

This week, we have a special guest blogger! Bibsey Mama writes to us from España and tells us a wonderful story from her childhood. I know Cinnamon will love this story too. Read on, good people...

¡Hola! Readers of Cinnamon and Truffle

When the delicious Truffle asked me to write a guest post for her highly edible, and achingly stylish blog, I was of course ridiculously flattered and the vain-glorious egomaniac in me (such a small part of me, honest guv) jumped at the chance.

Then the non-food writer in me thought "eek". You see, I am in fact an British expat mummy living up a mountain in Spain writing about life up a mountain in Spain, motherhood and the ravages that both have wreaked on my poor beleaguered body and social life.

What do I know about blogging about food? Nada, niente, nix. But when in doubt write about what you know, right? So, I know my family and my family loves food.

The writing of this post has led me to suspect that I may have led a rather charmed childhood. Annual family holidays were spent in an ancient, and idiosyncratically rustic, Italian farmhouse (originally bought by my grandparents in the 1970s) tucked away in a Tuscan hillside. There my sister, my brother and I braved such torments as scorpions, hornets, hoppy things, bitie things, monster mosquitoes, wild boar, unidentified night-time roof dwellers, bats and much, much more. There were even tortoises to be found on those hillsides.

Long afternoons were spent playing rummy and whist in the sun. Nights were spent trying to keep cool and fending off the mosies. And in between there was swimming in the lake, trips to the sea, stargazing and moonbathing on the terrace and above all else there was food.

Our Italian holidays were a festival of food to which we as a family wholeheartedly surrendered ourselves. There was no talk of moderation. No stinting ourselves. There was limited time and we all have to eat, right? We would have our lunch on the terrace under the shade of an enormous fig tree looking out over the olive groves. Panini, finocchiona, mortadela, prosciuto, mozzarella, gorgonzola and dolce latte, bruschetta, salad, watermelon, coffee, chocolates...

Gnocchi making with Mum circa 1979. I'm the one bottom right looking for all the world like Steptoe Snr.

The majority of nights we ate out. Consequently a great deal of time would go into the planning of our eating itinerary. So many good restaurants and never enough time. You have to go a long way and try very hard indeed to find a bad meal in Italy. Or so has been my experience.

Everyone had their favourites: the best place for pizza, the best for supa di vedura, or crostini or bistecca or scottaditta or frittura mista, or best located for a walk and ice cream after dinner. At times we nearly came to blows over where we might eat. This was generally when we were running out of time. Much depended on who could shout the loudest.

 Amazing pizza. So why do I look so sad? I suspect I had no front teeth that year.

But there was one place where all appetites were met, a typical family run restaurant where four generations of my family have been eating for nearly 40 years. We know the waitress as Bronzatta because of her perfect tan and general air of glamour. She's still there of course. As is her similarly glamourous brother who sports a very distinguished streak of grey. This was, and still is, the first place my family visit at the start of the holiday and the place where they choose to eat on the very last night.

So, if you ever find yourself near the beautiful hill town of Cortona in Tuscany, and in the market for the best pizza on earth, visit Pizzeria il Vallone. I would say "tell them I sent you" but I imagine, no, I am sure, that they would have no idea who or what a Bibsey Mama is.

A taster from Roganic, London

Hello C&T readers! The blog posting schedule has been relaxed somewhat dramatically, as you can see. Stateside, Cinnamon and her family are busy with many projects I'm sure. On this side of the Atlantic, my excuse is that I've been starting up a band with a friend of mine. Exciting times!

That doesn't mean I've been passing up many foodie opportunities that have come my way. We've still been eating, exploring and photographing. I have an enormous stock of photos to share with you guys, so I thought a quiet space on a Sunday (occasioned by the snow on London streets) was the best time to get some of these photos on the road.

First up, we have photos from a long-ago lunch at Roganic, one of the biggest openings on the London restaurant scene in 2011. We had dinner there just last week with some visitors from San Francisco, and they loved it. San Franciscans have high standards when it comes to food, so Roganic is clearly still going strong in 2012.

