Feast @ East - A pretty decent Nyonya Buffet

We have been to the Sunday lunch time Nyonya buffet at Feast @ East (Grand Mercure Hotel) twice in the past month, primarily because of our Accor card which affords us a 50% discount on the buffet (about SGD45 for 2 of us with tax included).

The spread of food is nothing to shout about - in fact, I'll say that you would be sorely disappointed if you were looking for quality. In fact, the Japanese sashimi section is limited to just salmon.

The focus is on Nyonya food and on some days, they have Ngoh Hiang which is very good according to my Teochew in-laws and my CEB. However on other days they have lamp chop instead or poh piah. I've loved poh piah since young and could not wait to help myself to unlimited rolls of the good stuff when I spied the item at the food counter. However, the experience was disappointing because despite the superior quality of the skin used, the skin was hard and tasteless.

The buffet also serves Or Lah - Fried oysters in flour. I don't eat this dish at all but my mother and CEB both thought that the restaurant did a bad job on this one too.

So why the return trips? The Laksa. It's been a long time since all of us have had really good laksa and the thick flavorful gravy of the laksa had us coming back for more - round after round. I had 3 bowls one visit, and 4 the next! It was that good. The laksa does not come with prawns - just fishcakes, 1/2 a egg and clams but one can always add prawns from the cold spread (prawns, mussels, scallops).

It also helps that the restaurant does a pretty decent durian puree and serves slices of cheese cakes, chocolate brownies and durian cakes for desserts.

There is also a chendol and ice kachang machine in addition to tubs of ice-cream, and trays full of kuehs - the rainbow colored ones, the rice based ones (See pic above) and all sorts of sweets from the 80s. I had some of the Rabbit ones which I loved when I was a kid! The sago and corn dessert were also very good!

The Slog Reviews: 7/10. The spread of food is limited and the quality of the cooked food very average. Having a buffet here only makes sense if one wants to have Nyonya / 80s food to gorge on, or if one gets a one for one buffet.

Herbal black chicken soup and Aerogaz slow cooker

I read on the net that cooking Chinese herbs in a metal pot is not advisable because (somehow) the metal causes the herbs to lose their efficacy. So after looking around a bit, I decided to buy the 3litre Aerogaz slow cooker from Giant last Sat to cook the black chicken I had bought.

I also bought the 2 herbs I needed - Yu Zhu (Solomon's Seal) and Huai Shan from Giant since I saw the herbs there. The rest of the other herbs that I used were dang gui, dang shen, wolfberries and red longans. Now, my good ole mama told me that I needed to pour hot water into the crockpot so I boiled water separately and poured that into the pot over the herbs. Then I added the chicken from another pot that I used for blanching it. After that I set the slow cooker on auto-cook and left the house.

When I got home about 5 hours later, the entire kitchen and rooms were filled with an earthy herbal aroma. I found the chicken bubbling away in a delicious herbal concoction. Even after I switched off the electricity to the slow cooker, the pot kept the soup warm for a period of time. Just before we dug into the dish, I set the cooker to fast stew (which didn't seem to do much in 5-10mins) and the meat was by then so tender that it fell off the bones of the black chicken.

I think my CEB rather liked the soup as I did although he doesn't eat black chicken for no better reason that that the color is unappealing. That's alright - more for me! I had half the chicken for dinner while he ate the spinach dish and the tom kar gai with prawns dish which I had cooked for him in the tanyu pot I bought from Groupon. That pot is really easy to clean and seems to keep the food warm a pretty long time.

I tell you, I never thought I would end up so "domesticated" when just 2 years ago, I could not cook anything more than instant noodles. I'm just happy now that I have the time to indulge a little in the homely side of things