And now: eating AND cooking in Singapore!

Living in a hotel and being forced to eat out every night is not really a hardship, especially not when you’re doing so in Singapore where there is sure to be yet another hawker centre, food court, cafe or restaurant around every corner, all of them offering a bewildering array of dishes to choose from. But, as evidenced by this site and my former life as a caterer and chef, I like to cook. What with the crazy few days before leaving South Africa and nearly three weeks in a hotel, I hadn’t cooked a thing for about a month. The closest I came was making peanut butter and apricot jam sandwiches on the floor in our hotel room for Andrew to take to work. Peanut butter and jam sandwiches are delicious, but a three-year-old can make them with eyes closed (maybe; perhaps I should get my sister-in-law to do an experiment with my three-year-old niece). Which is to say, my daily sandwich-making hardly provided me with any sense of culinary achievement.

The walk home from the shops, along a canal

However! Buying random, unfamiliar vegetables, packages, bottles and jarred things and trying to figure out what to do with them in order to end up with an edible dinner – now that does provide me with a sense of achievement, even more so if the dinner is not just edible but actually good. We moved into our flat – called a condo here – over the weekend, and before we’d even unpacked anything, we’d been to our local grocery shop and stocked up on some familiar staples, and a whole lot of other things that seemed like they might be good and weren’t too expensive (in case they weren’t good).

Inaugural dinner, much more average than the word "inaugural" implies

After weeks of eating out we both just wanted vegetables, so I roasted a big tray, tossed it in a spicy peanut sauce (that possibly contained cuttlefish; I think I accidentally bought cuttlefish-laced chilli sauce but didn’t tell Andrew and he didn’t seem to mind) and called it dinner. It was edible, but not great; it appears Chinese green carrots and white radishes are perhaps not best when roasted (although, please do correct me if I'm wrong).

Dinner number two - much better!

But I was not discouraged, and dinner number two fared much, much better. We managed to find proper whole-wheat spaghetti, to my delight, and tossed the hot, cooked spaghetti with sautéed shiitake mushrooms, enoki mushrooms, Chinese spinach, crushed garlic, lime juice, soy sauce and olive oil. I topped the pasta with enormous toasted pumpkin seeds, and voila – dinner. So good. The kind of thing I would’ve made back in Cape Town, but using lots of local ingredients (that is, as local as things can be when not much is grown on this small island).

Biggest pumpkin seeds I've ever seen

Mushroom spaghetti with spinach and lime

Serves 3 or 4

Most of the ingredients here can be easily substituted. For example, you could use normal spaghetti, or a different shape pasta; use sunflower seeds instead of pumpkin; replace the mushrooms with any other variety of mushrooms you can find; use English spinach or rocket instead of Chinese spinach; and while the lime juice is lovely, lemon will also work. Reduce the garlic if you’re not used to too much.

150g shiitake mushrooms

180g enoki mushrooms

2 cloves garlic, crushed

Large bunch of Chinese spinach

Juice of 3 tiny limes, or 1 average lime

75g pumpkin seeds

4 tbsp olive oil

Salt

250g whole-wheat pasta

4 tbsp soy sauce

Pepper

First do your prep: slice the mushrooms, crush the garlic, cut the spinach up into bite-size pieces, squeeze the lemon juice and toast the pumpkin seeds in a hot oven till golden – watch them, they burn quickly.

Once your prep is done, place a large pot filled three-quarters of the way up with water, a tablespoon of olive oil and a teaspoon of salt over high heat to bring to the boil.

Meanwhile, place a large, heavy-bottomed pan over high heat, pour about a tablespoon of olive oil in the pan, and add the shiitake mushrooms. Sauté the mushrooms until dark golden; add the enoki mushrooms and sauté for a few more minutes (skip this step if only using larger mushrooms; the enoki mushrooms should be cooked much less since they’re so small and frail). Remove the pan from the heat and lower the heat to medium.

Your pasta water should be boiling by now – add the spaghetti.

Return the mushroom pan to the heat, adding the spinach and garlic. Sauté for a few minutes until the spinach has wilted. Scoop a few spoonfuls of pasta water into the pan and add the lime juice, soy sauce, another two tablespoons of olive oil and plenty of freshly ground black pepper. Give it a good stir and turn the heat as low as it can go.

When the pasta is cooked, drain thoroughly and add to the mushroom pan. Turn the heat up to high and toss the pasta quickly until most of the liquid has evaporated. Remove from the heat and taste – you might need to add a bit of soy sauce or salt, or some more lime juice or pepper. If you do add more liquid, return it to the heat for another minute or two; otherwise, remove from the heat and scrape into a serving dish.

Top with the toasted pumpkin seeds and serve.