Lion's head mushroom

 

What the mushroom looks like once the kitchen's transformed it

Leek baked in clay

Said leek on plate, before generous amounts of black truffle were grated on

Venison, with a sliver of autumn vegetable reaching for the sky

Warm spiced bread, with smoked cream, salted almonds and buckthorn curd

Lunch is a cosy 3- or 6-course affair, and dinner is a full-blooded 10 courses. Of all the tasting menus in the city, this is currently my favourite.

That's it for now, but I'm hoping to get more of my stock of photos out there to you, so watch this space.

Roganic
19 Blandford Street
London W1U 3DH
www.roganic.co.uk
020 7486 0380

Love

Truffle

Warm up January with some Beef Rendang

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope 2012 sees you having had a fantastic holiday, feeling well-rested, and now raring to go! First up this year, we have a guest post from our friend, Vanessa, with a delicious-sounding recipe for beef rendang. If you're trying to remember what rendang is, here is a picture from a previous post...

Ox cheek rendang, at the +65 Supper Club last year

Now it's over to Vanessa!

I boasted on Facebook a few days ago about an outstanding Rendang which The Husband spent an afternoon cooking. Having seen the wifely praise and a pretty dubious picture of the dish, Truffle kindly invited me to share the recipe. So thank you, Cinnamon and Truffle, for this opportunity to write a guest post. I’ve read Cinnamon and Truffle since it’s inception and enjoy the easy prose, the fantastic steering to London’s (and the world’s) good food and all the epicurean miscellany I glean.

Rendang is an Indonesian dish, which can now be found as extensively in Malaysia and Singapore. Originally a ceremonial dish which would be served to honoured guests, Rendang has cemented it’s place onto the menu of Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean restaurants in Asia and around the world. You can have Rendang made with all manner of meat – mutton, goat, chicken, liver – but we prefer Beef Rendang.

The key to Rendang is in the long, slow simmer. Initially, once the ingredients are fried together and the coconut milk and water added, it looks like an ordinary wet curry. 2½ hours later however, this has reduced into tender beef that falls apart at the slightest touch of a fork, covered with a sticky, dark and divinely fragrant sauce, which has completely infused the meat. It’s pretty much heaven in a pot. Soon to become heaven on your plate. Which then melts in your mouth. You can’t say better than that.

Pandan sighting!

Frangelico and I were at the Singapore Botanic Gardens this afternoon. Walking around the Orchid Garden, I said to him that I could suddenly smell pandan in the air. That reminded me that I'd tried to describe the fragrance of pandan to you guys by saying that it's what a South East Asian rainforest smells like after the rain. (Part of the grounds of the Botanic Gardens, incidentally, consists of 6 hectares of rainforest. Singapore is home to one of only two urban, city centre rainforests in the world. The other one's in Brazil.) Just as I'd made the pandan remark, I spotted this!

So now I finally know what pandan leaves look like as they're emerging from the ground. I was seriously excited by the find and wanted to share it with you guys. (Yes, I'm a geek. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'd already know that.)

This makes me think that a South East Asian rainforest probably smells of pandan after the rain, because there is a lot of fragrant pandan growing in it... Caught in a circularity trap, I am.

Anyway, here are pictures of some of the stunning rare cultivars in the Orchid Garden. Don't say we only ever talk to y'all about food. :)

Love

Truffle

Brilliant Savarin

I just had to emerge from my silence and share this with everyone. I've been reading a food writing classic, 'The Pleasures of the Table' by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. First published in 1825, it's a collection of writings on all things foodie, and it reads like a series of lectures that a visiting French philosopher might have delivered in Exam Schools in the 19th century. One can only dream...

Anyway, there is much in this book that's humorous and has literally made me laugh out loud (cf. the account given by a lady who is left alone with her husband's friend, one night after everyone had feasted on truffles at dinner). The part I wanted to share, though, is this.

"Are Truffles Indigestible?

It only remains for us to discover whether the truffle is indigestible. 

Our answer will be in the negative. 

This official and final decision is founded:

1. On the nature of the actual subject of our inquiry (the truffle is easy to masticate, weighs very little, and is neither hard nor tough);

2. On our own observations, conducted over more than fifty years, in the course of which we have never seen a single truffle-eater suffering from indigestion;

3. On the evidence of the most famous practitioners in Paris, which is a city of gourmands, and eminently trufflivorous;

4. And lastly, on the daily conduct of the legal fraternity, who, all things being equal, consume more truffles than any other class of citizens; witness, among others, Doctor Malouet, who used to eat enough of them to give an elephant indigestion, but who nevertheless lived to the age of eighty-six."

