Wild Honey

The English breakfast at Wild Honey

Over Chinese New Year dinner our friends told us about Wild Honey, a cafe in the Mandarin Gallery, where you can get breakfasts from various cities/countries around the world.  Sounded interesting enough for D and I to get to Wild Honey at 10am on a Saturday.

It was already packed when we got there.  This cafe caters to the expat community on the other side of Tanglin and it was full of people chatting happily in different languages over lots and lots of food.

Wild Honey serves breakfast all day, every day.  And from their menu you can select a breakfast from destinations like Belgium (Thick fluffy waffles served with coconut cream, grilled mango, blueberries and toasted coconut), Switzerland (Home made bircher muesli with organic yoghurt and seasonal fruits), Californian (Eggs softly scrambled with tofu, yellow and red peppers, fresh herbs on char-grilled ciabatta and Japanese (6 omelette balls filled with smoked salmon and garnished with wasabi mayonnaise. Served with sushi rice and wake salad).

Of course D and I had the English breakfast (if it ain’t broke…) – which comes with creamy scrambled eggs (although I asked for mine fried), pork sausage, sauteed mushrooms, dad’s baked beans, bacon and vine ripened tomato with toasted brioche.

When the plate comes, it is almost overflowing with food.  The servings are huge, so go when you’re hungry, or prepare to leave a lot behind.  I am not sure brioche is the right bread to have with a fry up – it’s almost too fancy, as I also thought with their mushrooms.  These were really really garlicky (I love garlic but not that much, or so early in the day) and I just remembered that there was also sauteed potatoes, which were equally garlicky.  I never thought I would turn potatoes down, I pretty much love them any way they are served, but again, these were overpoweringly garlicky.  The beans on the other hand, were awesome.  I couldn’t get enough of them – clearly home made, not overly seasoned or spiced.

If you’re going to pile that many things on to a plate, make sure they all work together, and don’t have each fighting for prime position.  Maybe the other destinations would work, but for me, so far, the best fry-up in Singapore is in our apartment on weekend mornings (although I may be biased).

Wild Honey
#03-02 Mandarin Gallery
Orchard Road
Tel: 6235 3900

Open 9am – 10.30pm Mon – Fri (open from 8am Sat and Sun)
Get there early if you don’t like to queue

Pancakes

With breakfast being such a rushed affair during the week, it’s nice to enjoy a leisurely meal to start our weekend mornings.

Last weekend, I had a craving for pancakes.  Thick, fluffy, American style pancakes with crispy bacon on the side and drizzled (or, smothered) in maple syrup.  And a big cup of tea.  Ah, what a lovely way to spend the weekend.

I’ve struggled for many years to get that super fluffiness in pancakes and now have a fail proof method.  It’s all about gently folding in stiffly beaten egg whites into the batter.

Ingredients (for 6 pancakes)

1. 1 cup flour
2. 1 tsp baking powder
3. pinch of salt
4. 1 cup milk
5. 1 egg, separated
6. 2 tsps caster sugar
7. 1 tbsp oil

Method

1. Combine flour, baking powder & salt in a bowl and mix well.
2. In another bowl, whisk together egg yolk, sugar and milk followed by oil.  Add into the flour mixture and whisk to combine.
3. Beat egg white until stiff peaks form, loosen the batter with a small spoonful of the beaten egg whites, then fold the rest gently into the mixture. You really want to keep the air in the egg whites as much as possible.
4. Heat a non-stick frying pan on medium low heat then scoop batter, about 1 ladleful, onto the pan. Cook until bubbles appear evenly on the surface, flip it over and cook until golden.

Steel cut oats

As a break from our standard weekend fry-ups, D and I decided to try oats for Sunday breakfast.  He was happy with his usual rolled oats.  I tried steel cut oats for the first time – and I love them !  They take a while to cook (15 mins) but portions can be stored in the fridge and then as you want to eat them, you can reheat them with some milk.  They have a surprisingly chewy texture which I really like – feels like you’re eating something substantial, even though it’s comfort food.  I struggle to eat breakfasts which aren’t food that you can eat for lunch (like a good nasi lemak yum) so this will fuel me up for a great start to the day !

