Our Piece of Paradise

Jason, Joshua and I have moved to our new home for the next three months - Singapore!   We have to profusely, excessively thank my Mom for this piece of paradise because she insisted that I get cancer treatment and deliver our baby here because of the high quality of health care.  Often, I find myself asking God how can I ever repay Him for this enormously extra-special blessing and windfall of a bonus.  Perfectly happy with the medical management in Manila, I'd like to save on unnecessary expenditure but Mom had to have her way.   

There are countless people in the world who cannot get proper care for their cancer and here I was getting more than an individual's excellent share.  I remember my brave friend, Raquel who lost the battle with the "big C" even if we had raised funds for her treatment by hosting a fun run and climb.  My dad also told me about how people queue for hours for a bottle of the "miracle enzyme" against cancer prepared by a priest.  And here I was in and out of posh hospitals seeing top doctors in a first-world country and like a lottery winner, get first class accommodation.  There's guilt and a tinge of anxiety but then this is replaced by an all-abiding, all-encompassing gratitude and hope that the reason behind this will be apparent in the future.   

Now, hubby, son, soon-to-be newborn son and I are back to our state of domesticated bliss like we were in China when it was just the three of us in our apartment.  After living with my Mom in Paranaque where there are enough cooks in the kitchen, I'm more than happy to take over the kitchen here and go back to preparing meals, aspiring to apply even a fraction of what I read on the internet and the chef competitions I watch endlessly on television.

Here's the first meal I prepared: stir fried pork with noodles and vegetables, fish in herb mustard sauce with pasta plus salad.  Because we didn't have spaghetti, I used Chinese noodles for both main dishes but just tossed the noodles in butter, cream and cheese.  

 I missed the kitchen, got excited and whipped up an extra dish especially for Joshua:

Today, we visited Chinatown hoping to get good bargains on spices and food essentials which are expensive in the grocery.  Jason didn't find it cheap because the location was too downtown and we were better off in our neighborhood wet markets because our apartment is a bit off center.

If you eat in malls and restaurants in Singapore and unless you have unlimited budget, you will end up in the poor house so locals and tourists flock to the hawker stalls, a haven for frugal foodies.   It's quite a phenomenon watching how lines build up in front of some stalls and not in others.  Jason decided to line up for more than fifteen minutes for this popular stall as he carried a soundly asleep Joshua while I sat down sipping fresh papaya juice.

Was the wait worth it?  For tasty chicken, yes!   Going around after the meal, however, I tend to suspect the more well-patronized stalls are those that offer dishes for S$2.50 and below.

We took shelter in this cozy cafe with the coolest interior playing the coolest music.

Our new piece of paradise includes other people's pets for Joshua to play with and a series of swimming pools that spell everyday FUN. 

Tonight, I cooked a pork and a lamb dish but hubby preferred the pork in oyster sauce and found the lamb over-seasoned with cumin.  But I have this weakness for cumin that needs to be tempered or I just miss it so much.