:)))

Sadly, Brillat-Savarin wasn't able to make his inquiry really thorough, by asking the question: does the daily conduct of the legal fraternity give Truffle indigestion? Responses on a postcard. (No prizes for the correct answer.)

If you fancy reading about Madame Name Unknown and Monsieur Verseuil, have a look at page 38 of the book.

Love

Truffle

Ocean Commotion, a book for children

Sometime last year, I wrote about food wastage in hotels. It does pain me to see a lot of food served to people who couldn't possibly eat that much, only to be thrown in the bin. Our society seems to want to see abundance all around us in every shape and form, as some sort of marker of our success. Restaurants often want to show diners large quantities on their plates (or, if they're following the 'small plates' trend, they want to give you lots of those plates). Watching cooking programmes on TV, it's not unusual (and indeed we expect) to see over-stuffed larders, and tables packed with a mosaic of colourful dishes and pretty plates. 

In the supermarket, there are so many shelves of fresh, packaged fish, meat and chicken. The shelves seem to want to be full all of the time. But does all of that actually get sold? WRAP, an organisation working to reduce food wastage, estimates that, in supermarkets and convenience stores in the UK alone, 3.6 million tonnes of food product was wasted in 2009. To put that immense figure in perspective, it's roughly equivalent to the weight of 13 double-decker Airbus A380s, without passengers and luggage. (Given that food product is not going to be as dense as the material that goes into making an aircraft, I can't imagine what volume 3.6 million tonnes would take up.)

That seems to me to be such a pity. If people are not buying it, why are shops stocking it? Why is this stuff making it into the supply chain at all, if we're supposed to be operating in free markets? (Yep, loaded question.) I can't help feeling that nature yields such beauteous creations to nourish us with, but that it's a bit of a slap in the face, the way we greedily grab as much as we can of all of that and use it so callously.

This is why I'd like to share a book published by a dear friend of ours. Titled 'Ocean Commotion', the book is a story for children written by Aruna Khanzada and beautifully illustrated with photographs of craft-work fish (all of which was made by children at a recent event at the Chalk Farm Library). I don't want to give away the story, but you can preview it (and buy a copy if you like) here. Aruna is, in my humble opinion, one of those positive-energy-people spinning in the Universe, and I'm so glad that she's channelled some of her energy into this book.

Over-fishing, together with food wastage more generally, is a problem. And as with many problems, I think awareness is the first step.

Love

Truffle

Plusixfive Seafood Feast

Last night, Frangelico, my sister Rice Krispie, her pal JC and I were at the plusixfive supper club again. This was only my second time there, and we looked forward to it with all the excitement of visiting an old friend's home.

The theme this time around was seafood, and the club featured the creations of guest chef Yolanda Augustin. Yolanda is half-Malaysian - of Eurasian descent, she explained, hence the Portuguese surname 'Augustin' - and half-English. She grew up in Malaysia with a maternal grandmother who was one of those amazing-cook-matriarchs that South East Asians will know well. Moving to England for her 'A' Levels, she realised how much she missed the food from home, and she started trying her hand at some dishes. The rest is cooking history. Yolanda, an oncologist by day, is in now the process of setting up her own supper club in London, called Wild Serai, and plusixfive was hosting her first foray into the genre.

We started off with pork belly satay from Goz, chef and founder of plusixfive (day-job: private equity lawyer). If you're in Singapore or Malaysia, you're unlikely to find pork belly satay in a restaurant or hawker centre. Reason being, satay originated in the Malay-Muslim community. Chinese communities in Singapore, however, engineered an alternative that would yield satay as tender and melting as the traditional chicken and lamb. Frangelico described Goz's satay as 'superlative'. I need not say any more, except that the peanut sauce that the satay came dressed in was better than anything I can recall having tried in Singapore: chunky and studded with peanut, limey and aromatic, sweet and sour. If any sommeliers are reading, I challenge you to find a wine pairing for Goz's superlative peanut sauce!