Citrusy rhubarb-polenta cake

When my grandmother died in September last year, she was 87. She was one of the happiest, most content people I’ve ever known, despite the fact that in the last twenty-odd years of her life her husband died, and six of her sisters, and her son-in-law, and so many of her friends. That’s just what happens when you start to go beyond a certain age, I guess. But my point is, as the cliché goes, she’d had a long and full and happy life, so there is no call to be sad for her on that front.

But of course I’m sad for myself, especially so now that my wedding day is drawing near and she won’t be there like I’d always dreamed. I prefer not to think about it too much; when I do, I inevitably start thinking about my dad who also won’t be there.

Sometimes the thoughts sneak up on you though, you can’t see them coming and avoid them. Just now I was zesting a mineola and two limes for a cake for book club tonight, idly wondering if I should make citrusy iced tea with the insides of the zested fruit. That made me think of homemade lemonade which I haven’t had for ages, and bam – my grandmother’s homemade lemonade. A thick sweet lemony syrup with lots of little bits of zest that we mixed with water, usually the fizzy water made with the ancient Soda Stream. I think that’s the last homemade lemonade I drank. It must have been years ago, she hadn’t made it for a long time, and now I wonder where the recipe is, if one of us still has it and if I could maybe make some.

And then of course within seconds, leaping and bounding on from lemonade, I’m thinking about the wedding and the outfit my grandmother had already bought for it and what my dad would have thought of it all. The lime and mineola zest lies forgotten on the kitchen counter.

The cake does get made eventually, zest and all. That’s after I remember that I was lucky enough to have had such a grandmother for so long, and that she was so happy for me and Andrew. After I think that my dad would have thought well of it all. Especially since so many times, little things about Andrew remind me of him, and I know how lucky I am that I’m marrying him. What a happy day it will be.

Citrusy rhubarb polenta cake

Serves about 16

I like the gritty texture of polenta cakes, and the fact that most of them aren’t too sweet. I wanted a loaf cake but had quite a bit of batter and rhubarb left over after filling my standard-sized loaf pan, so I made four little loaves as well. In a standard round cake tin you’ll end up with just one cake. The rhubarb is very tangy, so I balanced it with the sweet citrusy drizzle for the bigger loaf cake. I left the little loaves plain, though, so that I can justify eating them for breakfast.

Also, I followed all the rhubarb cooking rules and cooked mine in a stainless steel pot – not aluminium, copper or iron, which reacts with rhubarb and makes it brown. I still ended up with brownish rhubarb. No idea why, but it tasted good.

1 large-ish bunch rhubarb stalks

½ cup sugar

1 orange (or mineola, which is what I could find)

2 limes

1 ½ cups cake flour

¾ cup fine polenta

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

4 large eggs

1 cup sugar

¾ cup olive oil

1 ½ cups sifted icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 160 C. Butter your cake tin, line with baking parchment, butter again, and dust with flour (you probably don’t have to do all of this, but I was convinced the cake would stick otherwise). Set up a stand mixer with a whisk attachment (or alternatively, you can use a hand-whisk and large bowl).

Wash the rhubarb thoroughly and chop it into inch-thick pieces. Place it in a ceramic or stainless steel pot along with the ½ cup of sugar, and place it over medium heat. No need to add any water – as it warms, the rhubarb will release its own juices and dissolve the sugar, and cook down into an apple-sauce-like mixture. Stir it every now and then as it cooks, about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, zest the orange and limes, and squeeze their juices into a small bowl. When the rhubarb has cooked down, add about half of the citrus juice and stir, then remove from the heat.

Whisk the flour, polenta, baking powder and salt together in a bowl until well-mixed. Add the eggs and 1 cup sugar to the stand mixer bowl and whisk on medium-high speed until the mixture is light and thick – this should take about 4 minutes. By hand it unfortunately takes more like 10 minutes. Add the orange and lime zest, and whisk again to mix thoroughly.

Add the flour mixture and olive oil to the whisked egg-sugar mixture by turn, whisking all the while – a third of the flour mixture, then half the oil, again a third of the flour mixture, the other half of the oil, and end with the final third of the flour mixture.

Now you have a choice: either spoon the rhubarb mixture onto the bottom of the cake pan(s) and cover with batter, or pour the batter into the pan(s) and drop spoonfuls of the rhubarb into the batter. In the first method, you’ll end up with an upside-down cake, and in the second, the rhubarb will peek out but will mostly be baked into the cake.

Bake for about 30 to 40 minutes (little loaves will take 15 to 20 minutes, a regular loaf about 30 minutes, and a big round cake will take 35 to 40 minutes), turning the cake 180 degrees halfway through the baking time so it bakes evenly. While it bakes, you can whisk the remaining citrus juice with the icing sugar to make a citrusy glaze.

The cake is done when a knife or toothpick inserted into it comes out clean. Remove the cake from the oven and cool in the pan for five minutes before either turning out (for the upside-down cake) or lifting out (for the baked-in-rhubarb version). Drizzle with the glaze, if you like, or leave plain for a slightly more virtuous cake.