Schweet breakfast idea

I always roast more potatoes than I need – I don’t really know why, and generally I use the leftovers to thicken soups the next day.  At breakfast this morning at the FCC Angkor, D ordered a manchego cheese, potato and roasted garlic frittata.  What a wonderfully light and fluffy way of using up leftover potatoes!  Sweat some onions in a small frypan on low heat, add in garlic, and then add a mixture of egg, mashed potato and grated cheese (parmesan would be good), cook till the bottom is set, and then pop under the grill till the top is cooked.

You could fry up some bacon after the onions and garlic to make it a true breakfast as what is breakfast without bacon ??

I miss a good cafe breakfast on a Sunday morning

D and I used to enjoy a leisurely stroll to our favourite local cafe on a Sunday morning – a prerequisite to where we needed to live was to be no more than five minutes away from a good coffee.  In Darlinghurst, it used to be Tropicana Cafe, a bustling, busy cafe which made the best fried eggs ever, or Ten Buck Alley, which had arguably one of the best baristas (and therefore coffee) in town (with Latteria on Darlinghurst Road being a close contender for best coffee).  When we moved to Chippendale, it was Cafe Guilia where we would spend our Sunday mornings reading the papers.

People move, things change, and Singapore is a hard place to find a good coffee still (we have resorted to a Nespresso machine at home to try to achieve this), but pretty good breakfasts can be found, perhaps not as conveniently around the corner.

Normally we frequent Jones the Grocer up at Dempsey, which, being Australian, and pretty much exactly the same as the Jones’ that we used to go to, makes me happily reminiscent of being back home.

This morning, actually in the hope that we’d get some groceries at the same time, was breakfast at Huber’s at Dempsey.  Coffee, disappointingly weak, but the breakfast was delightful.  It’s a much quieter experience than eating at the packed and bustling Jones, and because it’s a little away from the main cluster of cafes and restaurants at Dempsey, it feels like you’re in a quiet ranch-type retreat, especially surrounded by all that foliage.

Huber’s is first and foremost a butcher and they’ve added a bistro where you can eat outside on the balcony (it’s shady and breezy for those of you like me who dislike eating in the heat), where you can get all the ingredients in your meals, inside.

The breakfast menu is limited, but who can complain when one of them is eggs, fried or scrambled, with bacon, pork sausages and grilled tomato?

The eggs have a deep orange colour (indication of being from happy, free-range hens who have the option of eating pigments found naturally in plants in the wild) and are perfectly cooked – the fried eggs had cooked whites with enough “wobble” in the yolk to dunk your bread, and the scrambled were light and fluffy and not overcooked.

The bacon was thinly sliced and not overly salty, which meant you could actually taste the flavour of the bacon, the tomatoes tasted like, well, tomatoes, and the sausages were lightly herbed pork sausages.  Even the bread we ordered in the bread basket was a light sour dough.  Perfect accompaniment to bring all the ingredients on the plate together.

And when you’re done eating, wander around inside and go nuts with all the wonderful meat they have in there.  We walked away with some spanish jamon and salami for pizzas, and a free-range, hormone-free chicken (I would have liked to be able to get an organic one, but this will have to do, in Singapore, for now).

Well that’s dinner for two nights sorted this week then !

Huber’s Butchery & Bristro @ Dempsey
18A Dempsey Road
Singapore 249677
Tel: 6737 1588

Oh for a simple breakfast

It’s amazing how a difference of just 3 blocks can dramatically change the breakfast options you have.

When I was working closer to Chinatown, little coffee shops abounded with offers of simple good food – freshly fried beehoon noodles with srumptious sambal, gooey sweet sticky peanut butter spread on to thickly cut and freshly toasted bread, or my personal favourite, nasi lemak with a squid curry and an egg with crispy sweet and salty fried anchovies- a throwback from my days working in KL.

So my new role has me right next door to Lau Pa Sat – “the Festival Market” – the hawker centre that had locals in an uproar when it was even suggested that the prime location, in the middle of the business district, on which it stood be replaced by commercial office space.

I was a little confused at the variety of food that you could get at 8.30am – I did a few sneaky rounds around the tables to see what other people were eating and was amazed that you can get Indian dosai for breakfast ! Anyway, I ended up with fried glass noodles, with fried beehoon noodles and some vegetables and my confusion led to me having the oddest and most dissatifying breakfast I have had since i tried to eat a bowl of muesli for breakfast.

But I’m not giving up ! I’m going back there for lunch today so that the Festival Market can redeem itself in my eyes…