Le hide, Paris

Le hide, Table d'étoile, Koba's Bistro

Frangelico and I were in Paris a few weeks ago, and it was a great opportunity to meet up with a friend from my school days. I've known Ratatouille since I was seven years old, and we were at the same school until we were 16. That's a mighty long time, and many years of birthday parties! 

One of the best memories from my childhood is of the birthday parties each of us would have every year. These were the highlights of our school years - fabulous gatherings of school friends just running around in the garden, playing home-made games planned and run by my sisters (Pass the Parcel, Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Newspaper Dance, Musical Chairs). And there was, of course, the food. All home-made, except for the cake. My mother's special pizza was always in demand, and my friends still reminisce about them. (Amma's pizzas and her later dosai diplomacy are still paying dividends to this day.)

Relish, Singapore

Eating all that South East Asian food in Singapore is great, but sometimes you get a craving for something not so spicy. Yes, I'll admit it, I want some relatively bland food, in the same way my dad needs a regular fix of chili when he's traveling in Europe.

To this end, Frangelico, my dad and I visited a new burger bistro in the city. (It's apparently been there for 3 years, but hey it's new to me.) Owned by the same group that gave us Wild Rocket - a rockin' Modern Singaporean experience - Relish features burgers, shakes, rings, fries and pastas.

Spam fries - because just spam wasn't good enough

The Yin and Yang of Mangosteen and Durian

Frangelico and I have just returned from a trip to Singapore, where we were visiting my dad. We tried to fit in as much feasting as possible in the one week (all in the interests of the blog, of course). Here's the first course...

August in Singapore is the time when mooncakes start making an appearance. These treats are a staple of the Mid-Autumn Festival, which is a harvest festival celebrated on the 15th month of the Chinese Lunar calendar. The festival usually falls in September or October, but hotel delis and restaurants start stocking mooncakes well before that. Traditional fillings consist of red bean or lotus paste, but the offerings are getting more and more interesting by the year. A recent article in a Singaporean paper mentions, amongst other concoctions, purple potato with cranberry jelly, and champagne truffle with ganache.

Snowskin durian mooncakes

This year, our dear Uncle G gave us a gift of durian mooncakes. The durian, hailed as the King of Fruit in South East Asia, leaves no one indifferent - you either love it or you hate it. Happily, Frangelico (despite never having sighted this prickly green dinosaur of a fruit until a few years ago) loves it. Its aroma is strong (and that's putting it mildly), which means the fruit is banned in public transport on the island, and in the cabin of Singapore Airlines. To me, it's magnificent - with a heavy scent of forests and leaves, deep and sulphurous. The flesh of the fruit is a light yellow, and it's thick and gooey, like condensed milk would be if you concentrated it even further. The taste is rounded sweetness, with just a twinge of sharpness.

A Skylight in London

Just another sunny day in East London

Wherever you may be in the world, if you have an internet connection and are reading this blog, you would no doubt have heard about the recent events in London. It's been a trying time, to say the least. Frangelico and I have been thinking and talking about almost nothing but. Yesterday evening, we expected the looting and vandalism to worsen, but in London it was mostly quiet. Sadly, the same can't be said for other parts of the UK, and worse things happened last night than shops being broken into. This morning, as has been the case over the past few mornings, I started waking up feeling unsettled and disturbed. The world was spinning, and I was struggling to find something to hold on to. In that space of time when I was surfacing from sleep into wakefulness, a few of the pieces that were swirling around my mind came together and fit alongside one another like the embryonic beginnings of a puzzle.

After running some errands in the morning, Frangelico (who was on holiday today) and I took the tube to Aldgate East. Here in East London, about 10 minutes north of the tube station and not far from Spitalfields Market, we found the Crisis Skylight Café. The blackboards behind the broad counter offered for lunch a warm soup, tempting hot dishes, and a variety of jacket potato options. On the counter itself were large white dishes with fresh salads, a feta and vegetable frittata, an egg tortilla with bacon and onions, and various cakes and pastries.

Service with a smile

Both of us went for the sweetcorn chowder to start with, followed by the roasted vegetable dal with rice and tzatziki. Having placed our orders at the counter, the food was delivered to the table. Everything came together, and Frangelico and I leapt in without hesitating.

