Bohemia Bunny

The Funnerology Principle

Monthly Archives: September 2009

NYC Bagel Chips review

I’ve been eyeing these chips for a while, but the price kinda put me off. They garnered a positive review in the Straits Times’ Sunday foodie section, but since that column is always given to expensive foodstuff, I figured I can do without luxury munchies.

This weekend, though, is the last weekend of the month – in other words, payday, and I figured I should at least give it a go. I got them from Fairprice Finest at Bukit Timah Plaza, I don’t suppose they’re widely available.

The eco-friendly packaging has a minimum of ad copy. There is nothing else on the other surfaces of the bag. Just like an old-school bakery’s brown bag. King Kong want bagel! (That is one big bagel.)

And… the chips sitting happily in the bag. The seal on the bag is worth a mention. Upon unfolding the wire tab, you find that the bag has already been slit open! But not really. The real seal is inside, where you can see the jagged edges of the plastic where I sliced it through with my finger. Very easy to open, no strenuous pulling or scissors needed.

A delicious bagel chip. The garlic flavour burns, oh you can definitely feel the burniness on your tongue. It’s deliciously tangy too, and the flavour lingers. It’s lethal at close distances too, I’d bet. There’s no buttery taste, in case you are like me and always expect garlic-flavoured stuff to taste like garlic bread. This is not a drawback, it is just different. I don’t mind at all.

It’s definitely crunchy, the chips are about 2mm thick so there’s a satisfying amount of bite to them. Nyam nyam. It’s deffo not cheap, but you get what you pay for.

P/S: They are actually made in Singapore!

Cooking Adventures, Ep. 7

Instead of going out for a birthday dinner, the boyfriend and I decided to buy ingredients and cook our own steak dinner. It helps that we live very near a butcher shop that sells pre-marinated meat and quality sausages, so it’s hard to mess up as long as you don’t burn anything.

I went to the market in the morning to get vegetables to accompany our meat. Potatoes became wedges…

And we shall soon see what became of the carrots and tomatoes.

But first! A tip from the pros:

Preheat your pans and plates! Preheated pans prevent food from sticking, as well as maintaining the integrity of the fats used in cooking. Preheating plates prevents the hot food from getting a shock when plated. Plus it makes sure your food stays the way it’s meant to be served, instead of going cold.


Steak for the carnivore. A lovely rib-eye steak, pre-marinated so we don’t have to mess around with it. Just need to stand there and watch it cook. Mmm!


My Swiss cheese sausages. Forgot to score them before cooking.


Aerial view of our dinner. Aha, there they are! We cooked the tomatoes in a dry (no oil) pan, and boiled the carrots with some salt and seasoning.


Note the Weetameal crackers with the remaining garlic butter inside. Garlic butter is SO DARN delicious! The flavour of the garlic really seeped in, so the butter was smooth AND savoury. Nyam nyam nyam.


My dinner


His dinner

Everything was great! The bulk of the cost went to the meat, because the vegetables only cost $1.60 in total.

Tsk tsk, SMRT

I usually take the 985 bus to Toa Payoh from my house, because it takes the PIE so I can arrive at the next bus stop in 15 mins. On a good day, I can make it to work in 30 minutes, door-to-door.

Today was not one of those days. The 985 was 5-7 minutes later than its usual arrival time, and when it did, the electronic signboard was flashing “Reader out of order, please pay cash”. Dammit! I only had 55 cents, definitely not enough to get me to Toa Payoh.

So I took the 157 to Toa Payoh interchange instead, and took the MRT down one stop in the Southbound direction.

Everything was going fine until we were pulling in to the next stop. The voiceover announcement chimed “Next stop, Braddell”. I looked up in alarm. I thought the next stop was Novena! I knew for a fact that I got on the correct train, because I remembered staring at the Jurong East-bound train across the platform as we were waiting to depart.

We pulled into Novena station. The LCD display in the train still read “NS18 Braddell”. Huh. Okay.

What the heck, SMRT? Who dropped the ball?

A hardworking day off

On my days off, I seem to do more work than on my usual days at work. But then again, on my days off I’m usually running all around town running errands, or cleaning the house, whereas I mostly sit around all day at work.

This morning I woke up and bought drain cleaner. No breakfast, no house-cleaning, just off to the hardware store to buy drain cleaner. The shower drain was running a bit slow and this was the 2nd bottle I poured down the drain (literally). Buying from the neighbourhood hardware store costs 2 dollars more than buying from the shopping mall, but that’s the price you pay for convenience.

After I left the drain cleaner to do its work, I dumped the laundry in the machine and sat down with my DS to play Professor Layton. It is very addictive, and to a brainiac like me who prefers logical puzzle and strategy games to action games, it’s like crack cocaine.

When it came to lunchtime, I plucked some leaves off the basil plant outside and made pesto to go with my fusilli. Simple and good. The shower drain did not show a miraculous recovery to fantastic drainage, but there was some improvement and I decided to leave it at that.

Then I went out shopping. I pretty much head out shopping every week, but this time I took my passport along. I had a whim to buy SPM Biology books instead of the poor selection of O Level workbooks available in Singapore, so that meant a trip across the Causeway to Popular in City Square JB. In Malaysia, triple science is the norm. So much so that I saw a “Pure Science” package of forecast papers being sold, one set each for Math, Additional Math, Bio, Chem and Physics. Aiyo, so kiasu.

The cloudy weather made for a pleasant bus ride all the way to the Customs building. Once I came out on the JB side, I was lost. I couldn’t see City Square, and wandered to a Ramadan bazaar in the concourse of the huge new train station. The girl selling murukku and tapioca chips pointed me in the right direction, and it was a breeze getting to Popular from there.

Compared to the paltry choice available in Singapore, Biology at SPM level had a whole bookshelf dedicated to it, just like with the other sciences. And the content is so much more in-depth, and maybe a bit excessive. SPM candidates have to know the stages of colonization of a pond into forest – that’s waaaaay out of O-Level syllabus. And for Chem, there’s a whole section on detergents, soaps, sulfuric acid and food additives that would be completely alien to the Singapore candidate.

I love how cheap all the workbooks are, though. I didn’t get a revision book as it would be too far out of syllabus to do much good, but the workbooks were about 5 ringgit each so I picked up 3 sets. I don’t know why the publishers all split the books up into “Form 4″ and “Form 5″. Apart from making the books lighter, perhaps…

On my way back into Singapore, I picked up 2 ringgit worth of lekor, the fish-paste fritter native to the East Coast. So hard to find good lekor in Singapore. But the fritters I bought were cylindrical and spongy, instead of being tapered and chewy. I like them chewy, it’s more fun and satisfying that way.

When I got home I changed into my running outfit, and sat down to play some more Layton before heading off. Then I heard rain falling outside. Never mind, I thought, I’ll wait till the rain stops, then go running. Then there was a clap of thunder, putting an end to my exercise plans for the day. So sad. On such a wonderfully cloudy day, I didn’t get to run. So I stayed in and munched my lekor while playing DS.

I don’t know what’s on the menu for dinner, but it will probably involve the 2 potatoes that are starting to sprout. I just don’t have enough soil to plant them and get my own potatoes for free.