Prawn Mee at Chomp Chomp and 717 durians

Yesterday, I had dinner at Chomp Chomp Food Center located at 20 Kensington Park Road near Serangoon Gardens. 99% of all the hawker stalls there have posters/prints of favourable newspaper reviews on their stalls and as testimony to the truth of these posters/prints, 99% of the seats were filled even as late as 8.30pm on a Tuesday night. After walking two rounds of the hawker center, we managed to find seats (had to share a table with couple of other gals) and ordered the usual sugarcane juice (SGD 2 for a small cup which wasn't really small) from the drink stall in the middle of the center (the juice was fresh and there wasn't too much ice).

After much deliberation and in consideration of our dessert later, we settled on having the large prawn noodles (SGD 5) from the only prawn noodle stall. The Slog Reviews: 5.5/10. While the prawns were indeed much larger than the usual tiger prawns, the meat was rather tasteless and a tad over-cooked. The chilli powder (in the spoon) and the great customer service from the aunty made up for it in some way but having prawn noodles shouldn't be a first choice at Chomp Chomp.

My food-fussy companion did not eat most of her prawn noodles and ordered not only porridge (sorry no picture as she dug in too quickly) and also a plate of 10 mutton satay sticks to share. The Slog Reviews: 8/10. The mutton was marinated very well and bursting with juices. The pandan leaf used to wrap the rice (ketupat) was fresh and gave the firmly packed rice a nice fragrance. I have had better peanut sauce (this one had a dash of limey stuff at the side) elsewhere but this one was fine.


After dinner, she had room in her little belly for durians so we went to 717 trading at Highland Center on Yio Chu Kang Road for durians. The last time I'd been to this place for durians was early 2008 and it was a remarkably bad and expensive experience then. It was so bad that we drove down to Geylang right after that and had a S$20 durian there which was a million times better. However, I'm all about second chances and this was the closest so 717 it was. This time, the durian seller ( a Malaysian youngish really thin and friendly chappie) and the two D24 durians we had left us with a really good "I-want-to-return" feeling for both of us.

This is the first durian that we had. I wasn't keen on D24 durians which the durian seller was pushing and wanted the Mao Shan Wang ones instead. However,at my insistence, the durian seller opened one of the MSW durians and he was right in that the durian meat of the MSW durians was soggy (overripe). He put it aside and opened this D24 durian which to me looked yummlicious. And it was. Every single bite. Thoughts of weight, figure, self-control flew right out of my companion's head when she started eating...I swear, her eyes were closed at some points in pure ecstasy. The Slog Reviews: 9.5/10. :)

The cost of the MSW durian would have been SGD 15/kg - I am not sure how much the cost of the two durians were but they came up to a total of SGD 26 with a SGD 2 discount. Definitely very pricy for about 6 seeds per fruit but ahhhh,nothing beats the taste of really good durians like this. Here's a picture of the second durian which tasted almost identitical to the first one. If you look closely, fellow durian lovers, you can see the little wrinkles in the skin of the durian seed - and yes, biting into and spliiting open the thin chewy skin and having the rich meat underneath spill into one's mouth is an experience that we can relive over and over again :)