The chowder was properly steaming and hot, unlike soups you get in most London cafés. It was full of plump and sweet kernels, which had a delightful crunch to them still. The chowder base had the perfect consistency for a summer soup: light, yet fulfilling without being creamy. There was also some chili in the mix, giving the whole flavour profile a stronger dimension. 

Roasted vegetable dal with rice and tzatziki

Next up was the dal and rice dish. Now, I know my South Asian food, and my experience of eating dal in restaurants has either been of the pretty-bland-and-stodgy variety or the over-spiced-and-swimming-in-oil type. The Crisis Skylight Café's dal knocked my socks off. I'd never tasted one as flavourful, healthful, and comfortingly homemade in a restaurant. I loved the tzatziki accompaniment, rather than the usual cucumber raita, because the tzatziki was thicker. Its texture stood up to the dal's complexity of lentils and roasted butternut squash and aubergine, whereas raitas tend to get runny because of the thinner yoghurt and the cucumber.

The ones that got away

The meal was very filling, and we didn't have space for dessert. Just check out what we missed! Triple chocolate muffins, cookies, flapjacks, pain au chocolat, pain au raisin, almond croissant, and cherry and almond croissant.

We enjoyed the ambience a great deal too. There were plenty of smooth wooden tables (with elevated seating by the window at the front), and throughout the two hours or so that we spent there, we witnessed brisk business taking place. The customers seemed to be a mix of local suits, office workers, fashion students, and retired couples. At the height of trade (at around 1.30pm), the queue was all the way to the door.

The fresh décor and comfortable interior

Union hand-roasted coffee and a sofa to enjoy it on

After lunch, I asked to speak to someone about the café, and I first met Eki, the front-of-house manager, and then Carrie-Ann, the head chef. Eki and Carrie-Ann are two of the 4 or 5 members of staff employed by the café. All of the others who work there are their trainees, who are either on the 'front-of-house journey' or the 'kitchen journey'. And who are the trainees, the most important part of the café? The trainees can come from two groups: the first is a group of young offenders working with Switchback, a charity that supports 18-24 year olds to build on skills learnt in prison kitchens; and the second is a group of people working with Crisis, a charity providing education, training and employment services to single homeless people.

Eki talked me through the front-of-house training they undertake: everything from food hygiene,  customer service, barista skills, to managing basic accounting. Each trainee spends roughly 6 months on the programme, working in the café 2 or 3 times a week. At any one time, they are working with roughly 10 to 12 trainees.

Head chef Carrie-Ann, a sparkling Scotswoman from Edinburgh, works on the kitchen training together with the sous-chef Ross. Kitchen trainees are taught everything they need to know in order to operate in a professional kitchen, and the trainees who go on to be placed successfully in employment find jobs as kitchen porters or commis chefs (responsible for basic food preparation). She told us that the dal and rice we'd enjoyed so much that afternoon had been prepared by one of the trainees working with her, Steve. He was familiar with Caribbean cuisine, and so she had given him the task of preparing the dal as a means of introducing him to a different cuisine using different spices.

I was then given the honour of being able to look around the kitchen and photograph the chefs and trainees in action! Sous-chef Ross was busy zipping around preparing some takeaway orders that were coming through, now that it was past the lunch hour. (In fact, he was moving so fast, I didn't get a single shot of him that wasn't blurred.) There was a cake-making lesson going on in the corner too, with Mary and Eric stirring demerara sugar and butter in large bowls. 

Eric, a trainee, is taken through the paces of a ginger cake by Mary

Following on from the events of the past few days, I've been thinking today of something Mahatma Gandhi said: "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." I'm not quoting this because I'm a communist, a leftist, a liberal, politically correct, or suited to any other label. I think the reason is that I'm human. And although I (as much as anyone else) find it difficult to deal with other people a lot of the time, I don't want to see parts of my human family crash and burn when it's within my power, and the power of so many others, to try to do something about it. Even if this perspective isn't for everyone, at the end of the day no man is an island, and unless the prospect of living in a self-sufficient nuclear bunker is particularly attractive, I suspect that only when all of us are doing well, will each of us individually too.

Back row: Eki (front-of-house manager), Carrie-Ann (head chef), Alana (café manager), Eric (trainee), Ross (sous-chef)

Front row: Mo (trainee) , Jo (regional manager), Steve (trainee)

To the teams at Switchback and Crisis: hats off to you guys. You're carrying out tremendous work that not all of us have the emotional strength to do, and you're out there fighting to make a difference to the city I call home and beyond. For this, I thank you and wish you all the very best for your projects.

Crisis Skylight Café
64 Commercial Street
London
E1 6LT
020 7426 3867
www.crisis.org.uk

The café is open from Mondays to Fridays, 8am to 3pm (covering breakfast, elevenses, lunch and tea). Their catering services are also available to companies and for events, and the café space may be hired for private events.

Love

Truffle

One great tip for espresso lovers

Coffee? No, thanks. But a croissant, on the other hand...

I'm not a coffee drinker, but a good friend has just given me a fabulous espresso tip, and I have to share it. The tip comes courtesy of Ftira, a lovely and exuberant Londoner who grew up in Malta. She's originally Chilli Padi's friend from their MBA days, but she's adopted Rice Krispie and me as her sisters.

Ftira is a coffee connoisseur, and at dinner last night she was talking about the virtues of Starbucks. (Please note, this is not Truffle's endorsement of Starbucks. I boycotted them for a lengthy period of time following their takeover of my beloved Seattle Coffee Company!) If you want to get the perfect espresso from the baristas at Starbucks, remind them when you place your order to extract/brew the coffee for no more than 19 seconds. Apparently they're trained, during their induction, to brew for exactly 19.5 seconds, but they forget...

So, don't forget the magic number: 19. And if it works for you, come back and tell us!

Love

Truffle

Hammade Homeware

I don't know about the rest of the country, but London's been having a truly beautiful and hot day today. The last seriously warm day we had (before all the rain arrived), Truffle here had the pleasure of being invited to a pop-up shop in Kingly Court in the West End. Given the weather, the media types and teenaged Continental tourists were out in force on Carnaby Street. Kingly Court is a relatively new development that seems to have landed like a space ship into the folds of Soho. Restaurants and cafés surround a courtyard on the ground floor, indie boutiques are scattered throughout the building, and there's a smart yoga studio on an upper floor.

I was at Kingly Court that warm Thursday to check out Ham, a gift and homeware brand started up by Jo Robinson (née Ham). I know Jo from school, as she was Head Girl the year before my sister Rice Krispie was. (That's right, Rice Krispie was Head Girl at my school. Her sisters' pride regarding this fact never fails to embarrass her. So I thought I'd mention it on our blog.) After school, Jo trained as a fine artist at The Ruskin School in Oxford. She then worked in marketing, before leaving last year to start up Ham.

The concept behind Ham is the capture of unexpected moments in the contented lives of a pig, a horse and a rabbit. Jo's designs have taken these moments and finished them on premium cotton, fine bone china, and foil-blocked gift cards. There is much to adorn the home, but my kitchenware antenna specifically picked up on the delightful apron, tea towels and mugs.

Cinnamon Goes to Singapore

Hello! We are back from Singapore! We went on a quick one week trip to see my parents, to vacation, to attend my 20th high school reunion and to eat lots of Singaporean food. I had my fill of Mee Pok, Satay, Kueh Pie Tee, Chwee Kueh, Mee Siam, Chilli Crab and Chicken Rice. I am now back, reminiscing about our trip.

You know, I always thought I was the one going through all the change, living in different countries, experiencing different cultures, and developing in complex ways as a person. I expected Singapore to remain the same all through these years. But it too has changed.

My first experience of change came on day 2, when Prince Charming and I left the kids at home with my parents and went to Ann Siang Hill, the trendy hot spot for bars and restaurants. There we had dinner at Cugini's - an Italian restaurant. We were very excited when we got there as the ambience was great and the place was filled with Italians! No better endorsement of restaurants than to have its ethnicity filling its tables, I say. But, we were a little disappointed with the food and the wine. The shocker of the evening came when the bill came at the end....US$350! We had even shared the appetizer and dessert!

We had a similar shocking experience when we lunched at PS Cafe on Harding Road. This time the food was five-star and the ambience hard to beat. It is set in an old colonial building surrounded by trees of dense rainforests. But, my parents waited for an hour for the table and each main course was no less than $23!! What had happened to my inexpensive Singapore!